# A giant winged owl-like creature, the Owlman of Mawnan, haunts the woods around a Cornish churchyard

**No verdict.** The record is a cluster of frightening anecdotes reported around Mawnan Church, Cornwall, from 1976 onward. The claim we rate is that these describe a real, unclassified winged humanoid. That claim is unproven: there is no physical trace, no photograph of the creature, and no witness account that reached the public except through one man, the surrealist showman and self-described hoaxer Tony (Doc) Shiels, or through people connected to him. Barn owls and eagle-owls nest in exactly such towers and offer a mundane fit for the sightings. Nothing establishes a monster, and much points to a story shaped, if not invented, by a known trickster.

Category: Cryptids & Monsters · Era: 1970s · First circulated: 1976, first spread through a Cornish pamphlet and through material sent to Fortean Times by Doc Shiels; revived in cryptozoology books and websites from the 1990s onward · Believed by: Cryptozoology enthusiasts and Fortean readers, with a durable following online; treated by most folklorists and skeptics as modern legend rather than zoology
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/owlman

## Summary
The Owlman of Mawnan is a winged, owl-faced humanoid said to have been seen near the church of St Mawnan and St Stephen, on the Helford River in Cornwall, beginning in 1976. In the best-known account two young sisters on holiday, June and Vicky Melling, were said to have been so frightened by a large bird-man above the church tower that their father cut the family holiday short. Further reports followed that summer and sporadically into the 1990s: a creature about the size of a man, grey or silver-feathered, with pointed ears, glowing red eyes, and pincer-like claws. This case file keeps two things apart: a run of anecdotes, a local pamphlet, and a lively Fortean paper trail; and the claim it rates, that a genuine unknown animal or paranormal entity was behind them. The central problem is that nearly every thread runs back to Tony (Doc) Shiels, a surrealist painter, stage magician, and admitted hoaxer who was raising monsters in Cornwall that same year. On the evidence available, the existence of the Owlman is unproven, and the ordinary explanations, from large owls to a showman's invention, remain unrefuted.

## The claim
That a large winged creature with an owl-like face, roughly the height of a man, has repeatedly appeared around Mawnan Church in Cornwall since 1976, and that it represents either an unclassified animal or a paranormal entity rather than a misidentification, a folk tale, or a deliberate hoax.

## Origin and timeline
- 1976-04-17: According to the story later told by Tony (Doc) Shiels, two young sisters on holiday, June and Vicky Melling, saw a large winged bird-man hovering above the tower of Mawnan Church. Their father, Don Melling, is said to have been so unsettled that he cut the family holiday short and left Cornwall. No one outside the account interviewed the girls at the time.
- 1976: The tale is folded into a pamphlet, Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, credited to Anthony Mawnan-Peller, which circulates in Cornwall. The Owlman thus enters print alongside Morgawr, a sea serpent said to haunt Falmouth Bay, the two stories sharing a setting, a moment, and a promoter.
- 1976-07-03: Two 14-year-old girls, named as Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, are said to have seen the creature while camping in woods near the church: an owl as big as a man, with pointed ears, glowing red eyes, grey feathers, and black claws. Their reports, like the first, reach the public through Shiels.
- 1976: Shiels feeds accounts of both the Owlman and Morgawr to Fortean Times, describing himself as the magazine's Cornish correspondent. He is by this point openly engaged in what he calls monster-raising, staging rituals intended to summon Morgawr from the sea.
- 1978: New sightings are reported near the church. A woman described as Miss Opie says a devilish man-like owl flew up into the trees, and three young French visitors staying nearby report a very big furry bird with a gaping mouth and red round eyes. The location stays fixed on the churchyard and its woods.
- 1989: Cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes says he interviewed a young man he calls Gavin, who described a grey-brown creature about five feet tall with large black feet and glowing eyes, seen near the church. Downes presents this as a report reaching him independently of Shiels.
- 1995: A visitor said to be an American student working at a Chicago museum reports a man-sized bird-man with a white face and glowing eyes flying over a car near the church. It is among the last widely repeated sightings; the Owlman by now lives mainly in books and, later, on the internet.
- 2006: Jonathan Downes publishes The Owlman and Others, the fullest treatment of the case, gathering the reports and defending the possibility that something real lay behind at least some of them, while acknowledging Shiels's central and complicating role.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Multiple independent witnesses, including children and foreign visitors, described the same owl-like man over two decades.
  Evidence: The independence is the weak point. As occult historian Gareth Medway observed of Shiels's monsters, the witnesses tended to be Shiels himself, friends of Shiels, relatives of Shiels, people who reported only to Shiels, or letter-writers no one ever interviewed. The earliest and most cited encounters, the Melling sisters and the two campers, reached the public solely through him. A repeated description that all flows through a single promoter is not the same as independent corroboration.
- Claim: The sightings describe a specific, consistent creature, too detailed to be simple imagination.
  Evidence: Consistency is expected once a template exists. The 1976 pamphlet and the Fortean coverage fixed the image of a grey, red-eyed, pointy-eared owl-man near the church, and later witnesses had that picture available to them. Downes noted that at least one later witness was aware of the Owlman tale beforehand. Shared detail among people who already know the legend measures the legend's reach, not the animal's.
- Claim: A large owl-like creature was really perched on or near the church tower.
  Evidence: There is a straightforward candidate. Church towers are classic nesting and roosting sites for barn owls, and a barn owl or a large eagle-owl seen at dusk, wings spread, pale face lit by low light, can look startlingly man-sized and uncanny to a frightened child. Skeptical writers including Joe Nickell, and the Fortean broadcaster Lionel Fanthorpe, have pointed to exactly this: a real but ordinary owl at the root of the fright.
- Claim: This is a genuine mystery investigated seriously by cryptozoologists.
  Evidence: It was investigated, chiefly by Jonathan Downes, but investigation is not confirmation. Downes gathered accounts decades after the fact and could not produce a photograph of the creature, a body, a feather, or a witness whose story was documented at the moment it happened. Serious effort applied to thin, late, second-hand testimony yields a serious account of a story, not evidence of a beast.
- Claim: Doc Shiels merely reported what others saw; his involvement does not make it false.
  Evidence: His involvement does not prove a hoax, but it is disqualifying for taking the reports at face value. Shiels was a professional illusionist who had already faked celebrated photographs of the Loch Ness Monster and who described himself as a charlatan and a thimble-rigger, once telling Downes not to invest belief in anything, especially him. When the sole conduit for the founding sightings is a self-declared trickster staging monster-hunts nearby, the reports cannot be treated as neutral testimony.

## Why people believe it
- The setting does a great deal of the work. An ancient churchyard above a wooded river valley, approached through dark trees, is primed for dread, and a pale shape moving in the tower at dusk lands on already frightened nerves as something monstrous rather than something feathered.
- The witnesses were often children, and their fear was surely real even if the creature was not. Sincere terror reads as proof to listeners, and adults are reluctant to tell a shaken child that what she saw was only an owl.
- The Owlman rhymes with Mothman, the winged red-eyed figure of 1960s West Virginia. A ready-made template of the glowing-eyed bird-man gave the Cornish story a familiar shape and an instant audience among Fortean readers.
- A gifted showman promoted it. Shiels was a vivid storyteller with a genuine flair for myth-making, and he placed the tale in Fortean Times, wrapped it in Cornish atmosphere, and linked it to Morgawr, so it arrived polished and pre-publicized.
- The case is unfalsifiable in the way that suits a legend. With no body and no clear photograph, the Owlman can neither be caught nor conclusively ruled out, and that open door lets belief persist indefinitely.

## Open questions
- Were the named early witnesses, the Melling and Chapman-Perry pairs, ever independently traced and interviewed by anyone other than Shiels? The public record rests on his telling, and the girls' own later accounts are effectively absent.
- How much of the later testimony, especially the 1989 and 1995 reports gathered by Downes, was genuinely free of the established legend, and how much simply matched a picture the witnesses already carried?
- Doc Shiels never issued a clean confession that the Owlman was invented, even while cheerfully admitting to hoaxing and to raising Morgawr; whether it was outright fabrication, embellishment of a real owl scare, or surrealist mischief that took on a life of its own remains genuinely unclear.

## Sources
- Owlman, Wikipedia (2025): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlman
- The Owlman of Mawnan Smith, The Cornish Bird (2019): https://cornishbirdblog.com/the-owlman-of-mawnan-smith/
- The Centre for Fortean Zoology: Jon Downes Interview, Cryptozoology, The Owlman and Other Monsters, Blather.net (2003): http://www.blather.net/theblather/2003/12/the_centre_for_fortean_zoology/
- Monstrous Tales, Magonia (2013): http://magoniamagazine.blogspot.com/2013/12/monstrous-tales.html
- Cryptid Profile: The Owlman (AKA: The Cornish Owlman or The Owlman of Mawnan), The Pine Barrens Institute (2018): https://pinebarrensinstitute.com/cryptids/2018/8/18/cryptid-profile-the-owlman-aka-the-cornish-owlman-or-the-owlman-of-mawnan
- The Cornish Owlman, Astonishing Legends (2024): https://astonishinglegends.com/astonishing-legends/2024/10/11/the-cornish-owlman

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/owlman