STRANGE FENOMENA: A LINCOLNSHIRE CASEBOOK
The Ruskington Goblin
One of the good things about highlighting fortean phenomena in the media is that you can sometimes get new people coming forward and volunteering their own inexplicable experiences, which they have put to the back of their mind or only discussed with close friends and family, if anyone. The publication of my two articles about The Ruskington Horror (FT401:32-38, 402:38-43) resulted in me being interviewed by BBC Radio Lincolnshire and Howard Hughes on talkRADIO. Therefore, it was no great surprise when I was contacted with another story from the Ruskington area. However, I was very surprised by the story itself…
Around 9pm on 10 September 2017 Marc was driving alone down the A15; he was heading home to Bourne, having been in Lincoln earlier in the day. He was about 30 minutes into his journey cruising at 55 miles per hour (88 km/h) in his Mazda 3, in a steady flow of traffic, listening to music on the radio. It was when he was just north of Leasingham, between the Cranfield turn-off and the first turn-off to Leasingham, and a little less than two miles (3.2km) from the Holdingham roundabout (see map), that something very peculiar happened.
At a spot where the white lines edging the road on both sides were broken to indicate tracks into the farmers’ fields to the left and right, Marc was amazed to catch sight in his headlights of what he can only describe as “a kind of goblin” – a thin little man, probably less than a foot (13cm) tall, running along on the inside of the road to his left in the same direction he was travelling. Admittedly, this all happened in a split second, but it was sufficiently strange for Marc to download the relevant footage from his dash cam when he got home. Unfortunately, the images were typically unclear and inconclusive, despite the weather having been fine. Some small markings could be made out on the road, but nothing that resembled the ‘goblin’ that he remembered so vividly. In the circumstances, he rationalised that it was probably just a rabbit or hare (which was not obvious from the dash cam, but it is important to bear in mind that dash cams have very wide-angle lenses and so can distort the field of view to a great extent). Despite the fact that he was familiar with observing such wildlife at the side of the road in rural Lincolnshire, Marc struggled to shake off his perception that the
gait and appearance of what he had seen strongly resembled some kind of homunculus, and that he felt that it was slightly malevolent. Therefore, he had to put it down to being a trick of the light or “one of those things”.
There the story might have ended – filed away in Marc’s memory, possibly to be later forgotten. But Marc subscribes to Fortean Times and had read my articles about The Ruskington Horror – and he realised that the place where he saw the ‘goblin’ was right in the middle of the area I described, where many of the strange events described by other witnesses on the A15 had taken place. Understandably, this caused him to revisit the spot and re-evaluate what had happened. Certainly, if an actual goblin (or other weird creature) had clearly appeared on the dash cam then he would have been straight on to FT at the time. He is familiar with Charles Bonnet Syndrome (see FT125:14, 184:46-49, 321:54-55), and how stimuli can cause the brain to over-interpret what is actually being seen; and he appreciates that somehow he might have “filled in detail” and turned whatever he witnessed into a running ‘goblin’. Nevertheless, he feels certain that it wasn’t something static because, as far as he was concerned, it was definitely moving; not just in a translational sense, but with its arms and legs relative to its body. Which neatly brings us back to Shirley Wallace’s question about whether a traveller’s state of mind creates hallucinations or enables the perception of external paranormal phenomena that are already present. Perhaps for Marc it was the latter…
ROB GANDY is a Visiting Professor at Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University and a regular contributor to FT. A lifelong fortean, he has eclectic interests in all things weird, including phantom hitchhikers, ghosts, strange sports and folk customs, time slips and synchronicities.
In his headlights was a thin little man, probably less than a foot tall