Green children, lethal crinolines and the bandicoot bandwagon

The current Fortean Times has an article by John Clark on the famous case of the Green Children of Woolpit. It begins:

They were green. There were other strange things about the two children, a boy and a girl, found by harvesters in the fields of the Suffolk village of Woolpit on a summer's day in the 12th century. But it was their green skin that people first noticed. There was much more to the story, but that's how it began.

He suggests that the children were Jewish and were either fleeing persecution elsewhere in East Anglia or had been separated from a group of travellers from abroad. This would explain several puzzling aspects of the case, including the children's green colouring.

This issue also revisits the subject of death by fire in women wearing crinolines, finding an example from as recently as 1938. The unfortunate woman was Phyllis Newcombe, who was engulfed in flames at a dance at Chelmsford. Her case is often seized upon as an example of spontaneous human combustion by believers in the phenomenon.

But I was most taken by the Great Bandicoot Panic of 1996. This was a initially a marketing stunt designed to get these small Australian marsupials into public consciousness before the launch of a new Playstation game called Crash Bandicoot.

Bandicoots, the campaign said, were invading Britain and were a serious pest to farmers and gardeners. And, sure enough, members of the public soon report sighting the beasts. The fact that what are called "bandicoots" are in reality several different species meant that anything from a mouse to a badger could be mistaken for the new menace.

So bandicoots were seen in the East and West Midlands, while the South Wales Daily Post reported three separate sightings in just three days. And:

During a rumination on the existence of the Rutland Tiger - a local Alien Big Cat - the Rutland Times appeared to accept the presence of the "Australian bandicoot" as a fact.

Then the game was launched, the Christmas silly season passed and, all at once, the bandicoots disappeared.

Incidentally, the Rutland Tiger may well have been left over from the sudden and botched closure of the safari park at Bonkers Hall. This followed an unfortunate incident involving a coachload of nuns. 

These were not, I must emphasise, the Sisters from Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes, who are more than a match for any tiger.