Hypnoheist: More Than Just an Urban Legend?

Michael Goss

Magonia 57, September 1996

The customer was tall and dark – perhaps Italian, maybe Turkish: that was the impression which 32-year-old Mohammed Zamir formed of the man who stepped into his electrical shop at Ilford, Essex, one day in late 1977. He wanted to buy a cassette and asked Mr Zamir to take its cost out of a £20 note which, the shopkeeper observed with momentary interest, was a curious colour. Up until now it had been a perfectly ordinary sort of transaction. What happened when he examined the note more closely was quite out of the ordinary.

Remembering Roger

John Rimmer, Michael Goss, Peter Rogerson

Magonia 56, June 1996

"It is with great sadness that we have to tell our readers of the death of Roger Sandell. Roger died on January 20th, 1996, at Roehampton Hospital in London, after an unsuccessful operation for cancer. He was 51. Besides the tremendous personal loss which all of us at Magonia feel, and I am sure all who knew him will share, there is a great loss to everyone who studies the subjects we cover in Magonia."

Jumpers and the Killer Monk of Beachy Head.

Michael Goss

Magonia 55, March 1996

Go to the N19 district of London, ask someone the whereabouts of Suicides’ Bridge. Unless that person is a stranger like yourself, the chances are heavily in favour of your being directed there right away. No painful brow-furrowing or other symptoms of urgent memory-searching, no doubt or vagueness; the answer will be with you in an instant.

Blue is the Colour: The Hypno-Show Controversy

Michael Goss

Magonia 53, August 1995

"Y'know... Hypnotism is not just about people making fools of themselves on stage," confides the head-and-shoulders caricature, speaking word balloon-wise from the bottom right foreground of the "Biff Weekend" cartoon strip. "It's also about flogging videos." (1)Sure enough, there are the self-help home-hypnosis videos cascading down from the top of the frame like comic gifts from a benevolent Creator.

Old Hat, New Hat

Michael Goss
Magonia 40, August 1991

Blame your editor. His BackPage invitation to Magonia readers to predict the next Great Unexplained Phenomenon set me a-thinking… Set me a-thinking that each successive Great Unexplained Phenomenon which rises from the obscurity of being known to the freakish few to becoming the possession of the millions.

The Lessons of Folklore

Michael Goss

Magonia 38, January 1991.

 

‘Folkloric’; a slightly gawky adjective and perhaps one that exudes too much n aroma of musty libraries and still mustier academics who browse in them. But, a convenient adjective for all that. Can mean more or less what you want it to mean. What I want it to mean when I’m writing on satanic child abuse – and what I don’t want it to mean – goes like this:

The (Urban) Legendary Elvis

Michael Goss

Magonia 31, November 1988

 

As the late Gilbert Harding used to say of dyspepsia: 'Of course I get it, but I don't suffer from it' ... I can take the Sunday Sport or leave it alone. Often I leave it alone for weeks at a time until some temptingly outrageous headline like 'Hitler was a Woman' makes handing over the 35 pence not only justifiable but essential. On grounds of research into contemporary rumour-legend dissemination processes, you understand. But you knew I was bound to say that.

Shito-Dama, the Japanese Fireball Spirit

Michael Goss

Magonia 24, November 1986.

 

The Japanese spirit world is populated by a strange crew; there are teasing, shape-changing entities known as kitsune or ‘fox spirits’ which delight in deceiving lone travellers; there are bird-faced tengu in the forests, and half-human, half turtle kappa in the deep ponds. And of course there are the ghosts of the departed who cling obsessively to the things left undone or uncorrected in their earthly existence.

The Phantom Hitch-hiker on Public Transport

Michael Goss
Magonia 22, May 1986

Just when you thought it was safe to bring your car out of the garage ... the Phantom Hitch-hiker is back on the road again. And this footloose, footweary spectral traveller of the world's highways is still going through the timeless routine of hitching rides from unsuspecting motorists - by preference friends of the narrator's friends - and vanishing with the same spectral ease that foaf-lorists everywhere have come to expect.

The French Pterodactyl: a Fortean Folly

Mick Goss

Magonia 21, December 1985

When Professor Challenger wanted to prove to zoological sceptics that pterodactyls weren’t extinct after all, he merely arranged an expedition to an unknown plateau in the Matto Grosso and caught one. The sight of the gargoyle-faced nightmare filling London’s Queens Hall with the “dry, leathery flapping of its ten-foot wings” and with a “putrid and insidious odour” as it circled overhead left Challenger’s enemies in no doubt: the pterodactyl tribe most certainly was not extinct!

The Maniac on the Platform

Michael Goss
Magonia 19, May 1985

I first met the London Underground Platform Maniac when travelling on the Circle Line between Blackfriars and Embankment on 25 February 1985. Not in person, happily, but as a story told by the middle-aged lady opposite me to her friend. I wasn’t meant to be included in this audience of one, of course, but something about her hushed tone advised me to make sure that I was, even if only as an eavesdropper. So my ears flapped long and hard enough to pick up the following …