All-Colors, Sam

Once upon a time, on the Isle of Wight...

Sandown is most likely not a place you’ve heard of.

It’s a small city with a long history. Situated on the eastern coast of the picturesque Isle of Wight, the earliest evidence of human habitation can be traced to a salt mine operated by Roman settlers. Of the indigenous Celts of the area, very little is known. For most of its existence, however, Sandown was more of a military installation than it was a proper town; the English monarchs feared that the natural beaches that lined the bay would make the location an ideal spot for invaders from the continent to land upon, and built a number of castles, forts, and other such fortifications in the area that are now mostly ruins. This proved to be a prescient move, as when the French made the mistake of invading the Isle of Wight in 1545, they chose the beaches near Sandown as one of their points of entry. They didn’t make it very far.

It wouldn’t be until the final years of the eighteenth century that civilians would move to the area, when wealthy Londoners would begin to lease seaside cottages during their holidays to the country. The introduction of the railroad to the Isle of Wight would make the once remote corner of the island increasingly accessible to the outside world. By the end of the century, what had once been little more than a glorified military outpost had became a small but thriving resort destination for the burgeoning English middle class. The beaches, it seems, were as ideal a spot to lounge on a sunny day as they were for foreign invaders to storm. Today, it still hosts throngs of tourists who flock to see the idyllic beaches, ruined castles and forts, and presumably the National Poo Museum. Quaint and classy, I know.

Famous visitors and residents include Lewis Carrol of Alice in Wonderland fame, Mary Ann Evans, better known by her nom de plume, George Eliot, German composer Richard Strauss, and even Kaiser Fredrick III and his family (though, during his stay, he was only then Crown Prince of Prussia). Charles Darwin began work on a little piece while visiting the area that would eventually become On the Origin of Species. So enamored with the area was he that he would soon relocate his family to the nearby town of Shanklin.

But of all of the many visitors and residents that have passed through Sandown during it’s relatively brief existence, there is none more intriguing than one enigmatic character only identified as Sam. So far as anyone knows, this mysterious figure only ever visited the town once. In fact, it would be disingenuous to not pause and issue a disclaimer that there is a very possible chance that Sam never visited the seaside resort town at all, on account of not being real. As it is, the only testimony that Sam was ever present in Sandown or exists at all, comes from two children. And one of them isn’t even named.

The story of All-Colors Sam was first reported in the January/February 1978 issue of the bi-monthly publication, The Bufora Journal, operated and published by the British UFO Research Association (abbreviated to Bufora). In this issue, the account was given in a piece called Ghost or Spaceman ‘73?, penned by a resident contributor named Norman Oliver.

The year is 1973. The month is May. The time, four o’clock. A seven year old girl identified only as Fay was on holiday with her family, staying in accommodations not far from Lake Common. Now, you may think this means that young Fay and her folks were shacked up in a quaint little lakeside bungalow outside of town. In some retellings of this story, this is how it’s pitched. However, a quick check of a map of Sandown reveals that there is no Lake Common. There is, however, a Lake Common Road at the northern edge of town.

And for some reason, when you click on the marker, it gives you a picture of this fellow.

Hello?

Puzzling.

As you can see, the Isle of Wight airport - an important location in our tale - is so close to Lake Common Road, I have to assume that the family was not, indeed, at an actual lake, but staying in lodgings on this street. Yet, as I said, that’s not always how the story is reported when told by third-parties. Keep that in mind going forward.

Now, on this fortuitous spring day, Fay was playing with an unnamed acquaintance on what I presume must have been the open space behind Lake Common Road. Given the boy is unnamed, I’m also going to assume that he was just some kid she had just met and decided was now her best friend, as small children are often wont to do. For ease of storytelling, he shall be referred to as Bobby going forward. As the two youngsters played and no doubt frolicked and rollicked through the grass, their afternoon fun was abruptly interrupted by the sudden sound of what was described as a weird wailing sound, likened to the siren of an ambulance. Now, if I heard a weird wailing sound, especially in 1973, I’d probably haul ass towards the nearest fallout shelter and start praying, but, being young, innocent, and most likely uninformed on the considerable dangers of being outside in an open field when a nuclear warhead detonates, Fay and her friend were more curious than frightened. They set off to find the source of the noise, trekking across the nearby golf course towards the small and poorly trafficked Isle of Wight airport (both of which can still be seen on the map above), where they suspected the sound might be coming from. As they made their way to the airport, they crossed through what is described as a swampy meadow adjacent to the facility. The sound came to a stop as they entered the meadow, but, determined to find the source of the strange noise, the two children pressed on.

Here’s a graphic provided by www.curiousarchive.com from their article on the incident, which also further convinces me that anyone who says Lake Common is an actual lake did not do their research.

While moving through the swampy meadow - which I presume must have been more well-forested at the time - the two crossed a small wooden footbridge that spanned a narrow brook. As they did, they spied a hand clad in a blue glove emerge from beneath the bridge. A hand with three fingers. Out from under the bridge clambered a bizarre and colorful figure. According to the testimony, it was carrying a book, which it promptly dropped into the water and struggled awkwardly to pick up again. Once the soaked and ruined book was acquired, the children watched the thing - whether it acknowledged them or not is unstated - go over towards a metallic hut, which is described as being similar to those used on building sites, but with no windows.

A sketch of the hut provided by the Bufora Journal, artist unknown.

It didn’t walk, but rather moved with an odd, hopping gait with its knees raised high. A gay little prance is how a friend of mine described it when I told him this story, which, for reasons that will become apparent, brought to my mind the mental image of a voguing clown.

Now, if I had been Fay or Bobby, this would have been the end of the story, because there would have been next to no chance I would have stuck around after witnessing a strange and colorful mystery man popping and locking out from under the bridge and into a windowless metal shack with a wet book in hand. Instead, it appears that the two children must have exchanged glances with one another, shrugged, and continued on their merry way rather than do the sensible thing and turn around. One must wonder if they were filled with childish courage, simple apathy, or if they were just plain not too bright.

The children are said to have wandered off about fifty yards away when the bizarre being reappeared. Again, whether the children saw him emerge from the metal hut or if he simply just popped up is not elaborated on. This time, rather than a book, the being was carrying what the children thought was a black knobbed microphone with a white cable attached. In some retellings of the story, it’s said that the being raised the microphone to its face, or sometimes its stomach, but in the Bufora Journal article, it simply says that the wailing sound immediately returned. The children had got their wish - they found the source of the sound. And, up close, it was loud. The fear that they should have both felt had now pounced upon Bobby and, rightfully terror stricken, he began to flee. Fay, it seems, followed him, but for reasons that will become apparent, it’s reasonable to assume that she was the more adventurous of the two and was not scared shitless by this. She did appear to follow Bobby, as the article goes on to say that the children were a distance away when the sound stopped and they both heard a voice that sounded as if it was coming from someone standing right beside them.

Hello? Are you still there?

What the voice sounded like is, again, woefully unexplained, but the tone was apparently friendly enough that the pair of children decided that it was a good idea to go back and see if the ‘person’ was as nice as they sounded. In another, less domesticated time, natural selection would have picked these kids out of the gene pool a long before they ever got to Sandown, I think.

It is at this point that the entity is described. I’ll allow Oliver’s own writing to do the heavy-lifting, here.

He was nearly seven feet tall and had no neck - for his head appeared to be wedged straight onto his shoulders. He wore a yellow, pointed hat, which interlocked with the red collar of a green tunic. A round, black knob was affixed to the top of his hat and 'wooden' antennae were attached either side. The face had triangular markings for eyes, a brown square of a nose and motionless yellow lips. Other round markings were on his paper-white cheeks and a fringe of red hair fell onto his forehead. 'Wooden slats' protruded from his sleeves and from below his white trousers.

Oh, and, later in the article, it’s said that he was barefoot and had three toes on each foot.

A sketch of Sam, presented on the front of the Bufora Journal issue the story was published in.

Now you might see why, when envisioning the sight of this entity, I imagined a clown. It’s why this case is commonly cited as Sam the Sandown Clown, though the word clown is notably absent from the entirety of the article. Still… a fringe of red hair. A white face. A yellow, pointed hat and round markings on the cheeks. Sounds a lot like a clown, right? Now, long-time readers will know that I have a… difficult history with clowns. Especially as a child. One red rubber nose was enough to send me into hysterics.

Even this chick was too much for me. Not because she was a clown, actually, but because she’s Canadian.

We’re on better terms today, the red-noses and I, but, were I to see a clown or anyone even remotely clown-like emerge from beneath a bridge in the woods - as a child or an adult - one of the two of us would die that day¹.

This is all to say that, were I to have been in Fay’s mary-janes, I would have broken every sprinting record on the books running back to Sandown, and, seven years old or not, find a way onto the first boat leaving England and head for literally anywhere else. I mean it when I say I don’t know if I could imagine a more terrifying situation for seven-year old me than what I’ve just described, short of a scenario in which a knife-wielding clown jumped out of my closet.

Naturally, Fay and Bobby did not do this. Bobby was rightly terrified, but Fay, bless her heart, was not. She convinced him to stay as the clown-like figure produced a notebook and scribbled out a few random words. Even though this entity had just demonstrated the ability to speak, rather than just tell them what it had to say, it instead pointed to each word individually in the order it was meant to be read, leaving Fay to speak them aloud.

Hello and I am All Colors, Sam.

Not All Colors Sam, as so many third parties report: All Colors - comma - Sam. The comma raises several implications. None of them I like very much.

Since this was apparently a time before stranger danger was a thing, Bobby and Fay got a little closer to the mysterious Sam. They opened a dialogue. It turns out that the whole notebook bit must have been a show for funsies because he could speak. His speech was noted to be unclear, as if he were speaking without opening and moving his yellow lips - which he didn’t.

The exact contents of this conversation are unknown. We only have snippets. It’s stated that Sam asked the children about themselves. Presumably answering these questions, they asked him about himself, as well.

They asked why his clothes were ripped and tattered. Sam replied that he only had one set, so they were predictably a bit worn. Amateur mistake for any dimension-hopping anomaly, only bringing one pair of skivvies, but perhaps it was Sam’s first deployment to our material plane, or maybe he just didn’t think he’d be there for too long and found himself waylaid. Who’s to say.

His strange features and pale complexion puzzled the children, so they asked if he was a man.

He chuckled and replied plainly, No.

They asked if he was a ghost. Not exactly where my mind would have gone at first, but a valid question all the same. Sam gave the reply, Well, not really, but I am in an odd sort of way. Infuriatingly vague, isn’t it?

Naturally, the children asked, What are you then?

It is Sam’s reply to this simple question that cemented this story in my head ever since I read it. It was just two simple words.

You know.

He did not elaborate.

I cannot stress how deeply and intensely I hate that fucking answer. But we’ll come back to it. For now, let’s continue the story.

Sam would not elaborate on his most-likely preternatural disposition, but he would tell the children that he had no name, which is… strange, and makes one wonder how or what the word Sam is. A title, perhaps? A designation? A species? Maybe he was just messing with the kids. You know. For giggles.

We’ll continue to call him Sam, however.

He also told them that there were others like him, which also is not something I would want to hear if I was Fay or Bobby. On his notepad, he provided a rough sketch of one of his kind, which I assume must have just been a little self-portrait since the details of the sketch were not elaborated upon. He also said that he was afraid of humans. He was worried that they might hurt him, and if they did, he would be unable to fight back.

Which - yeah. That’s valid. If I saw someone like Sam, I’d probably launch into a hysterical, shrieking frenzy like a rabid baboon first and ask questions later, if at all.

After this little Q&A session, Sam invited the two children into his humble metal abode.

And, yeah - they went in.

As one does when invited into the dwellings of an unearthly, inhuman clown-ghost-spaceman.

The structure was two-tiered, with the first level being plenty tall for the seven-foot clown demon thing. It was covered in blue-green wallpaper and dials, furnished with simple wooden furniture and, strangely, an electric heater. The upper-floor was described only as having less space and the floor being metallic. He told the children that he subsisted on berries that he collected and water from the stream (after it was “cleaned”), and that he - or perhaps his people - had a “camp” on the mainland, though where exactly this camp was… or is… was not specified. When prompted to explain how he ate the berries when he didn’t even open his mouth to speak, Sam decided to show the kids exactly how he did it. After taking off his hat, which revealed a pair of round ears and brown hair atop his head.

Sam’s unique manner of eating is described thusly:

He placed the berry in his ear, thrust his head forward and caused the berry to disappear and reappear at one of his odd eyes: repeating the process, the berry traveled to his mouth. (A possible explanation could be that he was wearing some kind of protective mask and analyzing the berry to check it wasn't poisonous).

Sure. He put a berry in his ear and it was visible in his eye. Why not? Makes about as much sense as anything else in this story.

The children conversed with Sam in his little playhouse for another hour and a half before apparently remembering that they had to return to reality and leaving. And, I have to say - with all the astoundingly stupid decisions they made that day, they are extremely fortunate that Sam was of a kind disposition (so far as it appears…) and didn’t say, Leave? What do you mean, leave?

Whether he was disappointed his new friends had to go on their way or if he politely requested they leave him to go about his business by his lonesome, we can only imagine.

Fay and Bobby ran across the golf course, no doubt pissing off whoever might have been using it at the time, and excitedly told the very first man they met that they’d just talked with a ghost, which they seemed to be convinced Sam was. The man laughed at them, and then probably told them to get out of the way so he could tee off.

Three weeks later, in June, Fay told her father about the incident. Why she waited so long to spill it to him after she told literally the first person she met about it the day of is anyone’s guess. Personally, I like to think they were eating dinner one night and, most likely in an unprompted response to a mildly amusing anecdote, Fay randomly said, Oh, yeah. Reminds me of my buddy, Sam. He’s a ghost. He eats berries through his ear. No big deal.

Her father was, Oliver says, amazed by the level of details to Fay’s story. His response, however, was something along the lines of, Girl, ain’t no way that happened.

This did not make Fay very happy.

Perhaps intrigued by the sheer detail regaled to him in Fay’s story, or maybe prompted by an indignant Fay to do so, her father sought out Bobby to have him corroborate the story. It’s said he found Bobby easily enough, but that the boy was not easy to communicate with. With enough prodding, though, Bobby did admit that he, too, had seen Sam. Apparently, Fay took her father back to the site where Sam’s hut had been. Unsurprisingly, there was no sign that it had ever been there.

To conclude the article, Oliver posits a number of possibilities to explain away the bizarre encounter. First and foremost, he understandably gravitates towards the tried-and-true explanation of kids just making shit up; a little white lie spun by kids to keep themselves safe from a bottom-smacking for running around the woods past supper-time. He also suggests that it could be a classic case of folie à deux, or shared psychosis, a phenomenon in which two individuals share the same delusion, hallucination, or psychotic break. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility, dark and disturbing as it is, that the children experienced something traumatic with an adult male and the story of Sam is something of a fabrication made as a coping mechanism. Bobby does seem like a very impressionable, timorous little lad who the obviously more strong-willed Fay was pushing around the whole time. Perhaps she freaked him out so bad that he really did think he was seeing something, or ascribed something fantastic to a much more mundane happening. Maybe she just told him, If you don’t tell my dad this happened, I’m taking you back in the alley and beating your ass.

Oliver even states that it could have been a hoax played on the children. A common possibility brought forward by those who read the story of Sam is that the Sam was a run-of-the-mill prankster spooking some minors for a laugh, or perhaps someone with more nefarious intentions, luring minors into an abandoned shack where bad things might transpire away from leery onlookers. Yet, Oliver makes the rather compelling argument that if it was a hoax, a prank, or some sick freak attempting to do something untowards with children… well, that’s a lot of effort to put into a hoax. He even points out the distinct difficulty one would have to go through to appear to have three fingers and three toes on bare feet.

Fay’s father gave his own thoughts on the matter, which Oliver closes the account with.

I get the impression that Fay was somehow taken into a bubble of alien reality created by this strange personage… he told them that he had just made the hut. Also, Fay told me that while they were talking to this 'ghost', two workmen nearby was repairing a post. They paid no attention to the weird charade - as though they could not see it.

Fay’s father also felt more inclined to believe his daughter when he reflected upon his own strange, inexplicable encounter with odd lights in both the sky and the sea while on the Isle of Wight several years before his daughter’s. The details of his encounter are not pertinent to this story, but, if you’re curious, they can be found in the same article as the story of Sam as sort of a father-daughter double-feature. Ultimately, it seems as if Fay’s father believes that there was some connection between his experience and the bizarre entity his daughter would make contact with.

A sketch, presumably by Faye’s father, of what he saw one night while on the seaside cliffs of the Isle of Wight.

Let’s briefly throw out some other explanations that might help clear the air about Sam’s identity. We won’t actually get any answers, but, hey - it’s fun to speculate.

Sam was an alien. Simple, straight-forward, and ties in with the experiences of Fay’s father, who had a much more standard UFO encounter not far from where Sam met his daughter. Rather uncreative and pedestrian, though.

Sam was a ghost or a spirit of some kind. I mean, he did say that he was a ghost, but in an odd sort of way. There really is nothing else in the provided details that align much with conventional encounters with the shades of the dearly departed, which, in my opinion, makes this possibility the most unlikely of all of them. Yet, ghosts are not the only intangible and often unseen incorporeal intelligences that drift in and out of our reality. This brings us neatly to…

Sam was a fairy. This one is my favorite. And probably the most controversial.

Whenever any of my friends or family make the mistake of humoring me with a discussion of the strange and preternatural, they usually expect me to bring up fairies at some point. Because I always do. The exchange usually goes something like this.

I get the same kind of Scully Skepticism from my peers whenever I mention vampires, werewolves, wendigos, sasquatch, aliens, etc.

It will never not be funny to me that so many people are willing to believe in ghosts, demons, bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and even that there are intelligent beings from beyond our world that traveled across the vastness of the cosmos to our planet and, for some reason, have a unique fascination with our species… but fairies? Oh, now that’s just absurd. Impossible, even. It’s much more realistic that little green assholes from Zeta Reticuli hopped in a space-bending, gravity-defying silver saucer and zipped across the known universe to dole out ad hoc colonoscopies to random people because, ah… er… it is, I guess.

To be fair, I do see the logic. The concept of real, flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials seem more realistic to most folks. We live in a secular and materialistic age where the nebulous concept of science can be used to empirically explain away all the intangible phantoms, specters, and bugaboos that once plagued our “superstitious” and “unenlightened” predecessors. It is easier- and more comfortable - for many to accept the possibility of a hyper-advanced, intelligent species on another planet than the idea than it is to admit that we may share our own with beings, entities, and intelligences beyond the scope of our understanding. Beings that may not be outwardly hostile or malicious, but… well, our best interests and their own doubtfully overlap much.

It doesn’t help that Disney and others in the entertainment industry have put in a lot of leg-work rehabilitating the image of the fair folk. It’s part of the reason I’m so notoriously weird for bringing them up as an explanation for most paranormal phenomenon, because pretty much everyone normal who hasn’t read way too many books on the occult and the paranormal imagine fairies to be… y’know.

Like this.

The reality is far, far different. The same kind of misconceptions can be said of the genie and djinn, which…

Just you wait until I get around to publishing my thesis on the connection between the djinn and fairies.

You know what? Not now.

Suffice to say, just as the blue-skinned, singing, dancing, friendly, voiced-by-Robin Williams idea of a genie is far removed from historic and even current² Islamic religious beliefs in the djinn, the fair folk, too, are deeply misunderstood in modernity and completely divorced from their cultural and spiritual roots. The prototypical friendly, diminutive pixie is a relatively recent invention that really took identifiable shape during the Victorian era - traditional lore surrounding the fair folk is much more complex, bizarre, and often sinister than most popular modern interpretations of them, and the fae themselves historically took on a plethora of different appearances beyond the typical little person with wings or David the Gnome.

But that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Like the djinn in for many who subscribe to Islam today, for many European peoples throughout history, fairies or fairy-like entities were very real and very active forces in their world. Though I’m sure pockets of believers in the old superstitions remain, this is not so in the wider secular West. A spaceman in a spaceship (assuming they are physical beings) can be quantified. Their crafts can crash and the bodies exhumed to be squirreled away to some underground military installation in the desert. It’s tangible.

A fairy? Now, that’s a much more finicky thing and much more poorly understood. They’re more spiritual than they are physical. And don’t you know? Titans of Reddit Science like Richard Dawkins and Le Epic Space Dude and the heckin’ Science Guy³ came out and epically PWNED those dumb magic things with KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC, so, clearly, they never existed and, on the off-chance they did, they certainly would suffocate, wither, and disappear in a puff of nonsense in the face of inarguable reason from a more enlightened age.

But just because we decided they didn’t exist anymore… does that mean they decided to go away?

“Ay, girl, holla at cha boy. Stop sittin’ on toadstools lookin’ all melancholy n’ shit n’ hang with the amphibians.”

If you couldn’t tell, it’s a topic that both fascinates and perturbs me endlessly. And, look - I’m not really saying fairies exist. Obviously, I have no evidence to make that claim. But I’m not saying they don’t, either.

Everything about the story of Sam smacks of classic fairy lore. Unsupervised children wandering through the woods. A bizarre entity that straddles the line between whimsically quirky and upsettingly strange, if not suspiciously sinister. A general sense of alien logic. Frankly, if Fay⁴ was being truthful about the encounter, she and her friend are fortunate that they reemerged in their own time, and didn’t get Rip van Winkle’d several years into the future, as is so common in stories of people stepping through the vail and into the world of the fair folk. Perhaps it’s more fortunate that Sam never offered her anything to eat - in the stories of old, that seems to be the quickest way to ensure that one never leaves the Fairyworld at all.

What was it that Persephone did that trapped her in the Underworld with Hades, again?

Oh, and, of course, I would be remiss to not throw out the possibility that Sam was a demon. This is an answer I believe many would default to, for reasons I probably don’t need to elaborate much on. Clowns have long been associated with malicious trickster entities of a possible demonic persuasion. Some are convinced that they have their roots in demons outright. We could also spend hours hand-wringing whether or not phenomenon ascribed to fairies and aliens is of demonic nature. The more research one does on these topics, the more they all seem to overlap, raising the question of whether or not it’s all the same phenomenon going by different names for different audiences in different eras. That discussion is something we’ll need to shelve for another time, though.

This brings us to the final possibility: Sam was bullshit. A hallucination. A prankster. A story made up by a bored kid to troll her father. It could be a story made up by Fay’s father to either make his own encounter more interesting. He could have just been taking the piss out of Norman Oliver just to be an ass. Hell, we don’t even have verifiable proof that Fay or her father themselves ever existed any more than Sam - in the article, Oliver says that Fay’s father only allowed him to publish the story under the condition of anonymity. How do we know that the story wasn’t just something Oliver cooked up to pad out another issue of the Bufora Journal on a slow month?

As much as my inner-Fox Mulder wants to believe, these are all possibilities that can’t be discounted, regardless of how mundane they might be. Personally, as disappointing as it would be to discover this is the case, I’d also be relieved to know that nothing like Sam actually was encountered because damn, this story is creepy.

As I said, one of the most chilling facets of this story, and the one that I continue to come back to, is Sam’s reply when asked, What are you then?

You know.

It isn’t just cryptic, but it’s very easy to read it as… sinister. The entire article is frustrating. For as detailed as it is, there are a lot of details that are absent and would clear up a lot of vagueries surrounding the nature of Sam - especially when it comes to this uncomfortable reply.

When Sam said, You know, I have to wonder what tone it was delivered in. The tone in which is was spoken changes the meaning entirely. Was it a simple, dismissive, shrug-and-a-wave, Oh, you know, like he was quickly trying to change the subject? Or was it a much more deliberate, knowing, and odious, You know.

Personally, I read it as the latter. And I find the implications of it profoundly unsettling.

But, ultimately, we’ll never know the truth of what Sam was. We’ll never know if there’s even any truth to the story, and if it wasn’t just a tall-tale spun by an imaginative little girl or a UFO enthusiast. The story of Sam’s brief visit to the Isle of Wight was never widely published. There was no news coverage. No media frenzy. There were no repeated sightings of Sam, and no other witnesses besides Fay and her friend, both of whom have never been identified and never come forward. All we have is the second-hand account provided to her anonymous father.

The story was and still mostly is obscure, though it has begun to make rounds within the ever-growing circles of paranormal aficionados and laymen alike over the years. There is no discussion of the story I can find that predates 2020, when the account began to slowly make rounds on various cryptid and paranormal-centric podcasts and YouTube channels. Personally, I was introduced to the story through the Cyrptonaut Podcast.

In the process, the Sandown Clown has garnered something of a cult following in certain places. One of the more interesting knock-on effects of the story resurfacing and being retold dozens upon dozens of times is that certain new details surrounding the tale seem to crop up with every new mouth that repeats it. These discrepancies and deviations from the narrative as it was provided in the Bufora Journal range from innocuous and probably thoughtless mistakes like Lake Common being described as a lake rather than a road (even though this little detail could be cleared up with, and I cannot stress this enough, just looking at Sandown on Google Maps) to much more… questionable embellishments. As recently as last year, the aforementioned Cryptonaut Podcast received a fan-mail submission by a listener who claims to have encountered Sam.

Achoo.

Look, I’m willing to humor a lot of crazy stories but this one just doesn’t pass the smell test.

There really is no need for these discrepancies; the account of Sam in it’s entirety can read here in the Bufora Journal archives for a total sum of free. There really is no excuse for making mistakes in retelling the story aside from laziness, especially when the story takes all of ten whole minutes (at most) to read in full.

But this gradual shift of a narrative so simple and straightforward as it gains and loses details not present in the original and only sighting of the being with even the single faintest glimmer of credibility speaks to the unreliable quality of many paranormal reports, and how rapidly it increases; unless you read it or hear it from a first-hand witness, the likelihood you’re getting the story in its most pure state is doubtful⁵.

Perhaps that strange, intangible element of mystery and the maddening vagueness of it all is exactly why I find myself returning to the story of Sam when discussing the paranormal, these days.

Do I believe that there really was an All Colors, Sam that visited the Isle of Wight and had a brief, pleasant chat with two English children? Not really. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but a single second-hand testimony of a child does not a solid case make.

But I have to admit - it does make for a damn good ghost story. Or, perhaps it’s a fairy tale for the secular age.

Maybe it all depends on who’s looking.

1. I’d either die of fright or I’d kill them in a frenzy of animal panic.

2. Many practicing Muslims very much still believe in the djinn.

3. I do think Dawkins is more respectable than the other two chuckleheads mentioned, but you have to admit the “I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE” crowd really only ever cite these three pop-science when they discuss… well, pretty much anything.

4. By the way… what a curious and possibly deliberate choice of name for a pseudonym.

5. Rest assured that I, being the reputable, honorable, and trustworthy ape that I am, only took what details were present from the Bufora Journal article… but not everyone has my obsessive attention to detail. Or integrity.