Posted 21 August 2012 - 05:59 PM
I've actually seen the Horse Ripper! In the late 1980s, I used to live on a farm in the Scottish Borders, very near the town of Lauder. In the field right next to where I lived, there was a small herd of horses. They were rather pretty horses - Welsh mountain ponies, if you're interested - so it wasn't unusual for people to stop and look at them. For the purposes of this story, I should add that by far the prettiest of the ponies was a very rare pure white mare called Beauty. Anyway, there was this guy who kept coming back time and time again for another look. I never got a good look at him because he was always several hundred yards away, but he seemed to be middle-aged, and he definitely had a really huge pair of binoculars. There had been a number of incidents of horse mutilation in the area recently, which had been vaguely blamed on theoretical wiccans because nobody had a better idea, but I didn't think anything about this guy because it's the kind of area where obsessively looking at ponies through really big binoculars isn't that eccentric.
Anyway, after a while I moved on, and I was replaced in my rather unusual position as a guy who got a free caravan in return for various duties, mostly involving looking after the chickens, by somebody I knew fairly well. Just after I left, my replacement was awakened very late at night by some sort of commotion among the horses so severe that he felt obliged to take a look. I should add that by this point, Beauty had already been sold as a rich girl's pet. Unfortunately he didn't think to take a torch, so he never really saw the shadowy figure who, on being interrupted, pulled a knife and slashed his face open before fleeing. When the sun rose, it became apparent that this guy had been attempting to turn one of the brown ponies white with ordinary household emulsion. I have no idea what was going on there, but I'm pretty sure the pagans weren't to blame.