Ted Holiday

Fredrick William "Ted" Holiday (1921–1979) was an English journalist, angling writer and Fortean researcher. Born in Stockport, Cheshire, he served in the RAF from 1939 to 1946 and afterward built a career writing about fishing, with books such as Sea Trout: How to Catch Them (1956) and Estuary Fishing (1974). His reputation today rests on the decade he spent on the Loch Ness mystery, a commitment that gradually pushed him from natural history toward the occult. His posthumous book on the paranormal was published in 1986.

From angling to Loch Ness

Holiday's interest in the monster dated to 1933, when the Hugh Gray photograph was published in the newspapers. He made a one-man expedition to the loch in August 1962 and in 1963 joined the newly formed Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. After hundreds of hours of watching the water he claimed four unidentified sightings, and he reported several equipment failures, including cameras that did not work at moments of apparent activity. His first serious theory, set out in The Great Orm of Loch Ness (1968), proposed that the creature was a giant invertebrate, similar in form to the extinct Tullimonstrum gregarium but far larger.

The turn to the paranormal and the exorcism

Holiday's views kept shifting, and his writing moved steadily toward the metaphysical. The Dragon and the Disc (1973) argued for links between the Loch Ness reports, dragon legends and UFO sightings, while still describing the creature in physical terms. Holiday had earlier dismissed the Loch Ness UFO reports as "psychotic bunk", so the shift was a reversal. Strange History describes his later view that the phenomenon was entirely spiritual.

On 2 June 1973 Holiday brought the Devon clergyman Donald Omand to the loch to perform an exorcism. It took place in five rites, at each end of the loch and in the middle, and Omand shook holy water into the water and rowed out to deep water, which he considered necessary. Holiday and a Mrs Cary afterward reported strange manifestations, which were read as the creature "fighting back". The next morning Holiday said he saw a figure in black who vanished. The following year he suffered a heart attack, which the Strange History article notes he had after returning to the loch. These events are reported mainly by Holiday's own circle and by later writers, so they should be read as his account rather than independently verified.

Later work and reception

Holiday's final book, The Dyfed Enigma: Unidentified Flying Objects in West Wales (1979), was written with Randall Jones Pugh and treats UFO reports from a single region, the only published work listed for his UFO research. He died in 1979 in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, according to Wikipedia, which flags the death place as needing a citation.

The Goblin Universe was published posthumously in 1986, with a 45-page introduction by Colin Wilson. Holiday had sent Wilson a rough draft years earlier and later told him he was dissatisfied and had abandoned it; Wilson published it with the blessing of the family. A review by Walker Jaroch in Driftless Times describes it as an attempt at a unified theory of the paranormal, covering a "phantom menagerie" of Loch Ness, Bigfoot and alien big cats, and anchored by an account of the Omand exorcism. The reviewer praised the chapter on the Surrey Puma but found the reincarnation and psychic chapters speculative.

Holiday's place in ufology is minor. He is better known as a Loch Ness writer and as an example of how an investigator can move from natural history to the supernatural, while staying in the Fortean tradition that connects cryptids, UFOs and folklore.