Yorkshire in the 1300s was a strange and frightening place. The living dead crawled from their graves, wandered round the lanes and accosted the villagers, at least according to accounts written by an anonymous monk. But these zombies were very different from the gut munchers of modern popular culture, and it wasn’t your brain they were after. So why were the dead shuffling round Yorkshire six centuries ago? What did they want? And how could they be stopped?

In this episode of Monsters, Myths and Manias Paul Weatherhead (aka Professor Weird) looks at some of the strange tales from Byland Abbey and teaches you how to survive a medieval zombie attack!

Sources:

S.R. Young, The Ghosts of Medieval Yorkshire (2023, Pwca Books and Pamphlets)

The full text of the ghost stories can be read here: https://www.anselm-classics.com/byland/about.html

In recent decades there have been some fine zombie films, but these mainstream offerings tend to suffer from one fatal flaw: respectability. The zombie films from the golden age (which I’ve taken as being from the late 60s to the early 90s) are different. They are gloriously disreputable, so much so that many were banned in Britain or were only available in editions butchered by the censors. 

In this Halloween special, Professor Weird aka Paul Weatherhead guides you through his Top 5 cannibal zombie gut munchers from the golden age of the video nasty! 

Further reading:

Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead, (Godalming: FAB, 2005) 

Jay Slater (ed), Eaten Alive: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, (London: Plexus, 2002) 

In this episode, bizarre and spooky urban legends about ghost hoaxes going wrong and scarring the hapless victim to death!

Atheist philosopher A.J. Ayer choked to death on a piece of smoked salmon and had a bizarre vision of the afterlife before being revived... What did he see and did it change his mind?

Naked ghosts – people who wandered the streets at night starkers frightening any unlucky victim they happened to meet - were surprisingly frequent, especially in the early nineteenth century.  They were a combination of ghost hoaxer, streaker and flasher. 

The sight of someone stalking a secluded location with his wan naked body eerily reflecting the gas lamps or moon light would have been a very disconcerting, threatening and scary experience. It has an element of the bizarre and surreal about it, so it’s easy to see why these figures would be seen as otherworldly – why they were referred to as ghosts.

In this episode, Professor Weird presents a selection of true tales of ghostly streakers. Contains nudity.

Professor Weird explores the castration cult that swept Russia and Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century. They were known as the Skoptsy, and the operation (which they called the Fiery Baptism) involved a red hot poker and no anesthetic... But we would never do anything like that in the modern day and age... would we?

The West Yorkshire village of Calverley became the centre of public attention over Christmas 1904 after reports of a mysterious phantom were widely published. However, the Christmas ghost of Calverley has a long history, involving tales of schoolboys raising the dead, headless horses, exorcism and haunted preachers. The story begins, though, with a horrifying Jacobean murder spree that spawned a grim piece of gory theatre that William Shakespeare may have had a hand in…

This episode is based on a chapter from my new book, Phantoms of Christmas Past: Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hoaxes, Ghost Hunts and Ghost Panics: Amazon.co.uk: Paul Weatherhead: 9781803418407: Books 

To mark the release of his new book, Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hunts, Ghost Hoaxes and Ghost Panics, author Paul Weatherhead examine the weird history of ghost hoaxing, a bizarre activity that was surprisingly widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These hoaxes often led to mayhem, drunken rioting, ghost hunters dressing in drag, and even death....

Phantoms of Christmas Past is available wherever you get your books from or direct from the publisher: Phantoms of Christmas Past from 6th Books 

In January 1726 the British ships the Compton and the James and Mary anchored off a desolate uninhabited island in the South Atlantic for repairs. Men were sent ashore to find provisions, but instead came across a tent with a man’s skeleton lying near it. Next to the skeleton was a manuscript – a diary of the dead man’s last days as a castaway on this remote island. The diary was written in Dutch and told a horrifying tale of a man haunted by madness and despair and plagued by monstrous demons…

Fishermen are known for their tall tales, but few are as tall as the tale told of the gigantic fire breathing sea serpent that attacked a Scottish trawler in 1903. Reports of sea monsters were fairly common in the newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the desperate battle between the crew of the Glen Grant and the fire-breathing North Sea Monster is one of the most exciting...