Mawnan is a village south of Falmouth in Cornwall, near the Helford River, in the south-west of England. Its parish church, St Mawnan and St Stephen’s, is a thirteenth-century building surrounded by woodland. In the spring and summer of 1976, that church tower became the centre of one of Britain’s best-known modern cryptid stories: the Owlman, a large, owl-like humanoid said to hover above the tower and hiss at anyone who came too close. The story has no roots in older Cornish folklore. It begins, so far as the record shows, in 1976 — and almost every account of it reaches the public through a single intermediary.
The first sighting: 17 April 1976
The first report is dated 17 April 1976. Two sisters, June Melling, aged twelve, and Vicky Melling, aged nine, were on an Easter holiday from Preston with their parents, camping near Mawnan. They were near the church — in some versions they had wandered into the churchyard to play while their parents set up a picnic — when they looked up and saw a large winged figure hovering above the church tower. They ran, frightened, back to their parents, and the family cut short their holiday and left Cornwall.
Before they left, the girls’ father handed a drawing June had made of the figure to a local man who had taken an interest in the story: Tony “Doc” Shiels, an artist and stage conjuror. Shiels looked at the feathered figure in the sketch and gave it the name it has carried ever since: the Owlman. In Cornish, the creature is sometimes called Kowanden.
The story first appeared in print in a pamphlet entitled Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, written under the name Anthony Mawnan-Peller and circulated throughout Cornwall in 1976. Shiels was the source for the account, and he remained the source for almost everything that followed.
The second sighting: 3 July 1976
Eleven weeks later, on 3 July 1976, two fourteen-year-olds, Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, were camping in the wood below the church. They heard a hissing sound they could not place. What they described afterwards was a large owl with pointed ears, as tall as a man, with glowing eyes and black claws like a blacksmith’s pincers. It rose into the trees on wings that seemed too wide for the gaps between the branches. Both girls drew the creature and wrote a short description under their drawings. Both drawings went to Shiels.
Sporadic reports, and a thin record
Sporadic reports of Owlman sightings in the vicinity of the church were recorded in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1995. The 1995 case is typical of the pattern: an American tourist wrote to the Western Morning News with details of what she said she had seen, and the account reached the public as a letter, not as an interview. In each case, the witness was usually a visitor, usually young, usually alone or in a pair, and the account reached the public through an intermediary rather than through an independent interview.
No one has ever photographed the Owlman. It has left no feathers, no footprints, no dead livestock, and no sound recording. It has no name in any older Cornish text and no relationship to the church except proximity.
The problem of Tony Shiels
Any honest account of the Owlman has to spend time on Shiels, because without him there is very little left. He was a surrealist artist and stage magician who had been involved in a series of “monster-raising” exploits in Cornwall in 1976, including attempts to summon Morgawr, a supposed sea monster of Falmouth Bay, with the help of covens of nude witches. His conjuring books include one on producing supernatural effects for an audience and one, published in 1976, on how to hoax monster and UFO sightings.
The occult historian Gareth Medway examined the Morgawr and Owlman material in 2001 and found the same structure in both: the witnesses were Shiels, or friends of Shiels, or relatives of Shiels, or people who told Shiels and no one else, or people who wrote unsigned letters to newspapers and were never interviewed by anybody. Independent researchers were unable to trace and interview the witnesses of 1976. Medway suggested that the entire story may have been a hoax perpetrated by Shiels.
Shiels never quite confessed and never quite denied. Asked in 1992 about faked photographs, he said that in 1976 he had experimented with a plasticine model on a sheet of glass held up against the Helford, and described the results not as fakes but as “shamanic decoys.” He died in Ireland on 11 July 2024.
The case was studied in most detail by Jonathan Downes of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, author of The Owlman and Others (1997, reissued 2006).
The natural explanations
The most widely cited natural explanation is misidentification of a real owl. Church towers are common nesting places for barn owls, and the sceptical investigator Joe Nickell has suggested that a barn owl, seen at dusk or in poor light, could account for the reports. The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, a Fortean TV presenter, proposed instead a Eurasian eagle-owl, one of the largest owls in the world, which can stand about two feet tall with a wingspan of more than five feet — large enough, at a distance, to startle someone who was not expecting it.
Neither explanation has been proven, and neither accounts for every detail — an eagle-owl does not hover above a church tower like a humanoid figure, and it does not have black claws like a blacksmith’s pincers. But both have one advantage over the cryptid explanation: they involve a real animal that is known to live in the area. The Owlman, by contrast, has no physical evidence at all.
What is documented, and what is not
Documented facts: The Owlman story originated in 1976 in Mawnan, Cornwall, centred on St Mawnan and St Stephen’s Church; the first report is dated 17 April 1976 and concerns the sisters June and Vicky Melling; a second report is dated 3 July 1976 and concerns Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry; the story was publicised by Tony “Doc” Shiels, who named the creature, and first appeared in print in the 1976 pamphlet Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay; further reports were recorded in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1995; no photograph or physical evidence has ever been produced.
Unverified or disputed claims: The sightings themselves rest on second-hand accounts, almost all of them transmitted through Shiels, and the 1976 witnesses were never independently interviewed by researchers — so the details of what was seen, including the creature’s size, wingspan, glowing eyes and claws, cannot be verified. The suggestion that Shiels invented the story is a reasoned argument by historians such as Gareth Medway, not a proven fact, and Shiels never admitted to a hoax. The claimed 1926 precursor sighting and the Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington occult-ritual story are unverified and are not treated here as established history. The barn-owl and eagle-owl explanations are plausible hypotheses, not proven identifications.