The man in the stovepipe hat

As promised yesterday, here’s the second strange but true story from the archives first published in July 2006 and now redrafted with the original comments presented below it. I was inspired by correspondence over my encounter in the early 1990s with the phenomenon known as the ‘black stick man’ to write about a much earlier experience. If the story of the black stick man freaked you out and gave you bad dreams, as it well might for some, then don’t read this entry because it tells of an apparition that acted malevolently towards those who encountered it.

This is the story of when myself and others met the man in the stovepipe hat, another figure reported around the world. He’s dangerous and if you ever see him, run.

In the autumn of 1988 I was 21 and began studying for my A-level exams. I finished my A-level exams in 1990 and part of the summer that year was spent visiting a friend who had been a student in the year below me. She had successfully auditioned for the Manchester Youth Theatre and for six weeks was based on a campus site belonging to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). It was closed to its usual students but open in the summer for many young actors to use as a base while preparing to tour the show they were working on.

It was on that campus I met—or rather didn’t meet, but encountered—the man in the stovepipe hat.

This apparition was far scarier than the black stick man I saw several years later. I also saw the man in the stovepipe hat on more than one occasion, whereas the black stick man was a one-off. The first stovepipe hat man encounter was in broad daylight—I spent occasional weekends visiting my friend and staying over in her dorm room—and the supernatural figure was walking on a large area of waste ground near the campus: a vast undeveloped area of trees and dry, knotty clumps of grass. People walked their dogs there all the time, but there was little else in the way of human activity.

I remember seeing a very thin man, all too real and substantial but dressed like someone out of a production of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. He was all in black with white shirt cuffs visible and a white collar. He had a stovepipe hat on and a mean, bitter, vindictive expression on his face. His eyes glowed red, like hot coals. He had a huge black dog with him—I’m not up on dog species but I think it was a kind of bull mastiff—and the animal was equally malevolent. He kept it on a long lead and it wore a thick, leather collar. He was walking towards me and a couple of people I was with, and we ran off. We didn’t want him near us. That was instinctive and we were rattled by the encounter for some time afterward.

The same evening many of the MYT students and their guests, including myself, were in the bar on campus. It was basically a long shed some distance away from the accommodation, close to the waste ground. There was a pool table, one bar, some gaming machines. I was having a drink—I was not and did not get drunk—when someone burst through the door, someone I didn’t know but had seen around the place, shouting about lights in the sky. We all rushed outside. It was a warm, clear night and above us we saw several large lights, each of them rotating but arranged together in a rough oval. We saw nothing else so clearly but some of us, myself included, thought we could see something like a heat haze, a vague hint of connecting outline around and between the lights. It just hung there, apparently huge, above our heads. It made no noise.

The meteorological office was called and asked for an explanation of the lights in the sky. We had the benefit of our youth making us bold as brass but we were nevertheless surprised they didn’t laugh at us on the other end of the phone. Instead, they told us Prince was playing a gig in Manchester that night. The thing was, we could see the stadium lights from where we were and these other lights were nothing to do with Prince. The stadium lights were nowhere near as bright and much further away. The lights remained in the sky directly above us for approximately half an hour, then seemed to just fade away. All they left behind was a shared feeling of disturbance and disquiet.

That night, I was staying in my friend’s room. It was late, gone midnight, and we were chatting sleepily when we heard a woman scream. We discovered that two female MYT students who shared a room down the corridor had encountered a mystery man in their quarters. One young woman had awoken from sleep and was choking. Her roommate heard her having difficulties, switched the light on and saw, just for a second, a man dressed in black with a stovepipe hat on, leaning down over her friend’s bed and throttling her. His bony fingers were tight around her neck. He looked up, the woman not under attack saw his red eyes and he snarled like a rabid animal, then he just vanished right in front of her eyes. There one second, not there the next. The victim was able to breathe again and had not seen her attacker, had not been aware of him being present at all but she had woken in an obvious panic with a sense that someone was trying to do her in.

Word got round, more people got up to find out what was going on and not many slept again that night. Lots of large cups of coffee were drunk and speculation mounted as to what this creature was. Everyone agreed he was evil, given his behaviour as much as his mean appearance. And then, as if the violent encounter wasn’t enough, the anecdotal stories began.

Some people claimed that several suicides had taken place on the campus. I wasn’t particularly impressed by this being put forward. I remarked it wasn’t surprising if true, given that too many students take their own lives through drugs, drink, loneliness or mental health issues being exasperated by being away from home and under study pressure. Besides, there was no proof there and then of any suicides, and the person telling us this ‘fact’ couldn’t recall where it had come from. It felt like an overheated, hysterical response—the kind of thing kids conjure up from nowhere to scare themselves, and we didn’t need to be more scared than we already were.

When someone else said a person had once hung themselves on the waste ground, again I was cynical. How was this known, for starters—but what if something or someone was promoting anxiety and suffering in this location, and part of that encouragement was feeding fears and building rumours that had no foundation? I thought we had quite enough to deal with: an attempted strangulation by a ghostly apparition in the night, first seen in daylight. The victim of the ghostly strangulation attempt had bruises on both sides of her neck and found it hard to swallow.

We saw the man in the stovepipe hat one more time that summer, again in broad daylight, walking up the suburban street away from the waste ground. His dog was with him and when he saw myself and a group of friends near a public telephone box, he stopped walking and the dog did the same. One of our group was inside the kiosk, making a call. The man in the stovepipe hat threw his head back, laughed and then pointed a long bony finger at us before turning round, and heading back to the waste ground. What was the point of that, other than to cause upset and fear? The man in the stovepipe hat seemed to enjoy being very melodramatic.

We stood transfixed and watched him until he simply popped out of existence. Several people became convinced he was Satan. Even back then, before I had found my Pagan faith, I hadn’t much time for the concept of the Devil and I dismissed this as another example of hysteria taking hold and making things worse. Satan is the ultimate catch-all bogeyman. I did, however, believe—and still do—that the man in the stovepipe hat was a perverse, malicious entity out to do harm with a huge chip on its shoulder where humanity was concerned. He, it, hated and/or resented every single one of us without exception.

And that was that. We never saw him again and I never want to. I was never and still am not a fan of horror movies but in the early 1990s I was persuaded to watch The Poltergeist series of films, having been promised more scares than blood. They were pretty lame, which was okay by me, but when I first saw the character I think is known as ‘The Preacher’, I jumped and yelled in shock. There, on screen, more or less, was the man in the stovepipe hat. It wasn’t exactly like him—the hat wasn’t actually a stovepipe, for starters—but it was the actor’s gaunt face, hinting at perversity and cruelty, coupled with a hat, dark Amish- or Quaker-like clothes and fanatical religious air, that together made for a very close approximation to the entity we saw back on the UMIST campus.

The man in the stovepipe hat was more preacher in appearance than devil—the kind of preacher who spews hatred and venom from the pulpit.

Many years after that, the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured a villain not altogether dissimilar to the man in the stovepipe hat: a preacher, this time not quite so reminiscent because the actor wasn’t thin and skeletal but muscular and quite hunky. Still, the character’s clothes and behaviour brought the man in the stovepipe hat back to mind once again.

I’m an honest person and while I can’t explain the strange things I’ve occasionally seen down the years, I won’t write anything I consider to be untrue and I won’t give dates, times, places if I am unsure or can’t remember. As with the black stick man, I hope none of you ever see the man in the stovepipe hat. If you do, my advice would be to run as fast as you can—as I wrote at the start of this entry—because while I cannot say with conviction that the black stick man in London meant me any harm at all, I am absolutely certain the man in the stovepipe hat in Manchester likes to cause distress and inflict harm, real or psychological, upon any mortal he comes across.

For all I know, this supernatural entity may have caused people to hurt themselves or he may have done the hurting. He certainly tried to strangle the female student—I was there, saw the horror on her room-mate’s face, saw the bruises on her neck. I suppose some might argue the young woman could have self-harmed—but surely, strangling yourself isn’t easy and might even be impossible? You can then suppose that her room-mate was the strangler but, again, she wasn’t above the victim when the victim awoke, and was her friend. I’ve since found out that the man in the stovepipe hat has been seen around the UK and also across the US, and maybe other countries too, sometimes with a black dog and sometimes not. He’s often associated, though not always, with UFO sightings—yes, don’t forget, as if you could, that there’s a multiple-witness UFO sighting in this tale.

Stories of night-time attempts at strangulation by invisible forces are extremely common, often put down to waking nightmares and sleep paralysis, although there are those situations where a supernatural figure is reported as doing the deed, less easily explained away, as happened on the UMIST campus in the summer of 1990.

Me, I have no explanation to offer up for who or what the man in the stovepipe hat is. All I know is, there are things in this world that defy analysis, explanation and investigation. He is most definitely one of those things. I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t encountered him to believe or disbelieve. An open-minded approach is a good thing, though, and as any of my friends would testify, I am trustworthy and reliable.

Whatever you think, I hope you enjoyed the story. Blessed be.

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