A Walk Down Mystic's Way...

[BIAD]

The Owl-Man of Cornwall.

This particular legend has the burden of involving a renown trickster who bolstered the story of two young
girls encountering a strange creature in the grounds of a village church of Cornwall, England.

Tony 'Doc' Shiels is well-known in the worlds of paranormal, supernatural and cryptozoology. Mr. Shiels is
an elderly man who enjoyed the Barnum-style of offering the public views of the stranger side of modern-day
society. He's an artist, was heavily involved in stage-magic and for a time, a noted paranormal researcher.



Living in the area of Falmouth, I'm sure the many tales of water-monsters, ghosts, goblins haunting forgotten
tin mines and wind-blown stone circles along the rocky coast, didn't go unnoticed by this man who allegedly
took a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster in 1977.





The Owl-Man legend actually fore-dates the commonly-known account of the girls at the church encounter in
the same year Mr. Shiels took the famous 'muppet' Loch Ness photo.
A report in the now-defunct Cornish Echo newspaper recorded that two boys in 1926 were chased by 'a very
large, ferocious bird' that repeatedly attempted to attack them whilst the lads hid behind a metal grating.

Mawnan is actually a parish (an area that a church presides over) of South Cornwall and because most legends
need specific  points that a casual listener can appreciate, Mawnan Smith -the real village name on the northern
side of the Helford River, became merely 'Mawnan'
SOURCE:

During early April of 1976, two young sisters of nine and twelve years-old respectively, were holidaying with their
parents and  during an early-evening visit to Mawnan church, witnessed a large winged creature hovering above
the church tower.



June and Vicky Melling fled from the sighting of a "feathered bird-man" and related the story to their father who
cut short the vacation. Somehow, Tony Sheils became aware of the incident and requested a drawing of the
creature from one of the girls.

According to Mr. Sheils, two more females encountered the fierce feathered figure in July of the same year.
This time, Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry -both fourteen year-old girls, were camping when a "a big owl with
pointed ears, as big as a man" with glowing eyes and black, pincer-like claws was witnessed and once more,
drawings were offered.



More sightings were reported for years afterwards and the usual explanation is that it was a large eagle owl.
Eagle owls are not indigenous to Great Britain, but the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds (RSPB) state that
these large birds were held in captivity as far back as the seventeenth century.
SOURCE:

A Hoax...? Regional promotion? There are many supernatural stories that are firmly embedded in that southern
tip of England and with Bodmin Moor just waiting to the north, Conan Doyle's 'Hound of The Baskervilles' demands
we look at the ghostly canines that haunt certain areas of Britain.