THE BEAST OF BENBECULA
Newcastle - This unidentified creature was found on the shores of Benbecula in the Hebrides six years ago by Louise Whitts, a child minder, when she was 16.

Louise, of Bedlington, Northumberland, had always wondered what the creature was, but had never taken the photograph to an expert, believing she would look foolish when it was identified as a common sea creature.

"It had what appeared to be a head at one end, a curved back and seemed to be covered with eaten away flesh or even a furry skin and was about 12ft (3.6m) long," she said.

"It smelled absolutely disgusting, but the weird thing was that it had all these shapes like fins along its

back – like a dinosaur or something."

When Louise moved out of her parents' home recently, she unearthed a photograph and took it to Alec Coles, curator and keeper of natural sciences at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne. On 21 August, pictures of the creature were put on display at the museum.

Mr Coles said that none of the botanists, zoologists and marine biologists who had seen the pictures could throw any light on the puzzle.

Newcastle Journal, 21 Aug; D.Telegraph, Birmingham Mail, 22 Aug 1996

Lollipop Lady
Essex - Gemma Harris, nine, was playing with her friend Claire Blanchard, also nine, outside her home in Riverview Close, Laindon North, near Southend in Essex on 4 July, when they saw an apparition of an elderly woman.

"She was wear wearing a lollipop lady jacket with a big stop badge on it," said Gemma, "and she was very old with grey hair. She was crying. I was a bit frightened. She was there for about two minutes and then went white and moved across into next door's  		garden. Claire saw it as well. We ran to tell the lady who owns the house and she locked all her doors and windows. I really think it was a ghost. I've never seen anything like that before."

Gemma's mother Joanne Harris said the girls "were absolutely petrified". Mrs Harris, 38, went on to speculate: 'Perhaps there was some sort of road accident on this site before this pert of the Riverview estate was built 18 months ago."

Southend Eve. Echo, 8 July 1997
Spectre Disrupts College
Cambridge - Staff at Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge, have been diverted recently by a ghost.

One evening last April, for instance, one of the college fellows was hosting a private candlelit dinner. At 8.45pm, Matthew Speller and Paul Davies, members of the butler's pantry staff, descended the spiral staircase from the upper parlour to the Combination Room, a 13th century oak-panelled chamber, where they encountered a figure floating about a foot off the ground, which moved slowly towards a bay window and vanished. Davies described the apparition as "cigar-shaped and person-sized".

Others from the butler's pantry and the kitchen had previously heard insistent knocking from behind the oak panelling, accompanied by a sudden chilling of the air. So "real" was the knocking		 that the butler had gone down to the cellars to try and locate the source.

Last November, the spectre was seen again at the same time in the evening, gliding as before to the window; and the eerie knocking was heard. After repeated entreaties, the dean, Dr Graham Ward, left High Table to investigate and found the head butler on the floor whispering "It's fading, it's fading."

There was of course speculation concerning the identity of the spectre. The favourite was Francis Dawes, a Peterhouse bursar who hanged himself with a bell rope in 1789 following irregularities over the election of Francis Barnes, a highly unpopular master. There is a bell rope outside the Combination Room and a spiral staircase the beleaguered bursar could easily have thrown himself off.		 Until William Morris redesigned the Combination Room, putting in the window the spectre moves towards, there would have been a door into the garden or through to the staircase.
 
The dean summoned the diocesan exorcist, who declared that while knocking required only a simple service, restless revenants required a requiem mass of the whole family – in this case, all the fellows and domestic staff.

Dr Andrew Murison, the collage bursar, commented: "It is unlikely we would get all 45 fellows together for an exorcism – they are a cynical lot." Murison had himself witnessed the ghost in the Combination Room one evening at the beginning of December. The figure was "smallish, slightly built and balding," he said. "It was wearing a wide collar, like a pilgrim, and seemed to		 be holding a large hat.

After a few seconds, it quietly disappeared. The room was very cold, although a fire was burning in the grate."

Dr James Carleton Paget, a divinity don, said: "I can vouch for the good witness of the bursar. He is a hard-headed financier who is a creature of the Enlightenment rather than the pulpit".

James Muckle from the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham, an undergraduate at Peterhouse in the 1950s, thought this was just as well. "All right-thinking persons," he suggested, "must protest against any suggestion of exorcism. A ghost is a priceless cultural, academic and environmental asset which ought to be conserved and studied rather than extirpated".

Wolverhampton Express, 19 Dec
Were Adam and Eve Great Apes?
Cardinal John O'Connor of New York startled worshippers at St Patrick's Cathedral by declaring that Adam and Eve might not have been human, but some lower life form. This followed the Pope's stunning statement in October that "new knowledge leads us to recognise that the theory of evolution is more than just an hypothesis".

Times, 26 Nov 1996

Dangerous Mastic
Yorkshire - A pest control officer called to an escaped python in the garage of a house in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, discovered that it was a strip of rubber mastic that had peeled away from the door surround.

D.Telegraph, 4 Nov 1996
Havana tha One
Havana - Two morgue attendants in Havana, Cuba, playing chess on the night shift to pass the time, got the shock of their lives when a "corpse" suddenly sat up, reached over and moved one of the chessmen.

Coroner Jose Muñoz said Miguel García suffered a heat attack and had been 		incorrectly pronounced dead. He came to on the slab and, disoriented, grabbed the first thing he saw – the black bishop . He moved it three squares and dropped it.

At the time of the report, he was recovering at Havana General Hospital.

17 Oct 1996