It is a cold October morning, the skies overhead are a brooding mass of dark grey clouds.
I am standing on a playing field in the village of Cymau on the Flintshire-Wrexham border with renowned supernatural writer and editor of Paranormal Magazine Richard Holland.
We are next to a small playing area and behind us is thick undergrowth beneath a line of trees.
A few years ago on this very spot, a group of youngsters from the area witnessed something very strange indeed and – as Richard’s research revealed – they are not the only ones to have seen what some described as a werewolf.
“A group of friends were up here one evening,” Richard explained.
“It was just beginning to get dark when they heard a crashing in the undergrowth. What they saw, they described as a dishevelled man hunched over an animal.
Because of the light it was almost silhouetted and one of them described it as a werewolf.
“Whatever it was, they took one look at it and ran. They went back the next day and they saw that the nettles had been flattened so something had been there.”
Richard might have dismissed the tale were it not for a similar story he had heard some years earlier.
“What interested me was that I suddenly remembered that somebody had told me something similar that had happened in Abermorddu, just down the road.
"It was in the early 80s, this chap and his girlfriend were near the school there when they saw what they described as a caveman.
"They ran and it had chased them across the fields. It came to mind because they too had mentioned this dishevelled appearance.”
But that wasn’t all.
“Then I remembered another completely separate story that somebody else had told me about something that happened in Caergwrle in the late 80s,” he continued. “A group of people were up in the woods near Caergwrle Castle.
Although they didn’t see anything they were really spooked because they could hear the vegetation crashing really loud as though trees were being knocked down and it was getting louder like whatever it was, was coming towards them.
“Anyway, they didn’t hang around to find out what it was, they legged it out of there.”
Armed with an Ordnance Survey map, Richard pointed out that the line of trees behind us continue well beyond the park where we were standing and joined other areas of woodland near Caergwrle and Abermorddu where the unexplained noises and the strange sighting had happened in the 1980s.
As he talked I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at the trees, their multi-coloured leaves rustling in the wind on this chilly autumn day.
Could the three instances be connected?
Could there really be some strange creature resembling a primitive man, even a werewolf, living in the woods in the area who had lived there undetected for more than 20 years?
Richard, in his capacity as editor of one of the country’s biggest paranormal publications, has heard similar stories from elsewhere in the UK.
“There has been a bit of phenomenon recently.
"There have been increasing reports about something termed the ‘British Bigfoot’, particularly around Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, the local papers around there report a sighting almost every week.
“There’s no conceivable way any big animal, other than a deer could live there, but people have been seeing things there all the time – there’s even been big cat sightings.
“There have been quite a few similar reports from areas of lowland Scotland and from the North of England.
“Whether you believe the story in Cymau or not, these kids were definitely spooked by something.
"It could be a tramp who has been living in these woods for many years. One thing for sure is that there is no connection between these kids and those people who saw something in the 80s.”