The Cuckoo Town Podcast: Recent Episodes
Cuckoo Town Podcast
The Cuckoo Town podcast is mostly focused on the borderlands where the weird stuff meets our creativity. We're attracted to the unseen place where a smorgasbord of high strangeness (UFOs/ghosts/bigfoot etc) blends with the more mainstream fringes of our culture. This mysterious place is the source of our creativity in the arts, music, and literature, as in weird fiction for example. Our intention, with occasional assistance from deep-thinking guests, drawn from the paranormal world, creatives generally, and various other walks of life, is to peer inside this liminal space, this place where the magic that sparks our creativity abides, and the ancient muse still resides!
Mark Anthony Wyatt, 2022
Mark is a published writer, having published three books so far. These are; 'The Spirit of Cornwall: A Haunted Legacy' (Vols 1 and 2, 2019); and 'Wyatt's Weird World' (2015). His books are available as either Kindles, or paperbacks, via Amazon.com online, or via Waterstones and other independent and specialist bookstores. Please check out his glowing reviews, he's averaging 4.8 stars out of five! Mark is currently working on several fascinating book projects, and he hopes to have these books available by the new year (2023). He has appeared as a guest on over 30 paranormal/esoteric/popular culture podcasts worldwide, including several in the U.S.A., in the U.K, and in Canada. However, Mark now wants to do far more listening, far more reading, far more researching, and far less talking.... where possible, although he's still happy to do an occasional podcast interview as a guest too. He has many fascinating, talented, deep-thinking friends/contacts on the paranormal circuit, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the creative fields too. Mark feels that you will love to listen to these interesting people, just as much as he himself looks forward to asking them questions that he usually just shouts out at his podcast player, hence the advent of The Cuckoo Town Podcast! Please join us then, our first episode will be dropping soon! P.S., We're still prepping some cool artwork, so please don't be put off by my ugly mug, it won't be there too long, it's just a 'place-holder' until we finish our more respectable artwork, which we think you will LOVE! Watch this space!
In this episode I discuss my weird encounter with what appeared to be a HUGE owl, back in 2013, and its portent effect on my life. I'm not the first to have experienced something odd like this, and I'm sure these encounters are on-going around the world. As to what they represent, I'm no wiser, all I do know is that my life changed in so many ways in the months and years that followed my sighting. Are they aliens from outer space? Inter-dimensional? Spiritual? A figment of my imagination? A part of my wider consciousness? Have a listen to this episode, sleep on it, and then make up your own mind. As I mention in this episode, these strange encounters are not as rare as you might imagine. Something is happening to those of us who are receptive to whatever these owls represent. For me the meeting at the crossroads that night was life-changing.....
This episode is a thorough investigation of The legend of the lost land of Lyonesse, a mythical land that may have sat off the coast of Cornwall many, many years ago. No one is sure that the place ever existed, let alone sank, but there are tantalising little bits of evidence, both historical and geological. Do I solve the mystery? Listen and find out, you might enjoy my journey of discovery! If you do enjoy the episode, please tell your friends and family, anyone who may have an interest in Cornwall, legends, mysteries,folklore etc etc. Please also share the episode on your social media, thank you!
Mark
I had a short but fascinating conversation with Dr Jack Hunter. Along the way we talked about his personal encounters with the fae, his PhD studies on trance mediumship, his mushroom trips, bees, hoverflies, gremlins, and the folklore of his home region, the Tanat Valley, nestled amongst the lofty mountains of mid-Wales, amongst many other topics. It was fun, I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed our conversation. Be lucky!
Mark
In this episode, Bob Osborne shines a light on the far west of Cornwall, a place that has influenced YOUR life, whether you know it or not, through the gifted intellectuals and artists who were once lured there by its strange unearthly magnetism. A place where Aleister Crowley, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Frieda Von Richtofen, and many other world famous artists, writers, and musicians, once lived, loved, and, as Bob Osborne says in his book, 'Zennor, Spirt of Place', wreaked havoc! The world we live in today was hugely influenced by these talented people. Enjoy!
Mark
This is an amusing, weird, but, I assure you, true story, a small part of an auto-biography I'm publishing in the next few months, to be called, 'Surf 'n' Turf', but be forewarned, it's an unconventional auto-biography!
If you enjoy it, I would appreciate you sharing with all your friends/on social media etc, and please subscribe too. Thanks for listening, and.....'Be Lucky!
Just a short episode to promote the book 'Fairy Films: Wee Folk on the Big Screen'. I contributed an essay (on Twin Peaks) to this book.
Mark Anthony Wyatt
Following on from the Ascona Monte Verita commune episode, (Ep 18) we travel across the Atlantic to California, to see how German emigrant lebensreformers/naturmenschen (life reformers/nature men) some of them direct from Monte Verita in Ascona, Switzerland, heavily influenced the Nature Boys of California, and how that thread can be traced to the late 1960s flower power generation of hippies. We take a look at the charismatic hippies that were around LONG, LONG, before the late 1960s hippies. We go right back to their roots the late 19th century in Germany, and the early 1900s (at Monte Verita etc) then show how they directly connect to the LA Nature Boys who have never really gone away! There were nature boys (hippy men living wild in caves, trees, on the beaches etc) in California from around 1915ish onwards, possibly even before that. Among several facinating people we will take an interest is Eden Ahbez, a hippy musician, a spiritual man who rubbed shoulders with people like Nat King Cole (he wrote his massive hit...Nature Boy) and Brian Wilson, and he was revered by Paul McCartney, too. Give it a listen!
Mark
An overview/beginner's guide to the Monte Verita commune at Ascona. At its peak(1900 to 1920) Ascona was at the epicenter of the counterculture, emitting seismic waves of intellectual thought and creativity. It played host, and influenced some of the brightest and best of a generation (Otto Gross, Sigmund Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Rudolph Steiner, Frieda van Richtofen, Herman Hesse etc etc... As the current Monte Verita website, says, ‘it was a place where our minds could reach up to the heavens.’ The ground-breaking ideas that emerged from that commune in the early years of the 20th Century, spanning many disciplines, went on to influence our world, mostly for the better, although some of those ideas morphed in the outside world and were used for more nefarious purposes.
In this episode we're looking into the Victorian plant-hunters, adventurers who risked their lives in their pursuit of florae to bring back to Britain, and changed our gardens for ever.....but fear not, it's NOT going to be boring! This isn't 'Gardeners' World' you know, it's not Alan Titchmarsh, this isn't the BBC! There's lots of fun along the way, especially in the final part of this episode, where I talk about a little old lady who liked to sneak into peoples' gardens to errrrmmm...well, borrow plants, on a kind of long-term arrangement! She also put other plants back in their places....exchange being no robbery and all that. She caused quite a stir sneaking into posh peoples' gardens in 1970s Surrey, some people even put up fences and watch towers with searchlights to try to stop her. She was a kind of green Robin Hood, re-distributing botanical wealth....yes, I know it's a bit crazy, OK., it's a lot crazy....but is it true? Well, yes, in part it is. Enjoy!
P.S,. I also discuss the old English tradition of the Sunday Roast
I recently caught up with an old Cornish friend, Matthew James. I've known Matt for many years now. Matt is very knowledgeable about the paranormal, both as a student of the genre, and as an experiencer, too; he's had many odd owl encounters for example. We have attended many conferences together, and sky watches too, we've had a few adventures....including getting lost on the high, bleak, creepy, mist-enclosed Cornish hills. I hope you enjoy our conversation, we certainly did, enjoy!
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Shane Taylor, one half of the excellent Dark Notes podcast team. We had a varied discussion, taking in, amongst other topics, high-strangeness, literature (William Burroughs), music (Ska, Bruce Hornsby, Grateful Dead, Michael Nesmith etc), global politics, the old west, finding our space in the podcast world, therapeutic drug use, and many other subjects. I hope to do more 'shooting the breeze' with Shane in the near future, it was fun!
In this episode I take a look at a small area of intense and historic high-strangeness. The north-east of Cornwall has a paranormal reputation second to none, except perhaps other parts of Cornwall and London, but it's fair to say that the Bude area triangle that takes in historic Morwenstow and Stratton has always been a very active area for weird events. We can only really scratch the surface in our podcast, but we've certainly covered a lot of ground in this episode, we've taken a look at UFO activity over a highly secretive government intelligence base near Bude, English Civil war ghosts in and around the ancient town of Stratton, ghostly horses, and even unfeasibly large owls....or are they owls? The owls, as Major Briggs (from Lynch and Frost's Twin Peaks) told us, may not be what they seem! I hope you enjoy the episode, if you do please spread the word, subscribe, like, and all that good stuff, thank-you!
Mark
This episode takes a deep dive into the history and mystery of Cornish mermaids mythology
We take a brief look at the work of Algernon Blackwood, what (and who) inspired his weird fiction, this is followed by Mark reading one of his short stories (Entrance and Exit) We also talk about how woodlands and the concept of Higher Space influenced his work. Along the way we discuss Hinton, Gauss, Immanuel Kant, Skinwalker Ranch, the Gaia Hypothesis, John Keel, Jacques Vallee, David Paulides' Missing 411, fairy lore, and the idea that trees are conscious beings, among many other things! I hope you enjoy it, if so, please like/subscribe/and spread the word please, thanks!
In this episode, I discuss the dreams I've had where I've spoken to deceased loved ones. I believe this is a fairly common experience, have a listen and see if my dreams of the dead are similar to your own! There are a couple of other weird experiences, of a similar nature, towards the end of the episode too. I hope you enjoy it, if you do, please like/subscribe/spread the word, thank you! Mark
This episode is in 2 parts, in the 1st, Steve Cleaves and Mark Toombs, two long-time colleagues of a legendary Cornish ghost-hunter, Michael Williams, discuss his legacy, and their own paranormal experiences, and then, in part 2, it's Michael himself, taken from my interview with him at his home on Bodmin Moor, back in 2016. It's a wide-ranging conversation about his life. Michael was, as his Cornish Bardic name suggests, a man of many parts. He wasn't just a paranormal investigator, among other things he was a cricket enthusiast, an animal benefactor, particularly horses, a lover of the theatre, and a writer. He was one of my own influences, and, like Michael, I'm into the paranormal, but I also write, love literature and the arts. Enjoy!
I have a conversation with Bob Osborne, an artist, writer and researcher, about his deep interest in how our culture, specifically the counter culture of the 20th century, was heavily influenced by D.H. Lawrence and Aleister Crowley, among others. We discuss how they both spent time living in Cornwall (the far west of England in the UK), Lawrence during the First World War, Crowley around 21 years later, weirdly, in the very same small coastal village, stranger still, that other talented artists/writers/musicians/sculptors etc were also drawn to that specific area, and that brings us neatly to Lawrence's notion of 'blood consciousness' which also ties into the 'Sense of Place' (Genus Loci) which fascinates me and has inspired this Cuckoo Town podcast. I hope you enjoy the discussion!
P.S., for any Americans listening, Bob mentions 'Steptoe and Son' in his spoken introduction, that was the 1960s English TV comedy show that your 'Sanford and Son' was based on. Another thing I should perhaps mention is that the conversation does circle back a few times, but that's what often happens when two people with a common interest in a topic get carried away, sorry about that!
I sit down with Prof. Jeffrey R. Paine to discuss his research into the flying saucer flap of 1947, what led up to it, what happened, what followed in its aftermath, and how the experiencers of that flap were affected. Jeff re-read all the classic UFO literature of that golden era, which he had read as a youngster in the mid-1960s, but armed this time with far more information via FOI requests, leaks, and decades worth of accumulated knowledge/experience. Jeff's training gave him an edge, he was able to sift through all available information to look for patterns, to look at what had been omitted by official sources etc etc. Jeff's findings may surprise you, as he puts these historic events into context, and explains how we, as humans, uniquely experience events, and then (also uniquely) express those events in differing ways too. As he says, "Stories is all we have." We couldn't squeeze all this information into the time I'm allotted on the Spreaker platform, but don't fret, we are planning a follow-up episode soon! We are, as Jeff tells us, not really any wiser now, in 2022, than we were back in 1947, despite having all these extra facts and figures at our disposal now. All we know for sure is that some people, much higher numbers than you might imagine, DID experience something very, very strange, something we STILL can't explain away as mere delusions, hoaxes, mis-identifications etc. As Donald E. Keyhoe said, "Flying Saucers are real!" We just can't explain it with our present knowledge. Enjoy!
An episode where I read a short essay I wrote in 2019. It's about Donovan, creativity, and a sense of place. Anyone who loves Donovan's music and Cornwall should enjoy it, but it also digs deep into the nature of creativity, and how landscape can affect art. Oh, just listen to it, it will all make sense!
Guy Fawkes Night/ Bonfire Night/ November 5th/ Gunpowder Treason and Plot/ Remember. Remember the 5th of November/
We visit a cemetery in south central Illinois, well-known for inexplicable events. They seem to have just about every paranormal event happening around here, there are many documented ghost and UFO sightings, sinister robed men in the woods, dislocations, there were cattle mutilations in the same area back in 1977, there's an abundance of bigfoot activity, there are light anomalies too, oh, and even black panthers. Enjoy, but don't turn the light out.
How a chance encounter with a beautiful, historic mansion led to us meeting the owners, and being invited to investigate its history and hauntings!
This episode begins by offering a few ideas as to how and why our railway networks may be haunted. There are several real-life experiences, from railway workers and enthusiasts too, all are taken from an excellent book by Barry Herbert, entitled, 'A Stranger in the Fog' I highly recommend his railway ghost books, there are quite a few available, you can find them all online. The stories include a few time-slip scenarios, ghost trains traveling on disused lines, and the ghost of a railway worker who committed suicide not long after WW2. I'm sure you will find the episode entertaining, and it will make you think next time you're sat in a train at a railway station looking out the window at another train passing-by. Is it really passing by? Are you the only person seeing it? Have trains got souls? You might find that preposterous, but these stories will make you think more deeply about the reality we live in. Enjoy!
This episode is an initial look at an intriguing Cornish mystery, dating back to 1938, but it's now a part of Cornish folklore, alongside the older lore of merry maids, Spriggans, piskies, owlmen and giants. This mystery is about the untimely, suspicious death of an upper-class English lady, and it has Aleister Crowley centre-stage as the major suspect, the self-styled beast himself, plus espionage, blackmail, orgies, black masses, and satanic rituals on Cornish hills and at ancient stone circle sites. This episode is just a primer as it's a complicated, controversial mystery, there's only so much I could squeeze into this short episode, but trust me, it gets more interesting the deeper you get into it! I will be going deeper, with a great guest, in later episodes of Cuckoo Town, so stay tuned!