The Brentford Griffin (1984-1985)

The Griffin pub hung its sign in the town. Brentford FC played at Griffin Park on Braemar Road. The Griffin Brewery stood in nearby Chiswick, and two griffins sat on the Brentford & Chiswick coat of arms.

Schoolchildren told how Charles II gave Nell Gwyn a griffin. It fell into the River Brent and survived on Brentford Eyot, the island in the Thames. Joseph Banks was said to have brought another from the Pacific. A letter to Fortean Times in May 1998 recalled the legend being told at St John's School in the 1950s.

Summer 1984. Kevin Chippendale was walking along Braemar Road when something caught the eye, flying near the Green Dragon apartment building. It resembled a dog with wings. A long muzzle or beak. Four legs, with what looked like paws.

February 1985. Chippendale saw it again. This time the resemblance was unmistakable: the creature looked like the one painted on the sign of the Griffin Public House.

Then Angela Keyhoe, a colleague or friend of Chippendale depending on the account, looked out from a bus. A big, black, bird-like creature sat perched on top of the gasometer next to the Watermans Arts Centre. A giant black bird. Other passengers saw it too. One morning John Olssen, described as a psychologist, saw the creature while jogging near the Thames.

Andrew Collins at first doubted Chippendale. After interviewing the witnesses, Collins came to believe some of the reports. In 1985 Earthquest Books published The Brentford Griffin: The Truth Behind the Tales, a staple-bound booklet dedicated to Mothman Prophecies author John Keel. Collins later wrote in Fortean Times: "The information and data used in the text was obtained directly from the people concerned and everything was carefully checked before publication."

Reports kept arriving at the local newspaper office. LWT's The Six O'Clock Show sent Danny Baker hotfoot down to Brentford to investigate. In the 1990s the folklorist Ade Dimmick visited the town ten times and heard locals describe earlier sightings.

Robert Rankin, the Brentford novelist, attached himself to the griffin and its publicity in spring 1985. Rankin wrote and performed a play, The Golden Griffin, at a local school. The sightings coincided with a UFO conference Rankin was organising, and Rankin is alleged to have been the first to tell the press. Years later came the admission: "I didn't think for a minute that there was a griffin on the island in Brentford, but I thought it was a fine idea and did my best to help it along." Rankin also claimed that once the cameras appeared, the media and locals made up sightings, and dismissed the booklet as almost entirely inaccurate.

Collins answered that Rankin had no problems with The Brentford Griffin at the time, and offered a "cosmic joker" reading: the local griffin archetype, reactivated. Yet the biography on Collins's own website now says all but one case was found to be hoaxes perpetuated by Rankin. It does not say which case survived. No source has ever proposed an ordinary bird or animal behind the reports.

Hoax or not, the griffin embedded itself into local legend. John Rimmer, editor of Magonia, returned to it in a 2003 lecture and again in a talk on 29 March 2018, tracing a hidden trail of links from Samuel Pepys to the local football team. No photograph, film or trace of the creature was ever produced. What remains is a dog with wings over Braemar Road, and a black shape on a gasometer seen from a passing bus.