• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

These Things Don't Happen Much Anymore

I do have a long answer to your examples, but for now I'll make do with a short one.

For example, for a couple of years in the mid 1920's The Charleston was a very popular dance. It then fell out of fashion and has rarely been repeated.

Should we therefore conclude that The Charleston never existed and that all reports of it are fake news?

If you watch Strictly, you’ll find The Charleston is a staple element and every couple has to perform it during the series.

As for the Napoleonic madman, I seem to remember the figure being used as a shorthand in cartoons, animated cartoons and sketch shows from the sixties through the early seventies.
While living in London, I was struck by how many people were walking around aimlessly having conversations with themselves. Now we have mobile phones and we see people chatting on the phone in the street all the time. The question is,,,, how often is there no-one at the other end listening?
 
I suppose if you were scared in the street, pretending to chat to the speaking clock on your mobile might put a threatening person off from approaching you, and that wouldn't make you mad. If however you genuinely believed the speaking clock was conversing with you, then you have a problem.
 
If however you genuinely believed the speaking clock was conversing with you, then you have a problem.

You'll be telling me Santa isn't real next. TCHA! :)
 
Ive noticed that, althought not completely missing, reports of certain phemonina dont seem to have the same popularity as they once did, i remember, back in the day, the pages of thr FT were full of statues weeping blood, stigmata, crop circles and falls of fish etc, these things seem to have fallen out of favour with the public, maybe they are not sensational enough for todays youtube generation or they just dont happen as much as they used to.
 
One seeming staple of every ghost book that I read as a kid was the 'Phantom Hound'. Usually Black Shuck, but sometimes going by other names e.g. Stryker, Padfoot, etc.
To read those accounts, the night time countryside of England abounded with such beasts.
Yet, now? I can't recall a single, modern instance of such a sighting.
I've wondered for a while whether this means that such phantom dog stories were always simply folk-tales; that have fallen out of fashion, or whether people still experience such phenomena, but they're no longer disseminated widely or considered newsworthy.
Perhaps ABCs have filled the (in ecological parlance) 'niche'* that used to be occupied by BBDs :)) Big Black Dogs)?

Actually, I recall reading a relatively recent post on Mumsnet from a woman who, it sounded for all the world like, had encountered one of the 'guardian' types of BBD. She posted it more as a "what an odd thing" experience rather than as something supernatural.
I'll try to track down a link (once my @#$% computer stops 'updating').

* "Ecological niche is a term for the position of a species within an ecosystem, describing both the range of conditions necessary for persistence of the species, and its ecological role in the ecosystem." - from ScienceDirect website.
 
One seeming staple of every ghost book that I read as a kid was the 'Phantom Hound'. Usually Black Shuck, but sometimes going by other names e.g. Stryker, Padfoot, etc.
To read those accounts, the night time countryside of England abounded with such beasts.
Yet, now? I can't recall a single, modern instance of such a sighting.
I've wondered for a while whether this means that such phantom dog stories were always simply folk-tales; that have fallen out of fashion, or whether people still experience such phenomena, but they're no longer disseminated widely or considered newsworthy.
Perhaps ABCs have filled the (in ecological parlance) 'niche'* that used to be occupied by BBDs :)) Big Black Dogs)?

Actually, I recall reading a relatively recent post on Mumsnet from a woman who, it sounded for all the world like, had encountered one of the 'guardian' types of BBD. She posted it more as a "what an odd thing" experience rather than as something supernatural.
I'll try to track down a link (once my @#$% computer stops 'updating').

* "Ecological niche is a term for the position of a species within an ecosystem, describing both the range of conditions necessary for persistence of the species, and its ecological role in the ecosystem." - from ScienceDirect website.
Think you're right. They got ABCs these days.
 
And nowadays it's so easy to fake a ghost, UFO or alien picture on your phone - there are even special programs for it. So maybe people just aren't bothering to photograph their ghost or UFO sighting because it will be met with 'obviously faked' if they do.
 
Foo fighters. What happened? Was it something specific to the airplane models or the fuel? Would air shows with old planes not still encounter them?
 
Forgive errors in what follows, this is off the cuff.

Somebody or other once asked on the board, "Where have all the Napoleons gone?"

For quite a considerable amount of time--this period being long after Napoleon's actual death--there was a small subset of fervent believers who thought themselves to be modern reincarnations of Bonaparte. Similarly, there were a number of more or less insane people, regularly replaced by reinforcements as temporal attrition took its toll, who would claim to be literally be him.

Most, it seems, were anglophones, but they'd either speak French or adopt a French accent and employ mannerisms that they would imagine Napoleon as having. Some would dress the part. All jolly good fun and a standard trope of comedians and writers.

And now they're gone--or as close as damn it.

With this, as with MrRing's good example, I wonder whether there might be a epistemological issue at hand:

Foucault has:

Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true."

Which is to say that each historical/cultural/philosophical epoch has its own set of traditions/rules/hermeneutics/semiotics (Kuhn has 'paradigm') that forms a framework out of which truth can be mediated by discourse: it's a combination of how people get to the truth of phenomena (any phenomena) and how they then speak and act intelligibly about that which they find. Such systems are largely 'closed' inasmuch as it's exceedingly hard to step outside of the framework or, indeed, like the fish in water, even to realise that one is acting within any constricting framework at all. Utterances and gestures generated within one paradigm will appear largely meaningless from without--or, rather, from a perspective of one within a different paradigm.

Could it be that our Napoleons, our physical materialisations, our gassers and phantom airships are fading from view because the systems that infused them with relevancy, the frameworks that classified them as viable and intelligible responses to the world, are now fading (already faded?) or crumbling (already dust?)? You might well be thinking here, "Dressing up like Napoleon doesn't seem very intelligible to me," but in my experience, a careful excavation of anything that seems absurd or irrational usually reveals an underlying logical structure, albeit one based on false belief. Humans are pattern-recognition machines and thrive on repetition--it's our modus operandi. From the primitive whose sympathetic magic requires a winter blaze to call back the sun in spring, to the Aztec who sacrifices innocents to appease a deity and stave-off still worse enormities, we have countless cases of human beings lumbering around in response to forces beyond their ken and doing the best they can to extrapolate from inadequate precedents, but we don't often lumber mindlessly. Throughout history it will be found that outright insanity is not nearly as common as our having laboured under a general miasma of misapprehension, and even the weirdest hysterias can be dissected to reveal a core of crystalline logic, if one can build up a complete enough picture of the cultural context to reveal the forces in play.

As the world is still out there in its baffling complexity, and the human condition with all its absurdity still obtains, ought it not be predicted that--as with the overdue bus--a whole new fleet of fresh oddities should be along shortly? It's probable that they'll be so wonderfully suited to our needs, wants, fears and desires that they'll creep up on us at first--and perhaps they won't seem so very odd as we move towards them tiny step by tiny step--but ultimately they'll end up seeming to both those left behind in the rush and our inevitable successors as incomprehensibly absurd as the Napoleons and the ectoplasm do to most people today.

Edit:
MrRing himself started the thread on Napoleons. This is clearly a subject that is eating away at him!
See here:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-the-napoleons-go-who-took-their-place.61725/

The following is a 100% true story.

Some say that the release of the movie The Exorcist in 1973 was the reason for the since far lower sales of Ouija boards and their association with demons and all things sinister.

However, our family had one and I can recall playing it with my mother one afternoon when I was young (aged 7). This would have been in '72 as it took place in our family home and my parents separated in '73.

I do remember us asking it some questions to which it gave some nonsensical answers and then I asked it if I'd lived before, to which it answered ''Yes''. I then asked it what my name had been and it said ''Napoleon''.

After than the planchette started moving erratically and my mother asked if it was me moving it. which it wasn't. This seemed to unsettle her and we stopped.

I assume that she threw the board out after that afternoon as I never saw it again anywhere in the house.

A vaguely interesting story, to which I can add that to this day I have no interest in Napoleon, I don't consider myself a Francophile (although I do enjoy a nice Champagne) and I've never been to France.
 
I'm being very meta and brought back this thread that refers to Fortean phenomena that we don't hear much of any more!

We have so far mentioned: delusions of being Napoleon, Toads-In-The-Hole, Ectoplasm, Foo Fighters (the lights, not the rock band), Big Black Dogs, Phantom Drummers, Astral Travel, Ghosts avec rattling chains and/or detached heads.

I've not heard of a headless horseman/coachman in recent years. I guess he'd be a headless Uber driver these days?
 
Tatzlwyrm, or other cryptids? Of course if real they may have become extinct. There are a few others Waitoreke, Nandi Bear, Unicorns.

Are Banshees still a thing or still heard?
 
Oooh, one doesn't hear of 'screaming skulls' kept in cupboards or similar so much now - probably the 1970s was the last wave of documented spookydom around human head-bones.

Tschhhh! It's all 'Slenderman this' and 'Shadowpeople that' nowadays....
 
Oooh, one doesn't hear of 'screaming skulls' kept in cupboards or similar so much now - probably the 1970s was the last wave of documented spookydom around human head-bones.

Tschhhh! It's all 'Slenderman this' and 'Shadowpeople that' nowadays....
It wasn't when we went cycling at Cannock Chase and I fell off in the same spot about 4 times.
 
Back in the 70s/80s there always seemed to be a report on a (usually) Indian chap who had either

a) stood on one leg for 50 years
b) could climb barefoot up a ladder made of swords
c) could give out electric shocks from his body
d) had held his arm up in the air for years, and
d) claimed to have not slept for years.
 
Back in the 70s/80s there always seemed to be a report on a (usually) Indian chap who had either

a) stood on one leg for 50 years
b) could climb barefoot up a ladder made of swords
c) could give out electric shocks from his body
d) had held his arm up in the air for years, and
d) claimed to have not slept for years.
Don't forget the 99 foot-long fingernails.
Before seeing a photo of such a case I'd expected the nails to be long and straight, maybe with a light manicure, not curly and gnarled.
 
Back in the 70s/80s there always seemed to be a report on a (usually) Indian chap who had either

a) stood on one leg for 50 years
b) could climb barefoot up a ladder made of swords
c) could give out electric shocks from his body
d) had held his arm up in the air for years, and
d) claimed to have not slept for years.
I remember seeing a TV programme where they interviewed the man with his arm held up in the air.
He'd done it as a tribute to some Hindu god and the muscles and bone had eventually locked his arm in that position. The muscles had atrophied and there was reduced blood flow.
So he had a useless arm. But he still seemed oddly happy. It reminds me of those fanatics who jumped under the wheels of a juggernaut (a wagon carrying a sculpture of Jagannath), happily giving their lives to honour a deity.

Edit: This man is still alive and has been holding his arm aloft for 48 years.
 
Last edited:
I remember seeing a TV programme where they interviewed the man with his arm held up in the air.
He'd done it as a tribute to some Hindu god and the muscles and bone had eventually locked his arm in that position. The muscles had atrophied and there was reduced blood flow.
So he had a useless arm. But he still seemed oddly happy. It reminds me of those fanatics who jumped under the wheels of a juggernaut (a wagon carrying a sculpture of Jagannath), happily giving their lives to honour a deity.
I wondered about that. Why on earth (or otherwheres) any deity would require, or otherwise entertain the idea of, someone paying tribute to them by essentially making part of their body useless. Surely any deity worth its salt should be sending the message to use your body for good or to help others, rather than by perpetuating an endless and pointless salute?
 
Back
Top