The Ritual & Decorative Arson Newsletter (1972)

The Ritual & Decorative Arson Newsletter was published between 1970 and 1976. Its editor was Trevor Vestige who also managed the petrol station where Joe and Oliver Bush disappeared in 1970 (see Discovering Scarfolk for more details).

This copy was banned by the council after marauding children wearing ceremonial masks torched and laid waste to half of Scarfolk on Halloween, 1972. Despite the ban, the council torched the other half of the town the following spring because it "looked uneven".

Because the public information office had burned down citizens weren't warned and many perished in the flames. Grieving family members, however, were compensated with splendid, top-of-the-range trowel and funerary urn sets.

Happy Halloween from everyone at Scarfolk Council.

Radio Times Christmas Issue

Everyone at Scarfolk Council wishes you a very merry final Christmas before the inevitable apocalypse.

Here's your festive double issue of the Radio Times, which covers Christmas to the new year (or the end of time, whichever comes first.)

Learn more about the jolly apocalypse HERE.

"Severed Up" Psychic Advertising (1978)

In the late 1970s the police were struggling to solve several brutal crimes.

They turned to two Scarfolk psychics, Terry and Jasmine Oiltoad, a married couple who also ran a thriving advertising agency with a unique, supernatural selling point: Terry and Jasmine could psychically channel the victims of crimes, but only, strangely, if product placement was incorporated into their trances.

Deep in a clairvoyant daze, they would strategise national marketing campaigns, design advertising mock-ups for print, write product slogans, and even design storyboards for TV commercials. Psychic clues would somehow filter through Terry and Jasmine's subconscious into the promotional material.

Only when the campaigns were officially launched could Terry and Jasmine snap out of their trances and furnish the police with tangible details, such as the precise location of a murder or kidnap victim.

The advertisements themselves were littered with cryptic clues, as can be seen from the magazine ad below for Severed Up soft drinks. The razor logo and copy in this psychic-advertisement eventually led to the apprehension of a criminal known as the "Fizzy Razorblade Killer," though her real name was Helen Cradle, a 7 year old pupil from Scarfolk Infant School, who was also a known embezzler and quite good at geography and maths.

Psychic advertising was outlawed in 1979 when three major corporations were found to have ordered several murders in an effort to be included in popular psychic advertising campaigns.

Tupperware urns, 1973

Here's a scan of a Tupperware advert that appeared in a 1973 issue of the The Scarfolk Times Sunday magazine.

Back in the early 1970s, people weren't entirely convinced that death was final, irrespective of whether or not their loved ones had been cremated. The general opinion was: it can't hurt to keep things as fresh as possible. Just in case.

It was around this time that children throughout Scarfolk began seeing ghosts of seahorses drifting on the breeze. Adults could not see the apparitions, so the children were not believed at first, but 'Old Jamton Bones,' a recluse who lived in Scarfolk Woods, came out of his hermitage, proclaiming the seashorses to be an omen.

According to Bones, every forty years the appearance of the seahorses heralds a big change in Scarfolk. For legal reasons, what happened back in 1973 cannot be discussed here, but it is now forty years since their last appearance.

The mayor will keep you posted...

"Spontaneous! Human Combustion" Annual 1970

**Warning: Contains images of death (& unfashionable footwear)**

The mayor wishes that such a warning had been issued on publications in the 1970s. Maybe millions of children wouldn't have been terrified by the superfluity of glossy monthly magazines and cheap horror books which sensationalised gruesome occult subjects.


Grown ups in Scarfolk preferred their children to have a more hands-on approach to the supernatural, or 'the natural', as it's called here.

In 1970, Scarfolk had its own after-school kids' light entertainment TV show called "Spontaneous! Human Combustion." Though it ran for only one series, it sparked a catchphrase still occasionally heard today: "Douse the louse, Mr. Chrysanthemum!" (The name of the show's host).

This is the show's only Christmas annual.

Children's weekly magazine "Look-In" from 1978

Even children's magazines in Scarfolk left the reader uneasy and disquieted. All my copies of Look-In were hidden after 5pm so that I could calm down before bedtime.