Hello and welcome to the blog, folks. It's Andy and Craig here, and we're talking about a place we were supposed to go to this week, but due to weather and the very real possibility of being cursed, we're doing this from the comfort of our own home.
We're talking about Clapham Woods, a real-life sleepy English countryside folk horror story that has it all: a centuries-old curse, unexplained deaths, vanishing animals, a mysterious cult, and even UFOs. Here's a rundown of everything we've managed to unearth about this small, but incredibly weird, patch of woodland.
A Proper Curse from the 13th Century
The weirdness starts way back in 1288, when a local fella named Robert Le Falconer lost a court case and, being a bit of a sore loser, decided to place a curse on the entire village.
"I call upon she who knows to damn this accursed village and all its meagre holdings. May the priesthood of this false god soon come to know their fate."
That's a proper curse, isn't it? A cursy-sounding curse that's ever cursed. And maybe it actually worked, because a lot of people who visit the woods report an unsettling, eerie silence, with a strange lack of wildlife.
A Police Officer, a Vicar, and a Schizophrenic Walk into the Woods…
That sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in the 1970s and 80s, Clapham Woods was tied to a number of very serious deaths.
PC Peter Goldsmith: The body of a police constable and former Royal Marine was found in a patch of brambles six months after he went missing. The cause of death couldn't be determined, and it looked as if his body had been placed there.
Leon Foster: This missing pensioner's body was found in 1975, and it had undergone such rapid decomposition that the cause of death was impossible to determine.
Reverend Harry Neil Snelling: The local vicar went missing and was found as a skeleton three years later by a Canadian tourist. The circumstances were sketchy—the tourist simply wrote a letter to the police enclosing the vicar’s wallet and directions to the body.
Gillian Matthews: In 1981, a homeless woman was found murdered in the woods. Unlike the others, her death was determined to be a result of strangulation and sexual assault.
It's a lot of tragedy for one small patch of woodland, and it's easy to see why these cases feed into a much larger, darker story.
Disappearing Animals and a Pit of Skinned Cats
It’s not just people, either. There are multiple accounts of animals vanishing in the woods. One man got off his horse to take a break and turned around to find it had disappeared forever. Then there's the story of a woman whose Black Labrador ran off in the woods, only to return shortly afterwards, sicken rapidly, and die.
The weirdest and most disturbing story of all, though, is the report of police finding a pit full of skinned cats staked to the ground. That's a grim image that leads us nicely to our next point.
The Cult of Hecate
A lot of the animal disappearances were blamed on a satanic cult that was supposedly operating in the woods. But as we pointed out, the local paper misspelled the goddess's name, as it's actually Hecate (or Hekate).
Hecate is a Greek goddess of necromancy, witchcraft, and crossroads, often accompanied by dogs—a detail that ties directly into the missing animal stories.
The idea of the cult really took off after a researcher named Charles Walker claimed to have received a cryptic phone call and a letter inviting him to a secret meeting in the woods. He met a cloaked figure who said the cult had been sacrificing dogs to Hecate for decades.
This is where we get a bit suspicious. Walker himself used a Ouija board, and another researcher, Toyn Newton, did too. It makes you wonder: are the only occult practices happening in Clapham Woods being conducted by the people investigating them? It also sounds like it was a great hoax to play on the researchers—just a couple of dudes having a laugh with some Blair Witch sticks.
UFOs and the Lack of Ghosts
Despite the woods being named one of the most haunted in England, we couldn't find a single solid ghost story. Well, other than the one where a boy was supposedly floating, but that was just one sentence. We think people just use "haunted" as a catch-all term for all the other weird shit happening there.
And there is a lot of other weird shit. Reports of UFOs, high radiation levels, and even a "misty grizzly bear" that left behind a paw print and a high Geiger counter reading all abound in the area. We can't help but wonder if the UFOs are just picking up their alien pets after they've had a little wander around the woods.
One thing we do have is an account of a ghost-like encounter. A researcher's wife, Jean, was reportedly thrown backward into a barbed wire fence by an invisible force while entering the woods. Was it a dramatic slip? Or was she yanked by a ghost? We'll leave you to decide on that one.
The Devil's Soup at Chanctonbury Ring
Right next to Clapham Woods is the ancient Chanctonbury Ring, an important site with a history of Romano-Celtic temples. It's also where the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and his buddy Victor Neuberg used to hang out, convinced it was a place of great power.
But the best story, by far, is the folklore that says the devil himself can be summoned at the Ring. All you have to do is run around the clump of trees seven times anti-clockwise. When he appears, he’ll offer you a bowl of soup in exchange for your soul.
For us, the stories of Clapham Woods and the surrounding area are a perfect example of how folklore gets made. It's a wonderful collection of stories, a perfect setting for a folk horror tale, but for our money, the evidence is pretty thin.
So we didn't get to go there and make ourselves the wyrd news. But maybe one day we will, and we'll see for ourselves if the curse of Clapham Woods is for real.