On the 19th of February 2008, ten-year-old Shannon Matthews disappeared from outside her school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Hearing of the family’s plight, and realising that his services might be of help, psychic medium Joe Power got in touch with Karen Matthews — Shannon’s mother — and organised a sitting with her. Power’s official website explains that the story was covered by The People newspaper and that, as soon as he sat down with Shannon’s mother and clutched the missing girl’s favourite Bratz T-shirt, he sensed: “That Shannon had got into a car with someone she knew.” Adding: “I told them that the abductor was connected with Craig Meehan — Karen’s boyfriend — and that his name was Mick or Michael.” Shannon was found a week later at a house a short distance from Dewsbury, belonging to 39-year-old Michael Donovan, Craig Meehan’s uncle. The ‘case file’ on Power’s website, relating to Shannon Matthews’ abduction, closes with the following: “The British media interviewed me extensively about the Shannon Matthews case. It truly shows how accurate my (spirit) guides are when I work with them on criminal cases.” This glowing assessment of his own work doesn’t seem unreasonable when one considers that everything Joe Power said later proved to be entirely true. Strangely though, when I went to The People website this morning to find the account of Joe Power’s meeting with Karen Matthews, I found it made no reference to him saying any of the stuff he claims to have done on his website. In an article written in The People by Simon Lennon on 8 March 2008 — about a week before Shannon was found — it states that Power had informed Karen: “The car had a baby seat and a brown cushion in the back, and a religious card hanging from the rear-view mirror. “(It had) stopped near a church Shannon knew — and the driver used a Texaco garage.” And, finally: “I can see a lay-by near farmland.” The car driven by Michael Donovan, Shannon’s abductor, was a silver Peugeot. No one has ever bothered to verify if it had a brown cushion in the back, or if it had a card hanging from the rear-view mirror.

The most disturbing object in Whitby Museum is not the fossils, the whaling artefacts or the Victorian curiosities. It is a hand. A shrivelled, blackened human hand resting quietly behind glass in North Yorkshire, labelled with one of the most extraordinary names in British folklore: the Hand of Glory. (I mean, it doesn’t sound ALL THAT…) According to the museum, it was discovered hidden inside the wall of a thatched cottage in Castleton in the early twentieth century by a stonemason and local historian named Joseph Ford. The hand was donated to the museum in 1935, where it remains today — allegedly the only surviving Hand of Glory in existence. And this is where the story becomes peculiarly English. The Hand of Glory was supposedly made from the severed right hand of an executed criminal, cut from the corpse while it still hung on the gallows. The hand would then be pickled, dried and transformed into a magical burglary tool capable of placing entire households into unnatural sleep. Not murder. Not revenge. Burglary. British folklore often reveals a nation less afraid of monsters than of trespass. The details become steadily worse. In some versions, the fingers themselves were lit like candles. In others the hand held a candle made from human fat. If one finger refused to ignite, it meant somebody inside the house remained awake. Water could not extinguish the flames. According to folklore, only blood or skimmed milk(?) could put them out. One old charm instructed the hand to: “Let those who rest more deeply sleep” before guiding thieves toward their victims’ valuables. What makes the Hand of Glory so effective as folklore is that it occupies an uncomfortable space between witchcraft and organised crime. This is not a creature lurking on moors. It is a practical object, designed for use. The mythology reads less like fantasy and more like criminal procedure accidentally drifting into the occult. And unlike many British legends, there is an actual object sitting in a museum.

It came out of Orkney, where the sea is not picturesque in the conventional sense. The water there looks ancient and hostile, as though it remembers previous versions of humanity and preferred them gone. Winter arrives sideways. Even the light can feel abrasive. And somewhere inside that climate, people invented the Nuckelavee. Not a dragon. Not a ghost. Something worse. A skinless horse with a man fused into its back. The Orcadian folklorist Walter Traill Dennison recorded the most famous description in the nineteenth century after interviewing an islander named Tammas. The creature, he wrote, had ‘one huge eye like a red flame,’ and worst of all: ‘he had no skin.’ You can feel the folklore crossing some invisible line there. Most myths retain a degree of theatricality. The Nuckelavee becomes suddenly medical. Wet. Diseased. You do not imagine knights fighting it. You imagine infection. Katharine Briggs later called it ‘the nastiest’ demon in Scottish folklore, which sounds almost understated. The creature supposedly emerged from the sea to spread plague, drought and crop failure. In some accounts its breath poisoned entire fields. And historians have noted that the myth intensified during Orkney’s kelp-burning era, when acrid industrial smoke rolled across the islands. That feels important. Because the Nuckelavee is not really a monster. It is what environmental catastrophe looks like before scientific language exists. A community watches livestock sicken, weather patterns fail and toxic smoke drift inland — and eventually terror condenses into a shape. Something raw and breathing. Even now the creature feels oddly contemporary. We still give disasters bodies. We still imagine contagion as something lurking just offshore, preparing to cross into ordinary life. And perhaps that is why the Nuckelavee survives while gentler folklore fades. Deep down, people know exactly what it represents. The moment nature stops pretending to care whether we survive.

The fens of eastern England do not feel entirely settled. Even now, driving through Lincolnshire beneath those enormous skies, you sense the land might prefer to be underwater again. The Tiddy Mun rose from that anxiety. He was a tiny marsh spirit said to haunt the wetlands before they were drained and turned into farmland. According to fenland folklore, whenever engineers cut new channels or reclaimed marshes, the Tiddy Mun retaliated. Livestock died. Crops failed. Strange crying drifted across the reeds at night. Unlike most British folklore creatures, he was not a predator. He was protesting development. The story was formally recorded in June 1891 by M. C. Balfour in the journal Folk-Lore, which preserved the eerie chant villagers supposedly used to calm the spirit: “Tiddy Mun wi’out a name, tha watters thruff!” What makes the legend so unsettling is how contemporary it feels. Long before environmentalism existed as a movement, people already feared that damaging landscapes carried consequences beyond economics. Drain the marshes and something invisible becomes angry. England has spent centuries flattening its own mystery: forests cleared, rivers straightened, wetlands erased. The Tiddy Mun survives as the ghost of an older understanding — the suspicion that land is not passive after all. Stand in the fens at dusk and it becomes easier to believe. The roads run arrow-straight into darkness. Water glimmers beside them. Wind moves through reeds like distant whispering. And somewhere out there, beneath reclaimed earth, the old marsh is still waiting patiently to return. Or, potentially, waiting for the call of Ken Dodd.

The Owlman entered British folklore with remarkable administrative precision: a date, a place, two witnesses and a church tower. On the 17th of April 1976, according to later accounts collected by Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels, two sisters walking near the church of St Mawnan and St Stephen in Cornwall reported seeing a gigantic owl-like creature hovering above the tower. The family, we are told, abandoned their holiday immediately afterwards. The detail that lingers is not merely the creature itself but the deeply British understatement surrounding the event. Even modern retellings preserve that faint atmosphere of embarrassed disruption, as though the true offence was not the appearance of a winged humanoid but the inconvenience it caused to everyone’s weekend plans. A second alleged sighting followed on the 3rd of July 1976. Two teenage girls camping nearby described ‘a big owl with pointed ears’ and black ‘pincer-like claws.’ What makes the Owlman peculiarly unsettling is its setting. Cornwall already exists slightly apart from ordinary England: granite churches crouched beside subtropical vegetation, sea mist swallowing entire roads, tourists queueing for ice cream beneath landscapes that still feel faintly pagan. The Owlman fits there in the way damp fits an English churchyard. And the church matters enormously. British folklore rarely locates terror in dramatic Gothic castles. It prefers parish churches — ancient, weathered buildings embedded inside ordinary communities. English churches possess an unsettling quality precisely because they remain functional. Children attend harvest festivals in structures older than most nation states. One can buy marmalade at a fete beside Norman gravestones. The Owlman transforms this familiar atmosphere into something briefly cosmic. Not a dragon. Not an alien invasion. Simply a vast feathered thing perched above a village church, watching silently. Sceptics have suggested barn owls or eagle owls. Others noted that Shiels himself enjoyed elaborate monster-making exercises.