Weird of the north, rejoice!

Weird Weekend North returned to the Rixtonwith-Glazebrook Community Hall at the end of April 2024 rather than for its traditional first weekend: someone else had got in first! But as with all previous years, organiser Glen Vaudrey had curated a wide range of presentations about the weird and wonderful. Speakers were a mix of the new and the old, with Steve Jones, Richard Freeman, Glen and this author celebrating having presented at all seven events. As ever, Richard adopted his fez-tooned ‘Barry Tadcaster’ persona to introduce speakers with bizarre biographies.

Steve opened Saturday’s proceedings by highlighting the quirky, fortean side of human nature: death and dissension in the Leeds Dripping Riot of 1865. Eliza Stafford was cook to Henry Chorley, who lived in Park Square, Leeds. He accused her of disposing of two pounds of dripping to a local dressmaker, and pressed for her prosecution for theft. She admitted to disposing of the dripping, but claimed it was a perquisite of the job. She was found guilty and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. On the day of her release several thousand people gathered outside Armley Gaol, but she had already left for her daughter’s home in Scarborough. Frustrated, the mob marched to Chorley’s house. The ensuing riot resulted in broken windows at the house, and one man was trampled on and later died, with a number of men arrested for riotous conduct.

At WWN2023 Matteo Borrini wowed the audience with his stage magic (see FT432:14-15), but this year he returned in his professional guise as a forensic anthropologist. Provocatively, he began by stating “I believe in vampires.” His extraordinary presentation then described historical vampire lore and the post mortem changes that led to corpses being misidentified as members of the undead. This included his excavations of mass graves of plague victims in Venice, which revealed the remains of a female ‘vampire’ with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on plague victims. Responding to questions he outlined his work as a scientific consultant on human decay for the Vatican (see FT428:40-43).

Returning to Leeds, Anna Goodridge, Assistant Librarian at Leeds Library, described a ghostly episode in the building in 1884 in which a phantom looked round one of the bookcases, but it appeared its body was inside it. The Society for Psy