Lair of the Beasts

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Lair of the Beasts: An Ancient Wild-Man

Monsters of the Past

By Nick Redfern June 27, 2009

Ralph of Coggeshall tells the tail of a Wild-Man in early thirteenth-century
© N/A

Last weekend, I gave a lecture at the annual Haunted America conference in Decatur, Illinois, on the controversial subject of the blood-sucking, vampire-like Chupacabra of the island of Puerto Rico.

While I was there, a member of the audience asked me for how long people have been reporting sightings of Bigfoot-type creatures – both in the United States and around the world.

Well, that’s actually a very good question indeed.

There’s absolutely no doubt at all that Native American Indian legends of – and close encounters with - hairy wild-men-of-the-woods date way back into the fog of time.

But, as far as my own, personal investigations are concerned the earliest report that might possibly describe an encounter with a literal hairy wild-man originated hundreds of years ago - from the English town of Orford, which can be found on the east-coast of the country.

A thousand years ago Orford was a very small town. By the 12^th Century, however, King Henry II had transformed it into a bustling coastal port. Work began in 1165 on the town’s castle, which was completed in 1173, and which provided the perfect defense from anyone trying to invade England. Today, sadly, only its ninety-foot-high tower remains; that and the legend of the hairy wild-man, of course.

Within the pages of an early thirteenth-century publication titled Chronicon Anglicanum, one “Ralph of Coggeshall," a monk – and later an abbot – from the English county of Essex, recorded the following, eye-opening story:

“In the time of King Henry II, when Bartholomew de Glanville was in charge of the castle at Orford, it happened that some fishermen fishing in the sea there caught in their nets a wild-man. He was naked and was like a man in all his members, covered with hair and with a long shaggy beard.”

Ralph continued: “He eagerly ate whatever was brought to him, but if it was raw he pressed it between his hands until all the juice was expelled. He would not talk, even when tortured and hung up by his feet. Brought into church, he showed no signs of reverence or belief. He sought is bed at sunset and always remained there until sunrise.”

The monk added: “He was allowed to go into the sea, strongly guarded with three lines of nets, but he dived under the nets and came up again and again. Eventually he came back of his own free will. But later on he escaped and was never seen again.”

This was not, however, the end of the legends of the Orford wild-man, however.

In 1968, a young man named Morris Allen was walking with the family’s pet dog along the coast near Orford, when he saw in the distance what looked like someone squatting on the sand and leaning over something.

As he got closer, Allen said, he was horrified to see that it was nothing less than a man dressed in what looked like an animal-skin, and who was eagerly tearing into the flesh of a dead rabbit. The man was dirt-encrusted, with long, tangled hair on his head, thin and coarse-looking hair all over his body, and possessed a pair of wild, staring eyes.

Allen held his frightened dog tight and could only look on with a mixture of both deep fascination and overwhelming terror.

Suddenly the man held his head aloft and quickly looked in Morris’ direction, as if he had picked up his scent. The hairy creature quickly scooped up the rabbit, bounded off into the grass and was lost to sight.

Despite returning to the area on countless occasions in the hope of having a repeat encounter, Allen never saw the wild-man again.

Was the beast seen forty-one years ago by Morris Allen related in some fashion to the very similar creature cited in Chronicon Anglicanum by Ralph of Coggeshall all those centuries before?

We may never really know; however, it seems safe to conclude that whatever is – and has been – afoot in the English town of Orford of a hairy and wild nature, it has a long and distinctly strange history.

Nick Redfern is the author of many books on the paranormal and the world of the unexplained, including There’s something in the Woods; Man-Monkey; and the forthcoming Science Fiction Secrets.