The True Mysteries Of Peter Haining

For many years now I've been interested in...

Well, you can call it The Paranormal, you can call it The Unexplained or Forteana or just call it "Weird Shit"

Creatures that may or may not exist. Artefacts that don't belong. Lights in the sky and phantom hitchikers. Ancient conspiracies and and steam engines stashed away under Welsh mountains. Coincidence and coverup and curiosities galore.

 All the stuff that regular science and regular history prefers to store in a locked cabinet.
That's down in the basement.
Hidden under a stack of old newspapers.
With a big sign on the door reading "Beware of the leopard"

And I think I know where this peculiar fascination first emerged.

 I'm not entirely sure when I picked this up. Somewhere around 1979/1980ish so I'd have been 10 years old. Just the cover alone was enough to engage my interest. It got better once I had a peek inside.

Just check out these chapter titles. 

The Monster Trap

The Vampire Of Cumberland

The Green Children On Banjos

The Prince Who Saw The Flying Dutchman

The Mystery Mummy Of Wyoming

The Secret Of The Devil's Stone

The Cat That Had Wings

The Army That Disappeared Into Thin Air

Captured By The Bigfoot Creature

The Master Of Witches

It was like something out of Doctor Who. Except these were true! It said so on the cover. 

After I finished reading my newly acquired book I honestly felt like I'd been introduced to a whole new world that was so much more incredible than my teachers led me to believe.  

  It also introduced me to an experience I was to become very familiar with in future years. The bit where I was excitedly expounding on a new discovery and looked up to realise that everybody was now looking at me funny...

 My favourite story, and the one that stayed with me forever after, was "The Army That Disappeared Into Thin Air"   Let's use Haining's own words to explain it.

"There are many terrible things and many brave things which happen during times of war.

 There are also occasionally strange and inexplicable events which occur and because of their very strangeness rarely find a place in the official reports dealing with the conflict.

  One such event which I should like to recount hapened during the first World War and concerns the complete disappearance of 250 British soldiers. These troops literally walked into battle though what looked like a thick fog and were never seen again..." 

 Gallipoli 1915. A young New Zealand sapper is watching a British offensive against a Turkish-held hill. He becomes aware that there are clouds hanging over the battlefield that look...a little strange. Eight of them, identical in appearance and despite the strong wind, they hold steady over one particular spot. And below them a single, much larger cloud is just brushing against the hillside.

 Meanwhile the British are advancing doggedly up the hill, through a murderous hail of bullets and shrapnel. 

 They reach the cloud and march into it....

 But while the Anzac soldiers to either side continue their gallant but futile advance, the soldiers who marched into the cloud don't seem to have come out the other side. 

 Times passes, the battle rages on and although the sapper and his comrades watch the cloud intently, not a single one of the 250 British riflemen has emerged. 

 Then the cloud rises up into the sky. Behind it, on the hillside it had been hiding....nothing. Not a body or a bullet to be seen. It climbs to join the other 8 and slowly they drift away. 

 No trace of the lost men was ever found. After the war the Turkish authorities vehemently denied that they had taken any British prisoners that day. 

And the final words of the story are in the form of a question. 

"Why it was - as Sapper Reichert noted with utter bewilderment - that when the 'clouds' finally moved upwards and away they drifted steadily against the wind..."

 Shortly afterwards I picked up another Peter Haining book that had more of the same cool-yet-disturbing tales.

This time around we got :

The Restless Bones

The Winged Monster Of The Desert

The Terror Of The Dragon

The Mystery Of The Loup-Garou

Old Roger's Vengeance

The Witches Familiar's

The Call OF Drakes Drum

The Trail Of The Devil's Footprints

The Thing From Outer Space

The Voice In The Graveyard

Old as I am, as I was typing these I felt the circle of lamplight around me shrinking just a little bit.

Although there's some delights to be found - I guarantee that if you google The Devil's Footprints, it will disturb you just a little - the standout story in this volume is the one that grants this volume its title. It's an unearthly tale of an Italian museum where strange things started happening after dark. And the short version goes like this:

Riva, Italy 1954. Workmen digging a ditch stumbled across a Roman sarcophagus. Inside, they found the dry, dusty bones of a long-dead Roman man. A Roman man buried without his head. 

 The archaeologists who came to view the sarcophagus scratched their heads and suggested that maybe the dead man had been beheaded for some crime and his head left to rot on a stake as a grisly warning. 

Regardless, it  was decided to put sarcophagus on display at the local museum. Right beside it, the bones were painstakingly wired together and positioned upright in an iron frame.

 The mystery of the sarcophagus and grisly contents proved a big draw and the public flocked to see both.

 It wasn't until the fifth day that the tale of the Skeleton of Riva really began to get strange.

 The curator came in, bright and early that morning to find that the coffin had been opened. Certain objects had been moved about. Others dropped to the floor. 

 Almost as if somebody had been searching for something...

 And he couldn't help noticing that he skeleton seemed to be...not quite in the same position it was in before.

The museum was searched thoroughly, the locks checked, the artefacts placed back in their proper locations and the museum went back to normal. In time the nightwatchman stopped pacing nervously, the curator stopped cautiously eyeing his displays at the start of each new day and everybody agreed not to mention it again.

Until two weeks later the curator came in to find that once again, things had been moved around. Objects were scattered across the floor, an ancient oil-lamp now sat beside the feet of the headless skeleton  - now visibly slumped in its iron support - and most astonishing of all,  the altar of Jupiter set up in one corner had ashes lying in front of it. Ashes as if from a sacrifice, perhaps?

 Outside on the streets of Riva people began muttering about the strange things happening at their museum. If some cunning art-thieves were breaking into the museum, why was nothing ever stolen?  

 The word "Curse" began coming up more and more often.

 Four days later, a white-faced, terrified museum employee was waiting for the curator as he arrived. The artefacts had been disturbed again, except this time they had been thrown violently across the room.  Stands and display cases had been sent crashing to the ground. Priceless objects were piled up here, there and everywhere. But it was what what the curator found in the centre of the room that was most incredible, most disturbing.

 Let's have Peter Haining himself take it from here.

"Then, when he walked up to the skeleton, the fears that he had refused to acknowledge, had tried to convince himself could not possibly be true, seemed to be confirmed. For now the headless bones lay tumbled on the floor - the legs bent outwards at grotesque angles, the arms thrown one across the chest and the other outwards as if in a last despairing effort to ward off an attack of some kind.

 But what horrified the curator more than anything else, what made him realise he had been witness to one of the strangest occurrences in archaeological, not to mention supernatural history - and something he would remember to the end of his days - was what protruded from between the skelton's bones.

  Thrust through the lowest bones of the skeleton's rib-cage and into the floor beneath was an ancient Roman dagger."

After the hair on my ten year old neck had stopped standing on end I began wondering what else was out there. And I went looking for it. 

The Bermuda Triangle. The Philadelphia Experiment. UFOs. Antediluvian civilisations. Holy Blood and Holy Grail. I devoured it all. 

A few years ago British Tv did a moving film about the ill-fated Sandringham Company, that disappeared while attacking Turkish positions in Gallipoli. As you've probably guessed, this was the inspiration for Hainings "The Army that disappeared..." and yes, the mysterious cloud did get a mention. 

 "All the Kings Men" starred David Jason and had a more likely explanation of events. The inexperienced British Tommies lost contact with the other units and blundered into a Turkish killing-zone. The handful of survivors were summarily executed by Turkish troops in no mood to take prisoners and the remains lay somewhere under the soil of Gallipoli to this day. 

 I'd recommend you watch it if you ever get chance. 

 Some of the other stories in Haining's books are relatively well-known  - The Green Children and the Wyoming Mummy crop up from time to time  - while others seem to have remained untouched by other hands. Cynical, 43- year- old me remembers that Peter Haining was also known for his horror fiction so it's entirely possible that he made some of them up.

 I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference HERE to the Skeleton of Riva, so it's nice to know that there very well may be Italian grandfathers scaring their children's children with the tale of the restless bones 

These days I'm a lot more sceptical. I buy The Fortean Times religiously every month and still retain a love of ...err...weird shit. Naturally, I'm a lot harder to convince than when I was 10. A light in the sky is more likely to be a Chinese lantern. Crop circles are students pissing about. Sometimes ships just sink and never mind what the press call the local waters.

When all is said and done, though, I remain convinced that sometimes, just sometimes, the world throws a little bit of the fantastic our way, just to mess with the scientists who think it's all laws and numbers. 

Peter Haining 1940-2007
R.I.P

And thank you for giving my world mystery. 

More about him here: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/peter-haining/