Here Cerberus, good boy!
Wessex, England - It was the overnight appearance of a crop circle that brought a BBC camera crew to this area west of London on December 28th. BBC cameraman Dwayne Tymane was setting up his equipment when he heard noise coming from the other side of a hedgerow.
"I heard a yowl and then the sounds of an animal running through the stalks. I thought at first that it was a dog, coming toward us from the corn field (the English use the term corn for any cereal grain crop) but as it got within a 100 yards of us it stopped again and made such a horrible noise. It wasn't like anything I had ever heard."
Reporter Anne Taylor also heard the animal's progress toward them and was the first to see it.
"I got a little scared as it got closer toward us because I had seen a rabid dog before and that's what I thought this one was. I got up on the van's bonnet when it howled again and looked over the bushes to catch a glimpse of it. That's when I saw that the animal was once again moving toward us. I yelled for Dwayne to get away from the field before he got bit."
Instead Dwayne took his camera off the tripod mount, turned it on, and jumped across the hedge. At the movement of the man, the animal quickly turned away from the van and moved off at an angle back toward the higher grain.
"I tried to catch sight of him with the camera but he moved very quickly away from me," said Dwayne. "As I jumped over the hedge I must have hit the shut down tab since the camera powered down and I only got a few seconds of him on tape. The animal was gone by the time I got the camera turned back on"
BBC cameraman Dwayne Tymane
|
Both Taylor and her cameraman heard the animal howl several times more as they were filming the crop circle for a report. They later went to a pub in Hambledon where one of the locals told them they had seen the "Devil Dog of Wessex." Taylor wished to interview the man for a possible story on the beast but was told no by him and several other men in the bar.
"They all hushed up when we told them we were with the BBC," said Taylor. Later as we were leaving I saw the local plot (cemetery) and there was a large statue of a dog on the top of the gate wall.
Neither Anne nor her cameraman are quite sure what they saw and filmed.
"It wasn't a normal dog," said Dwayne. "I've watched what I taped several times and you can tell it doesn't have hair and the skin is rough like it's been burned. I think maybe that it's a dog that's been tortured by one of the locals. Probably the same one who's stomping circles in the corn outside town. That's why no one wanted to talk about it. Probably the councilman's son is hurting animals and they don't want him thrown in the asylum."
Anne remains more unsure. "I think Dwayne is on the right path with the idea that the dog has been tortured but what I don't understand is why there is a dog statue in the cemetary. Is it just coincidence?"
sources
phone interview with Anne Taylor and Dwayne Tymane, January 3rd, 2000
quicktime film courtesy of BBC2
