The Mawnan Owlman

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the mawnan owlman

 

The area south of Falmouth is not reknown for its ease of access. Quiet settlements sit on narrow lanes, and at the very end of one of these is the squat yet attractive form of Mawnan Old Church.

 

A tidy graveyard backs onto a narrow strip of woodland, accessible through a public footpath, and the steep northern side of the Helford Estuary. It doesn't take imagination to suspect that most visitors are tourists, walkers, church=goers or murderers clutching fishing rods hobby fishermen. Yet it would seem that as of 1976 something else came to pay an occasional visit to this delightful corner of southern Cornwall - the bizarre zooform entity known as the Owlman.

 

'A HUGE GREAT THING WITH FEATHERS...'

 

Unlike the case of the Ohio-West Virginia Mothman which has become a stape of modern Fortean lore, the story of the Owlman is far murkier, one linked firmly to the character of Anthony 'Doc' Shiels. A surrealist artist, magician, playwritean monster hunter who was attempting to invoke Cornish seamonster 'Morgawr' at the time, Shiels claims to have been approached on 17 April 1976 by irate holidaymaker Don Melling.

 

The Preston based tourist seemingly accused Shiels of hoaxing the appearance of a 'huge great thing with feathers, like a big man with flapping wings' hovering over Mawnan church. The witnesses were Melling's two daughters Vicky, 9, and June, 12. So scared were they that the family holiday was cut short without Shiels being allowed to gain any additional information on the sighting.1

 

Many sightings of winged humanoids appear as one-off events, but this was not to be with this particular weirdo. A contentious sighting was made the following month (Shiels stated that artist Dick Gilbert observed an unusual winged creature near the village of Lamorna, the only sighting away from the area of Mawnan Old Church. Details of Gilbert remain sketchy at best, Shiels noting ''no one knows where he is, or even if he is still alive'2) and on 4 July Shiels would again be sought out with news of an encounter involving the Owlman and two young girls near Mawnan Old Church.

 

At 10pm the previous evening Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry were terrified by something 'like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing ... it went up in the air and we both screamed ... you could see its feet were like pincers.'3

 

'WE REALLY SAW THE BIRDMAN'

 

It is worth mentioning that by the time of Chapman and Perry's sighting details of the Owlman were already in the local psyche. A local journalist writing under the pseudonym Anthony Mawnan-Peller had retold the Mellings' tale in the pages of 'Morgawr - The Monster of Falmouth Bay', a pamphlet both girls were familiar with. Despite this it would seem that Shiels was prepared to accept ' that they were genuine'.4 That same day upon which Shiels met with the girls, another pair of young females would run into the flying freak at its favoured haunt. In an interview later published in the Falmouth Packet two sisters from the Lancashire town of Southport relayed their experience: 'We really saw the bird man, though it could have been somebody playing a trick in a very good costume and make-up. But how could it rise up like that? If we imagined it, then we both imagined the same thing at the same time.'5

 

For the best part of two years the Owlman passed into lore as just one set of strange events that haunted Cornwall in 1976 (UFOs, animal mutilations and Morgawr are covered in Jon Downes' excellent 'The Owlman and Others', now republished by his own CFZ Press). Yet this was an interval rather than an end, and on 4 June 1978 the sixteen year old daughter of a Ken Opie ran into 'a monster, like a devil, flying up through the trees near Mawnan Old Church'. Shiels claims to have been told of the sighting by the girl's father in an abrupt telephone conversation which ended with the curious statement 'she wouldn't have been there on her own'.6 Yet no further witness did come forward although Shiels had only a short time to wait until details of a further sighting reached him, apparently from a local woman who took lodgers at her boarding house in Redruth.

 

Three unnamed French students were in the vicinity of Mawnan Old Church where they disturbed something 'very big, like a big, furry bird with a gaping mouth and round eyes'. Despite pleas in the media for the students to contact him Shiels was unable to glean any further information on this sighting.7

 

It would be another two years before further scant details of an Owlman sighting would come into the public domain when, 'an enormous, bird-like creature' was witnessed 'over the Helford River and into the trees near Grebe Beach'.8

 

GAVIN

 

And then the Owlman simply disappeared, even ignoring its habit of making a two year hiatus. During the interim the Owlman would occasionally become the subject of discussion in various magazines dealing with all kinds of Forteana and paranormal related subject. It didn't go unnoticed that all of the sightings had been linked to Shiels in one way or another, the implication being that he had made the whole thing up. Yet conjecture can sometimes be overtaken by events at the time and in April 1995 cryptozoologist - and friend of Shiels - Jon Downes was sifting through some letters he came upon a letter from 'earnest young student' subsequently given the pseudonym Gavin. Subsequent correspondence, discussions and interviews revealed that Gavin and his then girlfriend had been shocked by Owlman at some time during 1988 or 1989 whilst on holiday. Again, the sighting occurred on the fringe of Mawnan woods at approximately 9.30pm: 'The creature was grey, with brown, and the eyes definitely glowed. On seeing us, its head jerked down and forwards, its wings lifted up and it just jumped backwards ... this creature was DEFINITELY a great deal bigger than any owl ... and, as we were sure we knew what the head looked like, it didn't really resemble an owl except superficially'.9

 

MURKY WATERS

 

Now with a seemingly independent witness to support the existence of the Owlman it was all but inevitable that the entire saga would be dragged up again, albeit from murkier depths than ever before. In a latter to Downes a female marine biology student from the USA recalled the events she in endured in Mawnan woods on 3 September 1995. Writing of a 'vision from Hell', the student included a sketch of the entity. Rather than further implicate himself in a hoax Shiels curiously distanced himself from the letter, suggesting its origin was the reporter Simon Parker from the Western Morning News paper. Downes himself suspected a hoax, 'I am convinced that it is based on another drawing that I have seen somewhere. It is not based on one of the published eyewitness drawings of the Owlman, but I feel sure that it is based on a drawing that I have seen somewhere in an occult or Fortean magazine'. Interestingly the address from which the letter originated turns out to be genuine yet its sender has not been traced.10

 

During April of 1996 sketchy details of a further Owlman sighting reached Downes. A Stephen Fowler whose father 'had been the Rector of Gerrans and Portscatho, and his ministry had for a while included Mawnan Smith.' told Downes of another alleged Owlman sighting. This involved a resident from a home for people with mental disabilities, or those suffering mental illness (it isn't established which). Despite Fowler suggesting he would attempt to uncover more details it seems that Downes heard no more on the matter.11

 

NUMBER ONE SUSPECT

 

If the reader discounts the potential hoax and potentially unreliable word of someone with a mental illness or disability, the tale of the Owlman reaches an abrupt and unsatisfactory end. Sightings of the entity seem to have stopped in 1988 or 1989, even though Shiels himself has playfully suggested that it has been since, albeit without revealing any additional details. Contrary to this, in 2005 an acquaintance of the author got in touch with the Reverend Pinchbeck of Mawnan church who was unaware of any new sightings. Perhaps the creature 'died' when Shiels moved back across the Irish Sea. This would therefore make him a prime suspect!

 

To make sense of anything related to the Owlman case it's essential to look at Shiels himself. His monster hunting autobiography 'Monstrum!' is a tangle of word play, surrealism, conjecture and wry humour. His infamous photograph of the Loch Ness Monster (re-christened the Loch Ness Muppet!) has come under criticsm for appearing unrealistic due to a lack of water ripples around the neck. The suggestion has also been raised that the 'monster' is in fact the work of a talented artist - something that Shiels clearly is - having tampererd with the negatives. Similarly Shiels has stated that whilst he may capture photographs of monsters he doesn't necessarily believe in them.12 Trickery is in Shiels' blood and the suspicion cannot go away that the early Owlman sightings were a wheeze thought up by Shiels.

 

At this point it would be easy to laugh and walk away from the entire Owlman saga, yet this would neglect the seemingly independent testimony offered by Gavin. Perhaps only Gavin himself knows the truth about his sighting, and it would not be unreasonable to still query whether he had hoaxed his sighting or misattributed an encounter with something far more mundane such as a large owl (either at the time or at a later date after reading about the entity). The same can be said of the author of another piece of correspondence received by Downes in July 2000. Written by a 'Sally G', claiming to be Sally Chapman who had the Owlman sighting in July 1976, she states that her fellow witness Barara Perry had actually approached Shiels off her own back to tell him of their sighting. Whether Sally G is Sally Chapman is not certain, at least not in the public domain, but this piece of correspondence remains an interesting footnote.13

 

Quite rightly Downes has protected Gavin's true identity, yet it makes the case that harder to unravel. Regardless, the implications are clear. If Gavin did stumble across some sort of genuine zooform entity, then what was it? It has been suggested by some lone voices that someone had been dressed up in costume, or even flying a bird shaped kite, yet we're stuck in one big guessing game.

 

THE ROLE OF THE SURREALIST

 

Shiels has suggested himself that surrealism may hold the key. Sixteen days before the first recorded sighting of the Owlman the surrealist artist Max Ernst died. In 1937 he had visited the area with friends and performed rituals to invoke the appearance of all sorts of mysterious creatures. One of these may have been 'Nightjarman', half bird, half human.14 Perhaps it is possible that such invocation rituals - remember that Shiels himself carried these out at the time of the first Owlman sighting15 - may be able to create a paraphysical entity. This holds echoes of the Tulpa thoughtform being from Tibetan mythology, and the experiments by Toronto based researchers in the 1970s to create their own ghost by the power of the brain alone (popularly known as the Philip Experiment).

 

If Shiels is correct then perhaps Gavin, Sally Chapman, Miss Opie and all of the other witnesses to the winged freak at Mawnan Old Church may have been unlucky enough to have encountered a paranormal entity beyond the scope of conventional science and unserstanding.

 

Wishful thinking, whichever way you look at it.

 

 

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