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Super-Serpents
A Monster of the Woods By Nick Redfern
February 28, 2009
The mystery surrounding Loch Ness Monster-like beasts continues..
© N/A
A dense and eerily atmospheric forest situated deep within the heart of the historic and ancient English county of Staffordshire, the Cannock Chase is a high plateau bordered by the Trent Valley to the north and the West Midlands to the south.
And it’s also the very location where I spent much of my childhood and teenage years.
The huge and picturesque Cannock Chase has been an integral feature of the Staffordshire landscape for generations. Following an initial invasion of Britain in A.D. 43, Roman forces advanced to the south to what is now the town of Cannock, and along a route that became known as Watling Street: a major, and historic, Roman road.
The surrounding countryside was heavily wooded even back then, as can be amply demonstrated by the Romans’ colorful name for the area: Letocetum, or the Grey Woods.
And those Grey Woods are, today, home to some distinctly strange and diabolical beasts.
For example, just three years ago, the local Birmingham Post newspaper recorded that: “In March, 2006, ramblers reported seeing a ‘fourteen-foot snake moving through the bracken’ near to Birches Valley. They said the beast had a powerful head and ‘coloring that stood out sharply against the greens and blues of the bracken.’”
Despite the fact that there are without doubt no indigenous snakes in the British Isles of such a monstrous size at all, it is also a reality that, from time to time, stories of bizarre, snake-like and sea-serpent-like creatures do surface in the area.
Indeed, the story told by the Birmingham Post eerily paralleled one that had been related to me back in 1995 by a man named Norman Dodd. In the 1970s, Dodd regularly commuted to the vicinity of the Cannock Chase woods on business, and had a truly startling encounter with a large snake-like beast in the woods during the summer of 1976 – which turned out to be one of the hottest on record for the British Isles.
Dodd informed me that he could not recall the exact location on the Cannock Chase where the incident had taken place; but he was able to state with certainty that it was a small pool, no more than twenty feet by thirty feet in size, “not far from [the village of] Slitting Mill; and back into the Cannock Chase.”
Dodd stated that he had parked his car, a Ford Cortina, on the grass-verge of the road that was adjacent to the pool and was munching on his lunch and reading a newspaper. “It was a bloody stifling day. I remember swigging something to drink and having a bite when there was something moving right on the bank [of the pool].”
He added that he was startled to see a creature that he estimated to be around six or seven feet long slowly surface from the water; and that then proceeded to “bask” on the banks of the pool. “It sort of wriggled,” said Dodd, adding that “it was like its whole body seemed to sort of shake or wobble as it moved.”
Dodd further explained that the animal had a serpent like head and an oily-colored skin. Its body was thick and it seemed wholly unconcerned by his presence. “I know it saw me – or saw the car, definitely – because it looked right in this direction and then just went back to what it was up to: just laying there.”
But what was most puzzling of all to the highly shocked Dodd was the fact that the animal seemed to have “flippers near the front – or little feet.”
He conceded that the animal may conceivably have had similar “flippers” or “feet” at its rear, too; but explained that the “back-end never came right out of the water; like as if it was trying to keep itself cool from being part [sic] in the water.”
He watched astonished – and not a little concerned, unsurprisingly – for at least twenty minutes, after which time the animal simply slid back into the pond.
He concluded: “I wondered how a small pond like that might feed an animal that big for food [sic]. But what about its feet or the flippers: does that mean it might have been able to go from pool to pool for fish and things?”
Dodd’s eye-opening report was one of those that almost sounded too good to be true; and yet the wholly independent story of a giant snake seen in the Cannock Chase woods in early 2006 suggested to me that such Loch Ness Monster-like beasts were indeed on the loose in the area – and, perhaps, they still are…
Nick Redfern is a full-time monster-hunter and the author of four books on the subject: Three Men Seeking Monsters; Memoirs of a Monster Hunter; Man-Monkey; and his latest book: There’s something in the Woods.
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The pond creature might have been Northern Snakehead ? We're having a problem with them here in the states right now. They can travel over land, live in the mud and survive out of water for about 4 days. They aren't native to the UK, so it would have very few predators. It also eats pretty much anything, so it could grow to be quite large. And how long do snakes live? If the snake sighting was an alien snake,and it had no predators, would it be able to survive for years in Cannock Chase, growing fat on ground squirrels and sleeping the winters away.
I've heard strange stories about the woods in England. They seem to rival the strange stories told about the woods in the Appalachia region here in the US. People have been taken by extreme PANics for no apparant reason, or seen inexplicable things in the woods: intelligent lights, shadowy creatures, dwarfs, giants, etc. I sometimes wonder if there aren't magnetic properties in the rocks in some of these places, or weird resonances with the quartz that causes temporal lobe hallucinations, or that perhaps opens some type of doorway for real Land of the Lost type of experiences. The number of anecdotal stories is what amazes me, the sightings and weird experiences are accepted as "common" by folks in the region, even though people are smart enough not to come forward in any way that could be considered "public".