The Owlman of Mawnan: The Melling Sisters' Sighting

St Mawnan and St Stephen's Church stands among the woods near Mawnan Smith and Falmouth, in Cornwall. Its main structure dates from the 13th century. In 1976 this coast already had a monster. Morgawr, the Falmouth Bay sea serpent. Among those promoting it was Tony "Doc" Shiels, an artist, magician and showman.

Easter Saturday, 17 April 1976. June Melling, aged 12, and her sister Vicky, aged 9, were on holiday with their family. They were playing among the gravestones when they heard a strange sound. A large winged creature was hovering a few feet above the church tower. One fuller account describes a large man covered in dark grey and black feathers, with two large wings, no noticeable facial features or hands, and long feet with large talon-like claws.

The girls were so frightened that their father, Don Melling, cut the holiday short. Don had not seen the creature himself. One account says he would not let Shiels interview his daughters. But he gave Shiels June's drawing.

3 July 1976. Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, both 14, were camping in the woods by the church. They heard hissing. Both girls made drawings. Sally described what they saw:

"It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first I thought it was someone dressed up, playing a joke, trying to scare us. I laughed at it, we both did, then it went up into the air and we both screamed. When it went up you could see its feet were like pincers."

By late 1976 Shiels had given the creature a name, Owlman. On 2 August 1978 three young French students reported "a very big furry bird, with a gaping mouth and red round eyes." In the 1990s Jonathan Downes of the Centre for Fortean Zoology reopened the case and wrote The Owlman and Others. A man he found said he had seen it in 1989. Nearly five feet tall, with eyes that "definitely glowed."

No official investigation is on record. Between 1976 and 1978 the investigating was done privately, by Shiels. In November 2001 Gareth Medway made the case against him in "Monstrous Tales," in Magonia. Owlman, he wrote, "showed himself only to adolescent girls on holiday, who afterwards would chance to meet Doc Shiels, tell him their stories, and never be seen again."

The Melling sketch, Medway noted, was described as "by June Melling" or "based on the sketch by June Melling," "which is not the same thing." He called the drawings "remarkably excellent draughtsmanship for a pre-teenager." The Chapman and Perry captions differed in "alterable habits" but were "remarkably similar in their unalterable ones." Shiels' own record did not help. In 1976 his Morgawr monster-raising had used "three naked Witches."

Joe Nickell noted that "church towers are common nesting places for barn owls." Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe and Karl Shuker proposed a Eurasian eagle-owl, and Shuker cites wingspans of "nearly 7ft." An escaped great grey owl has been suggested too, though decades of sightings rule out a single animal. Some blame teenage pranks.

Shiels died on 11 July 2024. The Owlman outlived him, in Animal Planet's Lost Tapes, in The Secret Saturdays, on stage in Carl Grose's Horse Piss for Blood and as Moloch in the 2013 film Lord of Tears. Its American cousin is Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. No photograph of the Owlman exists. Only drawings, and an old church tower in the Cornish woods.