The Man-Monkey of Bridge 39

Norbury lies in Staffordshire, near the Shropshire border. West of Woodseaves, the A519 Newport Road crosses a deep canal cutting at Grub Street. The crossing is Bridge 39 of the Shropshire Union main line. Its proper name is High Bridge, and it is Grade II listed.

Thomas Telford built it in 1832 and 1833 for the Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal Company. Above the main arch sits a second, strainer arch, added to brace the walls of the cutting. Locals called it the Big Bridge. The folklorist Charlotte Sophia Burne later wrote that the cutting was "always regarded as rather an uncanny place at night".

January 1879. A labouring man was employed to take a cart of luggage from Ranton in Staffordshire to Woodcock, beyond Newport in Shropshire. On the 21st, about 10 pm, he was late on his return journey. He came to the canal bridge. In Burne's words, "a strange black creature with great white eyes sprang out of the plantation by the roadside and alighted on his horse's back."

He tried to push it off with his whip. "The whip went through the thing, and he dropped it on the ground in fright." The poor tired horse broke into a canter and rushed onwards at full speed. The thing was still clinging to its back.

How he got rid of the intruder, he hardly knew. He arrived home in an extraordinary state of fright and agitation. The next day the whip was picked up just where he said he had dropped it.

The story travelled. A few days later the village policeman called on the man's master. He wanted information about someone being stopped and robbed on the Big Bridge. The rumour had become a crime report.

"It was the Man-Monkey as always does come again on the Big Bridge, ever since the man was drowned in the 'Cut.'" Burne's two versions differ on who said it. In the 1883 telling the policeman says it himself: "That was the Man-Monkey, sir." In 1896 they belong to "a local wiseacre". No official finding is recorded.

Burne set the story down in Shropshire Folk-Lore, built on Georgina F. Jackson's earlier collection. She introduced it as "a very weird story of an encounter with an animal ghost" that "arose of late years within my knowledge." She told it again in 1896, in the journal Folk-Lore. The witness was never named.

Three readings have followed. The oldest is the local one: the ghost of a drowned man, later described as a boatman. Another holds that a wild animal, loose from captivity, lived along the canal. The third belongs to Nick Redfern, who researched the case and later reports from 1986 to early 2001. His book Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot asks whether the creature is a British Bigfoot, something supernatural, or something else entirely.

The Man-Monkey did not stay in 1879. In the 1980s a boater saw "a huge black, hairy monkey" looking down from a bridge on the canal, but it was gone before the family could look properly. Redfern gathered later accounts of a giant "chimpanzee", "a large and hairy, upright bear" and a werewolf-like "Moon Beast". The Canal & River Trust still tells the tale of double arched Bridge 39. A black thing with white eyes, and a whip that went straight through it.