» Tales of the Unexplained

Barnes Common
I'm mostly posting this because I want to know if anyone else has come across anything similar in the area.

When I was a teenager, sometime around 1986, I was coming home from work in Putney. To get home, I could either take a mile or more detour around the locked up park, or hop over the gate and sneak past the park-keeper's house - so naturally, after I went through the level crossing, I scaled the park fence and snuck.

The park path runs parallel to the railway line and I was walking along this when I heard someone walking up on the railway gravel. There's lots of shrubbery and small trees between the fence and the track, so I couldn't see, but it was quite loud in the quiet of the night. At first I thought it was a trackworker doing some late trackwalk or something, but after a few seconds I realised that the pattern I was hearing was four legs, not two.

'That must be a hell of a big dog', I thought, since the crunching was so loud and deep-sounding, 'Idiot thing must have got onto the track from the level crossing'.

I'd stopped to consider this and the sound of crunching ballast stopped. I walked a bit further on and the crunching started again. So I'm thinking, 'It's lost - it can hear me and is trying to follow me - maybe I should go back to the level crossing and lead it off the tracks before it gets itself killed?' The trouble is, the park keeper's lights had gone on and I didn't want to get caught, so feeling quite guilty, I kept walking with my parallel companion.

At the end of the path was another locked gate with a bit of barbed wire at the top. You could get over it to cross the brook, but you had to be careful. Still feeling guilty, instead of going straight over, I walked towards the fence to see if I could get a look at the dog. The crunching on the ballast turned to rustling and snapping of it coming down the embankment towards the fence. Some of the snaps of branches were really loud and I had time to think, 'this thing is huge' before I saw it.

The light was on my left - an old sodium lampost shedding orange light across the greenery, so what I saw was largely in shadows and fuzzy orange. It was much taller than me (I'm 5'4) and had reflective eyes like a dogs that were a misty sort of yellow, as if it had cataracts. The eyes seemed to be forward-facing in a very broad face - I couldn't see any other features in its silhouette, like teeth or nose, but I was looking so hard for these that I didn't pay much attention to the body, so all I remember is the general shape, like a bear on its hind legs. It was making a noise that sounded like a cross between a dog growling and a pig snorting.

I don't know how long I stared at the thing - probably nowhere near as long as it felt. I was facinated and terrified and curiosity kept me there until part of my mind informed me 'that shitty chain link fence isn't going to stop it for long if it goes for you'. So I turned and threw myself at the gate. I got over it in what seemed to be one fluid moment of sheer athletisism, managing not to cut myself on the barbed wire and sprinted to my friend's house, who lived in Westfield's flats the same as me.

When I got to his flat, I was shaking like crazy and babbling a bit about what I'd seen. He got a torch and made every sign of wanting to go out and find it, but I grabbed him and said along the lines of 'If you find it, it will kill you!' and was convincing enough to stop him.

Afterwards - when it was good and light - we went to take a look and saw that there were a lot of damaged limbs on the bushes and trees behind the fence where I'd seen it. We checked with the owner of the only Irish Wolfhound in the area to see if Clancy had escaped one night, but the owner said he never got out on his own. We even checked the papers to see if there was a circus in town that might have lost a bear - which is what it most resembled - but we never found out what it was.

I never cut through the park at night again after that.
(Tue 8th Jul 2008, 10:42, More)