Bigfoot in the British Isles? The idea of huge, hairy man-apes hiding out in the manor-dotted, bucolic countryside of the British Isles seems as likely at first blush as the queen switching out her Earl Grey for chugs of Red Bull. But Nick Redfern’s new book, Wild Man! The Monstrous and Mysterious Saga of the British Bigfoot, (CFZ Press, 2012) makes an exhaustive and surprisingly compelling case that people have indeed been seeing anomalous, Bigfoot-like creatures from Shugborough to Derbyshire, perhaps for centuries!
Redfern has to be one of the most prolific current writers on strange and cryptozoological topics — he releases books faster than I can find time to review them. But I wanted to make sure that I got this one posted because it covers so many topics of interest to the worldwide cadre of Bigfoot-seekers. It has the additional advantage of being authored by a native of the British soil who possesses many area connections and much firsthand knowledge.
Redfern starts by grounding the wild man topic in medieval history, harking back to the wodewose, or hairy, naked men seen throughout the forests of England since at least the early 14th century. But he notes that the wodewose was described as very close to human underneath all that fur.
The nearly 300, large pages are packed with anecdotes in a timeframe that ranges from ancient to contemporary, but the book is about more than mysterious case studies. Redfern doesn’t shy away from possible explanations for the anomalous creatures, venturing into possibilities such as misidentifications with primates released from the private zoos of eccentric collectors. He also notes the difficulty of explaining how large predators could subsist in the English countryside without detection and lays out a theory that they may be “semi-physical” or products of some other process that is not presently known to science.
Whatever these wild things are, Redfern’s examination of them belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in anomalous creatures, especially those of the hairy hominoid kind. There may be more beasties hiding in that famed British mist than anyone has previously guessed.
@alanborky Search “Black Shuck” for the ghostly black dog. There are even songs about it here.
Linda I haven’t read the book yet so Nick may’ve touched on this anyway but I’m intrigued to see Shugborough on the edge of Nick’s happy hunting ground the Cannock Chase being mentioned.
Apart from Shugborough’s heavily occulted association with the whole Holy Blood Holy Grail scene it’s name perplexes me.
Straight off there’s the possibility it’s derived from a dialectic variant for shock making Shugborough the borough of shocks but there’s also the possibility it’s related to shag a British term for the source of us all.
But what if it’s alludes to shaggy men and here I’m not refering to Scooby Doo’s mate though a few scooby snacks might make witnessing such things a little easier.
I’m also wracking my brain for the name of an old 19th century book I once owned which explained a shug as a sort of daemonic entity which can take the form amongst other things of a sentient black caninoid potentially associating all this stuff even with your work as well as confirming my own suspicion no matter how it may look we’re ALL exploring different aspects of exactly the same terrain.
Speaking of which the thing is there’s definitely parts of the English/British historic and prehistoric landscape such as the name of Shugborough that seem to’ve been deliberately and carefully engineered in the way say Sanskrit and Arabic have on all kinds of levels as a way of transmitting To Whom It May Concern information across time and until now I’ve never made the connection with the wild and woolly giants populating Arthurian mythology even though paradoxically as in the case of the Green Knight and in much mythology all across the world such giants aren’t seen as brutish and mindless but rather conferers of baraka and masters of magic-like technology and knowledge from whom we brutish mindless humans learn to become true men [the story of Eve's daughters being a thing quite apart from but contributing to this process].
As I say though Nick’s probably touched on this sort of stuff in the book already.