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MrSnowman

Abominable Snowman
Joined
Aug 5, 2002
Messages
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I recall reading in a Charles Berlitz *ahem* book some time ago, that there was a cave network beneath St Helens on Merseyside, where there was much rumness afoot. The story went along the lines of a boy scout being murdered whilst on an expedition to the caves, allegedly by some kind of misshapen dwarf creature (according to 'witnesses').
After this event, some journalists explored the caves, only to be chased away by something that was evil and sinister. I know that Berlitz stories have to be taken with a horseweight of salt, but they're usually based on some kind of distorted truth.

Can anyone enlighten me? I fancy paying a visit to these caves myself. If they exist that is. Ta :)
 
Might be what you were referring to.

Taken from
:
https://web.archive.org/web/2002080.../liverpool/features/ghosttrail_billinge.shtml

Billinge

What must rank has the strangest find underground is the subterranean church allegedly found near Billinge in the late 18th century.

Four children decided to explore the limestone caverns in the area and vanished.
One child survived and told a terrifying tale about small old men with beards who killed his three friends and chased him.
The petrified child stumbled over human bones in the caves and finally managed to scramble through an opening to the surface as a hand was grabbing at his ankle.

The authorities were concerned because a number of people had gone missing in the area near the cave entrances. Two heavily armed soldiers descended into the caverns with torches and claimed that they not only found a heap of human bones, they also found the ruins of an ancient church of some unknown denomination.
The interior of the church was lit by three large candles and grotesque gargoyels formed part of an altar. Throughout the exploration of the underground, the soldiers said they felt as if they were being watched, and also heard voices speaking in an unknown language.
One report said that a child’s head was found in a cave, along with evidence of cannibalism. After a second investigation, the caves either collapsed or gunpowder was used to seal them, and so the riddle of the underground church of Billinge remains unsolved.
 
What a wonderful tale!

I'd never heard it before. I wonder what the source is?

It must be true. I want it to be. :p
 
Sounds a bit like our own Sawney Bean, sire of a tribe of subterranean cannibals, who was eventually hunted down by a force of men lead by King James VI himself. Ask Sally about it; she probably still has the leaflet...
 
Reminds me of a very, very weird kids' book (or looking back, maybe not so much of a kids book - although I was about 10 when I read it, it was dark and twisted with some quite complex mythological overtones) called "The Weirdstone of [something unpronounceable] - Brisingamen?", by Alan Garner (there were also, I think, several sequels to it). The plot involved kids on holiday in Cheshire encountering a wise magician-type bloke who somehow got them into an adventure involving dwarves (good) and things called Swarts (bad), who were vaguely orc-like beings living in a network of tunnels underground. They were vaguely linked to an evil witch called the Morrigan who also had at her disposal a pack of giant dogs with no eyes. Seriously trippy book, and told in a very "realistic" style which only added to its weirdness.

...maybe this should be on the "books that scared you as a kid" thread...
 
"The Weirdstone of Br.....ham"

Goldstein, I`ve got it on my bookshelves if you want to borrow it! It was set on Aldersley Edge. I think it won a prize for children`s literature when I was doing my "Ed. Year" in the Seventies.

MsT
 
Bah!

Thanks for the info Carnacki.. it seems my subterranean adventures'll have to be put on hold for a while.. until I find some gunpowder to blow the hole back open! :madeyes:
 
So I take it this Ted never came back from his final cave trip? as it loops to Page 10? (Interesting how Next is looped back to page 10, when he was planning on another update.)
 
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a classic. I was fine with that one, but the sequel, "The Moon of Gomrath" had me terrified for years.

The characters and creatures in it are all derived from northern-european mythology. Alan Garner was quite an expert on that area. The Morrigan was the Death and Destruction aspect of the triple goddess in Irish mythology, the Svart-alfar- whose name means literally "dark elves"- I believe are from norse mythology.

Alongside Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence, those books are probably one of the main reasons I'm interested in all this mysterious nonsense.
 
Anyone else read The Gnomids?
I only know of one other person who read it (he lent it to me to read after he'd read it) and altavista/google/jeeves/yahoo only bring up one direct hit...
Apparently written by W.C. Chalk
 
There's a VERY similar story told about the underground tombs on Malta - in fact I think it was mentioned in FT a while back: group of scouts explore subterranean tunnels, encountered humanoids, disappear, human bones found, tunnel entrance sealed up....

So, whilst I'd love to believe such things I guess it's just another urban myth.
 
What about...

... Beowulf? It's theoretically fiction, but sometimes the old tales prove to be more than that.

Could some kind of stronger creature than humans live in caves until there were only a few, and then they became mythologized in tales? Maybe Grendal was actually a mammoth cave bear - or a fortean beast.
 
Good grief Eerievon! The Gnomids! That certainly takes me back.. Those Chalk books were like an introduction to Forteana for juniors!
What other books were there.. Something like the Mask of Death, where a big dust cloud enveloped the Earth plunging us into an ice age, and the hero was an eskimo who made his way all the way to the UK. I also remember a book of short stories he wrote, one with a boy who had a magic potion that gave him strength to beat up some bullies, and another about a magic pair of football boots (guess the story), and something about a magic typewriter too. Man oh man, take a trip down memory lane. I've got those books lying about at home, and I think it's time to dig them out! :)
 
Re: What about...

Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
Could some kind of stronger creature than humans live in caves until there were only a few, and then they became mythologized in tales? Maybe Grendal was actually a mammoth cave bear - or a fortean beast.

Grendel is always with you.

Grendel is nature. Beowulf was man.

Never will the twain live in harmony.
 
Snowman X said:
the hero was an eskimo who made his way all the way to the UK.
I saw that on TV!

Oh, sorry, it was an advert for a bank or something.... :madeyes:
 
What a wonderful tale!
I'd never heard it before. I wonder what the source is? ...

The locale for the story is the Crank Caverns - a network of tunnels and caverns associated with a sandstone quarry that operated from circa 1730 to 1939.

There are multiple stories associated with Crank Caverns, and the story cited in post #2 seems to be the best-known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_Caverns
 
The locale for the story is the Crank Caverns

I regularly travel the A.580 & 570 route which link Manchester to my home-town, Southport. Crank is a name familiar from roadsigns on these arterial roads. Thank-you for jogging my memory about this tale. What struck me today is that the methods of sandstone mining described in the Wikipedia article were used by Williamson for his obscurely-motivated excavations slightly later. The sites are within ten or fifteen miles of each other.

As a newspaper article, linked on the Wikipedia page, reminds us, St. Helens was also the stamping-ground of local folk-demon Purple Aki! He turned out to be real, so I'm not writing-off those subterranean creatures! :crazy:

The story of the buried church with lit candles is a variant of the eternal lamps in secret vaults associated with the Rosicrucian mythos.
 
Thanks, James, for reminding me about the Williamson tunnels story. Refreshing my memory by reviewing the Williamson case caused an odd thought to cross my mind ...

In searching for traces of the lost children tale I found a reasonable coherence in the story elements, but failed to locate any substantive clues to the story's original source. The storyline seems to be widely recognized, but its origin is murky.

The lost children episode is attributed to the late 1700's. Williamson obtained the land where he undertook his strange tunnels project in 1805. Depending on how one interprets the former timeframe, it could be only a few years distant from the latter timeframe.

The odd thought was this ... Could it be that the lost children tale referred to some incident that occurred with the Williamson tunnels - an incident whose retellings morphed it from an early 19th century into an 18th century setting?
 
The locale for the story is the Crank Caverns - a network of tunnels and caverns associated with a sandstone quarry that operated from circa 1730 to 1939.

There are multiple stories associated with Crank Caverns, and the story cited in post #2 seems to be the best-known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_Caverns

06F272B3-0FEE-459F-8715-DE896890C51B.jpeg


https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17.5&lat=53.49062&lon=-2.73871&layers=168&b=1

maximus otter
 
I'm from this neck of the woods and this has jogged my memory. I can confirm that there was a local word-of-mouth story along these lines doing the rounds in the early seventies.

Specifically, I remember my dad driving us home one ;late evening - going through some part of North-west Lancashire and telling us children that there was a local urban myth about a network of tunnels beneath the ground in the area containing bad uns.

I was intrigued, of course, but way too young to be doing any of my own digging - and by the time I was old enough I had forgotten the story and my attention was on other things anyway.

I would love to hear more.
 
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