Frederic Halford's final achievements

Recently discovered manuscripts--specifically a secret, hand-penned diary--reveal Frederic Halford was secretly working on wigglers in the year before his death. Even more surprising Halford had been actively corresponding with Corsican assassin Zucka Meats. Halford was planning to murder the younger G.E.M. Skues, it seems, and then to take credit for inventing the nymph as his own. And then, ultimately, to reveal his final wiggler designs as his crowning achievement. All of this came to an untimely end with his unexpected passing. The following "Halford's Ghost" facsimiles where created by British tier Major General Hoyt E. Toytea, working from the diagrams found in Halford's only recently discovered diaries.

Perhaps most bizarrely of all, Halford had also been corresponding with Sir Isaac Newton, which does appear to lend credence to the the theory of Halford as a male witch, because Newton had already been dead for nearly a century at that point. Newton was preoccupied with wildly abstract ideas about hypothetical relationships between trout behavior and Ultra Violet light. Newton favored further experimentation with florescent flies while Halford inexplicably clung to a purist condemnation of florescence as "Not natural, and thereby unworthy of a gentleman's consideration." And all this while simultaneously plotting with Corsican assassins--and while feaverishly experimenting with wigglers in his final days. There is clearly more to the Halford story than first meets the unsuspecting eye.

A few notes about Halford's Ghost materials:Halford's notes clearly describe a rigidly defined three-part recipe for wiggler designs. A diving bill, a weight and a float must be combined as a unit, so the upward force exerted by a buoyant fly body counteracts the downward pull of a lower-mounted weight. When acting properly together the balanced forces of the downward-pulling weight and the upward pushing buoyancy keep the fly from spinning completely around, thereby achieving a seductive, slow-motion side to side wobble, as instigated by the destabilizing forces of the diving bill.

Halford apparently used hand-shaped carp scales for the diving bill, necklace pearls for the weight and varnished, formaldehyde-cured cadaver brains for the flotation.Hoyt Toytea, when trying to recreate the originals, immediately ran into trouble. Halford, who had been afternoon smoking partners with Conan Doyle, had been using cadaver brains preserved at the National Museum--collected from recently deceased members of Parliament.

Pickled MP brains at that time were lightly colored, spongy and lacking in substance, and therefore highly buoyant. When shaped into varnished, minnow-body-like shapes they floated like little corks. But MP brains (somewhat like the famous color-morphing, post-coal-burning roof-top moths of the British Isles) have apparently adapted to the contemporary political climate--and are now too dense, dark and foul smelling for use for fishing lures.

Hoyt Toytea substituted foam for the float, metal beads for necklace pearls and plastic sheeting for the carp-scale diving bill. Halford was exceedingly wealthy so he could afford to use pearls for fishing weights. But apparently he did not use his own. Police records still on file at Scotland Yard do show a spate of purse and necklace snatchings in Halford's neighborhood in the months leading up to his death. But as yet there is no solid evidence connecting Halford to those hideous crimes.

Finally, one interesting side note: there is a growing body of evidence suggesting Conan Doyle based his brilliant but evil Professor Moriarty character on Frederic Halford. Doyle's diaries do emphatically describe Halford as the most devious, evil and duplicitous man Doyle had known.