A reported werewolf sighting in a south London graveyard has cryptozoology enthusiasts doing a double-take. According to a report by The Daily Star, the sighting eerily matches another one from eight years beforehand. The two close encounters seem to help legitimize each other.
Local researcher Andy McGrath told reporters that he developed a personal fascination with the “Werewolf of Camberwell.” When looking for more information on the alleged cryptid, he found the accounts from 1996 and 2004, which he said: “sound like something for fantasists and horror fans.” He explained the two sightings, highlighting their remarkable similarities.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“On October 9th, 1996, a man en route to see a friend, had decided to take a shortcut through Camberwell Old Cemetery to save time, when something prodigiously strong grabbed him by the arm and smashed him into the ground,” said 44-year-old McGrath. “He saw a large creature, with dark fur and a head like a German shepherd, looking at him intently, slobbering and growling and sniffing his body up and down, just as a dog would. Just as quickly as the attack started, it was over and the beast sprinted off on its hind legs.”
“Curiously, the witness believed that he was spared because he suffers from a disease that dogs can smell and thinks that probably because of this, the creature left him alone,” McGrath added. He then described the second encounter from 2004, which had two eye-witnesses.
“We heard a low growl,” one of those witnesses said. “Then a large tree in the corner of the cemetery was shaking incredibly hard as if something really powerful was shaking it with all its might. It was definitely not made by a person or an animal. The tree looked as if the roots were ready to be ripped out.”
“My friend and I took to our heels and ran as fast as we could in different directions,” they went on. “We could not rationalize the sheer terror we both felt. We knew we had to get as far away from the cemetery as we possibly could. There is something very sinister there.”
McGrath said that he actually considered himself a skeptic before digging up these two accounts. However, the apparent corroboration of the stories has him taking the urban legend more seriously. He said: “If a creature is described as being animal-like, then it probably is an animal and not uncommonly, a known animal; even if the qualities it portrays seem superficially supernatural, at the time. Modern-day sightings of the dogman, or as it has been traditionally known throughout European history, the Werewolf; are the type that I would have laughed off a few years ago… This is because the likelihood of an upright, bipedal, Wolf-Man had seemed biologically implausible to me. Nothing more than a fanciful faerie tale, to scare medieval kids straight and keep them out of the woods.”
“After researching this phenomenon for many years, I have become fascinated by the sheer volume of eyewitnesses who claim to have encountered this, Bipedal, wolf-like creature, in our modern era. Something which defies rational explanation as much today as in those formative fabled days of myth and legend,” he concluded.
