The Beast of Brassknocker Hill, Bath, 1979

Brassknocker Hill is a steep road. About 9 percent, up to 16 percent in places. It climbs from Monkton Combe and the Brassknocker Basin on the Kennet & Avon canal to Combe Down and Claverton Down, roughly 4 km south-east of Bath. In 1979 it lay in the county of Avon.

July 1979. Ron and Betty Harper, local residents, found their old oak stripped of bark. Large gouge marks scored the trunk. By 1 August, more than 50 trees had been stripped. The bite marks were reportedly from teeth at least twenty times larger than the squirrels that usually lived there. Birds and small wildlife were said to have left. Residents said their pets were terrified.

Later that August, a motorist was driving at night on a road through Monkton Combe. The animal was about four feet long. Bear-like. It had huge teeth and two striking, circular white rings around its eyes. For a moment it stood up on thick, substantial hind legs. The driver asked to stay anonymous.

Other accounts drew a different shape. A long-fanged, four foot tall creature resembling a baboon, chimpanzee, spider-monkey, gibbon or lemur. A taxi driver saw a chimpanzee on the pavement. It fled before police arrived. Frank Green, 81, kept a shotgun watch on Brassknocker Hill by day and by night. The watch turned up nothing. "I am very fond of some animals, but I reckon this creature could be dangerous and I am taking no chances."

September 1979. The story crossed the North Sea. Het Binnenhof, a Dutch newspaper from the west of the Netherlands, ran it as the Beast of Bath. Years later the Bath Record Office would remark that the Dutch were more concerned than Bath.

Summer 1980. Inspector Michael Price saw what appeared to be a large chimpanzee. "We were sure this mystery creature would turn out to be a monkey of some sort … After all, men from Mars aren't hairy, are they?" Probably a monkey became the working assumption. There was no formal investigation. Nothing was caught.

Around 1981 and 1982, new reports spoke of a stag, a polecat or a "Japanese deer". Then, in summer 1984, Bath Chronicle reporter Roger Green and photographer Colin Shepherd went looking. "The reports were pretty credible, so we were convinced that there was something there." After several minutes of stalking, they found the beast calmly grazing in a field. "It was an Alpaca, a type of llama, and had escaped from a paddock." It had been holding up traffic. Police returned it to its owner.

The alpaca closed one chapter, not the whole book. As Nick Redfern points out, a grazing alpaca cannot account for the primate-like figures of 1979, or for the stripped trees. The escaped primate theory favoured by police in 1980 was never confirmed. A Bath Chronicle retrospective on 9 September 2002 reportedly called the 1979 "large chimpanzee" mystery never resolved. No source has ever alleged a hoax.

Much of what survives traces back to that 2002 retrospective and to Jon Downes of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, both cited by Redfern in 2008. Rob Morphy retold the case at Cryptopia in 2010, and it now sits beside the Ninesprings Monkey of Yeovil among Britain's man-beast stories. No photograph of the creature is known.