Paranormal Devon

Devon claims so many classic tales of the supernatural and paranormal: the beckoning White Lady of Berry Pomeroy Castle, the terrifying Whisht Hounds of Dartmoor, the notorious Hairy Hands that wrestle with driver’s steering wheels near Postbridge, and the melancholy story of Jay’s Grave near Widecombe-in-the-Moor to name but a few.But Devon is also a county where mysteries continue to surprise us. Author Daniel Codd has unearthed hundreds of strange tales, old and new, to capture the imagination and to sometimes even chill the blood. Could it really be that a lone Roman soldier’s ghost was spotted forty years ago on the fringes of Okehampton? Did a Hatherleigh man really see the Devil before murdering his wife in 1752? What was the shimmering white figure that stared at drivers from Hardwick Wood, Plympton? Have buildings and even people spontaneously combusted in Devon? Was a ghost actually photographed near Okehampton’s castle? And what to make of the physical encounters with pixies that recent history has presented us with? Not to mention the baffling reports of UFOs, wild men, prowling panthers, mermaids, sea creatures and even werewolves that have turned up in the county…Covering an area from the county’s northern coastline to its southern beaches, Paranormal Devon has been researched and compiled from archive sources, is fully up-to-date and includes many mysterious first-hand accounts and contributions from county folk. Most of all, these thought-provoking reports remind us that Devon, even in the twenty-first century, is still an extremely paranormal county.

Daniel J. Codd is a lifelong student of history, criminology, folklore, the out-of-place and the paranormal in Britain, a fascination borne out of a belief that truth (including the possibility of the reality of the supernatural) is endlessly more intriguing than fiction. He has previously written full studies of the supernatural and paranormal in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Somerset and Bristol, and has contributed articles for Paranormal magazine as well as appearing on BBC Radio programmes. Daniel is endlessly intrigued by the anecdotes and accounts of ghosts and other phenomena he frequently receives, and is currently compiling these anecdotes, as well as anything else of interest he finds along the way among the archive material he is constantly trawling through.