The Fox Hunt
Statement of Olivia Barlowe regarding the urban legend and adolescent reenactment of 'The Fox Hunt', as performed in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Original statement given August 27th, 1998. Audio recording taken April 11th, 2013. Digital copy transcribed by Caspian Davies, Junior Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. ——— STATEMENT BEGINS
I don't know what the hell you expect me to say.
I'm sure, just like the others, you'll call me 'delusional'. But I'm not. I know what it is I saw, and what I saw? What I heard that night? No kid is going to make something like that up. I know you won't believe me. And, maybe, at this point, I don't give a—
You're not writing that down, are you? Hah. Of course you wouldn't.
Right. So. We were kids, probably all of us around, what, teens? No older than seventeen, at the oldest of us. I didn't know all of them, personally. That was part of the fun, at the time. We all gathered one night for 'the game'. We called it The Fox Hunt. Not sure which one of us started the name, if we were even the ones who made it up.
It was… mid-October? The chill had already set in the air.
Someone had found a flyer. I think it was Henry? He was the type to go searching for trouble. Would pressure others into tagging along to the abandoned railway station down near Wicker. Sheffield Victoria, wasn't it? God, they tore it down just after we…
This was back in 1984. Us kids didn't have any reason for wandering about like we did, but those were the times. You were let out into the world, clustered into groups of misfits, and returned home by the time the lamps came on. Except for that night.
So Henry had found a flyer. Some old, worn paper that looked like it belonged in a puddle somewhere, not in his hand. I still remember the way we huddled close to read the ancient thing. It was an advertisement, which wasn't too strange back in the day, detailing some 'game' of some sort.
The top was torn off, and it never said what game, exactly. Just the rules.
And there were plenty of those. Things like 'only after dark', 'the fox wears the mask', 'hunting red'. The whole game should've been absurd to a bunch of teenagers. We should've left it, laughed at it, but… We didn't. That was our first mistake. Whatever wanted us to find that flyer? Those rules? It knew we were bored kids. It knew how to dig under our skin.
Sam was the one who proposed we play it. Halloween night.
We were too old to go trick-or-treating, according to most of our parents. But most of us weren't particularly keen on babysitting our younger siblings, either. So we made a… A pact, I guess? It sounds ridiculous, thinking back on it. To us, it was serious business. We would dress up, just like the game said, and we'd perform the rites—no, sorry. The game. We would perform the game through some of the back alleys and streets we had claimed as territory.
I think all of us were too caught up in the idea of doing something that felt mature for our ages. Like it was something forbidden. I wish… I really, really wish we would've taken that feeling a bit more seriously. But we were just kids. Kids do stupid things. Really stupid things.
We grow up too fast.
So there we were, planning a… the flyer called it a 'hunt'. Sam had agreed to be the fox. I don't know why, but the flyer had claimed it was an esteemed position, and he just… We all just went along with it. So Sam was the fox. Myself, Henry, and a few of the others were the hunters.
The next week or so had been… preparations, I guess. All of us got involved, gathering whatever red clothing we could find. I think some of us must've stolen from our parents' closets, maybe. We had chalk, marked out the streets of the game. Where the fox could and couldn't go, who would lead the party to hunt them down…
The fights got bad. At one point, Sam threatened to tell the parents about our plans. Which would've wrecked the whole game, right? Henry and Sam got into it, I think a punch was thrown. I don't even remember what we were all fighting about, but… it couldn't have been that important.
There was something under the surface of the arguments. Everyone was tense.
Listen, I'm getting to that. Jesus, all I'm saying is that this wasn't our normal behaviour. We were kids. And sure, kids find the oddest things to focus on. But this was different. This felt… real.
As I was saying.
Halloween came quicker than any of us imagined. And there we were, gathered near one of the closed shops. All of us wearing hunting red. Jackets, shirts, even a scarf. Whatever we could find, it would do. It wasn't the formality that mattered to us, it was the… meaning behind it? I guess?
The lights were dim that night. They had this glare to them, like a spotlight centered just on our group. The shadows in the corners of the alleys and streets stretched longer than they should've. Don't think anyone really noticed. We were too excited to begin The Fox Hunt. Thing was, Sam hadn't shown up.
And the hunters couldn't hunt without a fox.
At one point, one of the boys had joked that Sam had chickened out. That he'd gotten scared. Sam had always been… the youngest of the group. A little more nervous. Followed the rules more, you know? So it wouldn't have been that surprising for him to have backed out last minute.
We were all discussing the logistics of assigning a new fox last-minute when he showed up.
I don't know if it was Sam. If it was, he didn't say so. He looked like Sam, but there was this… strangeness to the way he walked, the way he approached the rest of us. He was wearing a mask I'd never seen him have before. Some old, paint-faded fox mask. I think it might've been wood? You could see the carved markings where something sharp had dug in and sculpted out the muzzle.
Nobody questioned where he'd gotten it. I didn't, at the time, either.
I think someone tried to joke about it. One of the other boys, a younger one. But Henry shushed him, told him that we 'had to take it seriously'. I remember he said it in this voice I'd never heard from him before. All quiet.
I didn't like it. It sounded to… mature for a kid his age. Like he knew more than he'd let on.
It was already late. The hunt was supposed to start the moment dusk hit, but we'd waited around for 'Sam' long enough for the dark to really, fully set in.
There wasn't much time to sit around and shoot the—sorry, right. Well, we couldn't sit around chatting for long. But there was this… ritual? The flyer had spoken about it. To mark the fox as prey, and to mark the hunters as, well, hunters.
Henry initiated it. He initiated everything around the game.
The game had described this sort of, I dunno, blood oath? One of us, one of the older girls, had brought a sewing needle from home that night. We all held out our finger, one by one, and pricked it. Just enough for a single drop, we thought that was enough. Again, all of it was about the meaning, not the actions.
Plus, we were kids. It felt like enough. We didn't know any better.
But we all took the blood from our fingers and smeared just a single line across Sam's mask. Like we were painting the damn thing. When it was my turn, after all the others had left their mark, I left mine. But I couldn't help noticing the faint, darker lines underneath all the fresh red.
Like the mask had done it before.
There were these words we were supposed to say. Nobody was taking it that seriously, so the chanting came out between a series of giggles and laughter. I still remember it to this day. The chant.
'Dusk till dawn, the fox must run.'
Eventually, we'd gotten tired of the chanting and the formalities, I think. And one of us asked where Sam had gone. And they were right—Sam had disappeared. None of us had noticed, probably too busy with mocking the rites and tossing torches around for the hunters.
And yet, we all knew: the hunt had begun.
We split off into pairs, small groups. The nights prior, we'd agreed to the boundaries of the hunt. And if we forgot, there were faded chalk marks reminding us exactly where was 'off-limits'. So we started circling the buildings, ducking between alleyways and searching bins, chattering among each-other like it was just another game of hide-and-seek or Forty-Forty, or something.
Sometimes we'd meet up with the others.
And in no time, it was a whole cluster of us, late into the night. I remember thinking I didn't recognise some of the others. And I didn't think there'd been so many of us that night. We'd turned into a mob, all wielding cheap torches and wearing red. Stalking through the streets of Sheffield looking for the fox.
Someone had started up the chant again. 'Dusk till dawn, the fox must run'. Over and over. It felt less like a hunt and more like… Like a mob.
It felt wrong in my mouth. Like I was suffocating on the words. I couldn't stop myself from joining in at one point.
It'd gotten late. The darkness seemed… more present than it normally was on those streets that night. Pitch black in the alleyways, and the streets weren't lit up quite well.
I'd catch shadows in the corner of my eye, dancing from the street lamps and the torches we all carried. And that chant? It bounced off the neighboring shops. I half-expected that we'd be reprimanded by an adult, or told to move it along, but it was as though the streets themselves had cleared out for us.
It was ridiculous. Positively nutty. There we were, a group of us kids—more than I swear we had at the start, chanting down a long line of the street while sniffing out some poor boy wearing a wooden fox mask.
But I was there. I experienced every second. And you can say what you want, but you don't know me. You weren't there. So keep writing down my statement, but don't you dare look at me like I'm lying.
I don't even remember when I joined the chant. One moment, we were all clustered together moving like a pack of wolves, and the next we were all howling those damn words. And… I couldn't stop. We couldn't stop. I saw Henry, near the front of his cluster of us, leading the way like he was some sort of… master of the hunt. And even he looked confused. Distressed, even.
Eventually we made our way to Wicker, heading towards the rail station. That was beyond the boundaries of the game. Sam wouldn't have gone that far.
We shouldn't have gone that far.
There must've been double what we'd started with, by my count. A dozen of us, stalking down an empty street towards the abandoned train yard. Not another soul in sight.
The yard had always been… strange. But that night felt different.
Like it wasn't just some abandoned site anymore. Like it meant more that night. Something older than all of us. Something ancient. We weren't playing a game anymore. Even I could feel that.
And we shouldn't have gone that far.
But something in that chant… in the mask we'd been pursuing… in the dark, lit by our torches? It pushed us forward. We were all clustered in the yard, a big group of us lit only by the lights we held. No street lamps, no sign of life other than us.
We weren't even supposed to be that far.
But we were still there. Stalking through abandoned boxcars and sniffing out a fox mask-wearing boy like a pack of hounds searching for blood.
I don't remember who found Sam first. Or what should've been Sam, anyway.
There was this… scream. Not the kind of a kid who'd been caught and knew it, but someone genuinely, truly terrified. Or hurt.
I heard it above the chanting, but it didn't stop. I didn't stop. Most of us moved towards the sound, but I just… couldn't. I didn't want to. I think I was worried at what I would've saw. What I did see. There was a flash in a torch, something red. I thought it was a scarf, maybe. Or one of the boys' red coats.
…I know better now.
—Sorry, I need a moment. Can we take a break? Can I get… maybe some tea, some water, or something?
[C. Davies — 11:13, 21/09/2016; file ND-1352318] Annotations mention a significant gap of time during break in transcription. Original documentation notes Ms. Olivia Barlowe's increased signs of distress. When questioned whether Ms. Barlowe desired to proceed with the transcription, she became increasingly troubled and insisted on continuing with the statement, asserting that she, 'needed someone to f—king listen for once'. No further inquiries were deemed necessary. Statement to continue below.
Where was I? Sorry. So we had gotten to the rail yard. Us, the group of kids. There were more of us than there were supposed to be. And most of them had clustered around where they'd found Sam's hiding space. Or where he'd managed to escape to.
I wasn't a part of the mob that approached Sam. I didn't… I couldn't see what they were doing to him.
That scream, it didn't sound like a game. Not then. Not now.
I don't know if it was the scream or my sheer terror around the situation that did it, but I'd stopped chanting with the rest of them. They'd grown louder, so loud it was hard to hear anything else above their noise. But I'd stopped. I don't remember stopping.
I thought maybe someone had gotten hurt. That was my first thought when I heard that scream. It was this… horrible noise. I don't know if you've ever heard a fox cry when it got trapped. I hadn't either. Not until that moment.
The mob was everywhere, then. I couldn't see the mask through all the red of coats, shirts, scarves… I don't know if maybe Henry and the others had invited more of us, but it didn't start that way.
Still, I couldn't just leave. God knows I wanted to.
I managed to tuck myself into one of the boxcars at the edge of the yard while the crowd kept their chanting. Caught glimpses through them, mostly just red. The color was everywhere in the flash of torches. Like nothing else mattered in that moment than that hunting red.
Then… Like they'd all agreed beforehand, or maybe they just knew that they had to, the chanting… stopped.
It went silent. So quiet you could hear a pen drop. The sort of 'calm before the storm' type of quiet that you know can't shake.
Even the screaming had stopped.
I don't remember how long the silence lasted. There shouldn't have been that sort of quiet. Not in the middle of Sheffield, even that late. You'd expect… Something. Distant city noises or a call of a parent urging their kid home after they'd stayed out past curfew. But it was dead silent.
There wasn't a second chant on the flyer we'd found.
I don't remember anything like it, at least. There were no words to be said about catching the fox. It had been simple enough to remember, and I didn't remember another chant. But… There it was.
There shouldn't have been more chanting. Someone spoke, though. Henry, maybe, or one of the others. Their faces blurred under the glare of torchlight that night.
'The fox has run, the hunt is done.'
It was softer than the one before. Like they were sharing a secret. Or speaking in a church. It was… ritualistic. I know it sounds wrong to use that word for a group of kids, but it was.
I thought maybe that'd be the end of it. That the group would break apart, then, and Sam would come out with a smile, holding that damn wooden mask smeared with all our blood. But he didn't. And they didn't.
Instead, there was this… tearing noise. Not quite like cloth, not so clean. It was wet. I'd never heard a noise quite like it before. And I don't want to hear it again, so long as I live.
It only took a few moments before there was more of the noises. Wet, thick, mixed with these sickening… crunching sounds. I knew what they were doing, I just didn't know to what. Just that it was far too quiet in-between the chewing and cracking.
I sat there, still, for minutes. Maybe an hour.
The mob had grown still, too busy… with whatever horrid thing they'd done. But eventually, mercifully, they began to vanish. And I mean that, they vanished. Not in a ghostly, spiritual way. They faded into the night, torches off and leaving nothing but red behind.
And it wasn't from their clothes.
I tried not to look. I really, really tried not to. But I saw a hand, maybe. Or something like it. And there was Sam's mask, the fox mask.
I didn't turn on my torch, but some light from the moon caught it, just right. And it gleamed, like it'd been dunked into a river and fished out. Wet, dripping.
Sam was lying there. And I couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Or what was left of him.
I know you're not here for that, for the… the details.
So, I slid from my hiding place. And I was a kid, staring at something I shouldn't have been. Something that shouldn't have happened. What was I supposed to do?
I don't remember heading home. Maybe I walked. Or ran. But when I woke up the next morning, I found my red coat folded at the end of the bed. Like it had never happened. Like I'd never even worn it.
Mum didn't mention anything about me being out so late. And when I tried to talk to Henry about it that day, he just laughed. The group of them said the hunt had been fun, that Sam had gone home halfway through and 'must've gotten cold feet'.
When I asked him about the train yard, he said we hadn't gone that far. They didn't believe me when I told them what I saw that night. The fox mask, the way there'd been at least a dozen of us in total. And when I told him about what had happened to Sam?
He looked at me like I'd grown a second head.
It wasn't until the police came knocking that anyone thought to believe me.
They said they'd found a body. Didn't describe just how little was left of it. I don't know how they must've identified him, since what I saw didn't give much for identification. But I brought the flyer up, even gave it to them.
They took it, said it was probably just a prank. Unrelated to the case of the train yard.
Worst part was they never said anything about the mask. Not even when I asked. Like it'd never existed in the first place. Eventually the trail went cold. People stopped asking about what happened to Sam. We all moved on.
Or they did, anyway.
Eventually, I moved away. To a flat up north. It's a… quiet place. I try to keep to myself. Don't really go out after dark anymore. And I haven't worn red for years, not since that night with The Fox Hunt game. Sometimes I swear I see shadows, on the edges of my vision. And I hear that chant.
'Dusk till dawn, the fox must run.'
Just in the quiet… between the bushes and birdsong. Like it's being carried on the wind, or… maybe it's just my memories. Nobody else seems to hear it like I do.
I heard it again, just last week. It was distant, but… clear. Clearer than it had been. And I saw them. The kids, just on the edge of the Tesco car park. They vanished when I blinked, but… But I heard them.
You can say it's just a game. Everyone else says so.
I've tried to contact Henry and some of the others about it, but they still swear that they never went to the train yard. Still claim, to this day, that it was 'out of bounds'. And the police are no help, either. They won't reopen the case. Won't take anything of what I say seriously.
But I wasn't tired. I'm not 'delusional'. I saw what happened that night. And I remember when nobody else would. I remember Sam, and what we did to him. I remember that chanting, too. And… I think it's coming for me, next.
I found the fox mask again. In my mailbox.
It just showed up one day like it'd always been there.
It still has the stains. They're darker now. And there's more of them than there were.
I… I think I'm supposed to be the fox, now.
Or maybe I already am.
——— STATEMENT ENDS
The case of ND-1352318 included multiple police reports to corroborate Ms. Oliva Barlowe's accounts, even if only to verify that Samuel "Sam" Knowles did exist and had been discovered deceased in October of 1984.
While the investigation has, as Ms. Barlowe stated, been sorted among numerous cold cases as a result of no further substantial evidence since South Yorkshire Police initially began their search. Despite this, attempts to contact SYP regarding the additional details surrounding the case have proven more difficult than anticipated.
The Magnus Institute's own records contain crucial documentation by way of photographs, specifically those of Samuel Knowles remains. Or what could reasonably be assumed to be.
Contact with Ms. Barlowe for follow-up has, in the past, been achieved with various levels of success. Requests to expand on her experiences and testify on any evolution of events, however, has been noted in the records as 'ill-advised'.
Attempts to contact her by myself have… failed. As was expected.
However, and I acknowledge that personal experience with the case has no right to be included in my addendums, I recently received a package with no return address at my personal place of residence.
Inside, I discovered only two items. An old, torn flyer, faded as to be nearly indecipherable. And a wooden fox mask, with stains that, to my untrained eye, appear to be sanguineous in nature.
How anyone obtained my personal address is beyond my comprehension. Making a note of within these records as it pertains to ND-1352318.
— Cass, Junior Archivist of The Magnus Institute
