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FT404

Still waiting for delivery of issue 402...
 
Looking forward to mine arriving later today and scaring the dog.

Because the post drops right into the living room, I mean, not because I read the contents of Fortean Times aloud to the dog. Although, if lockdown goes on much longer...
 
Marilyn Monroe lives on as a ghost because she can't bear to leave the glamour and glitz of Hollywood and LA behind. Yet - conspiracy theories about murder aside - the most probable cause of death is suicide, out of a real sense of depression, alienation and despair - as if at that time she'd had an absolute gutful of Hollywood and LA. Or maybe being forced to stay is her punishment for committing suicide? Some spiritualist schools of thought say that suicide is punished on the other side - if only to point out to the post-suicide soul that you can't get away as easily as that, if you were driven to kill yourself then you have issues to work out before you can move on...

Again I wish I could remember the sources), but there is a recurring story that Bela Lugosi still haunts his last place of residence in LA - he apparently wanted to be buried in a crypt on the site. (but was eventually buried a long way elsewhere). The crypt exists and his spirit has allegedly been seen there by psychics. A story I read said that his last years were spent entertaining hangers-on who were proto-goths and vampire wannabees, and that this left an "atmosphere" in the house and grounds. (the psychic I read reported visiting the grounds, then "tuning in" to a satan-and-vampires themed party involving people in 1940/s -1950;'s clothing and hairstyles, and that there was an atmosphere of malice and menace in the psychic space. She reports going into the crypt and seeing Lugosi sitting upright, in the manner of a vampire rising from the grave, and getting peeved with her. (But he was buried in Culver City, some distance away...)

A longer article about Haunted Hollywood would be fun to read!
 
Reading on. The It Happened To Me thing where strange things happen to the science student who ends up on the fringes of the nuclear power industry and speculates, in passing, on the potential for odd things happening in that environment. Readers might be interested in Sir Terry Pratchett, who worked as a press officer for the electricity generating company and who sometimes had to interpret events at nuclear power plants for the general public. In one of his collections of non-Discworld writings, Terry tells a few stories (all the time regretting somebody else got in there first and wrote the definitive book on odd things at nuke plants- I'll need to locate the quote and add the name and title).
Terry ruefully said that with somebody else having beaten him to it and in his opinion having written the definitive text, there really wasn't a point in TP compiling his own stories - but he discussed a couple of stand-out events. one was the Haunted Pixie Mound just outside a power plant, where to excavate or interfere with the artificial hill meant a terrible lingering death at the hands of affronted fairies. The nuclear engineers said, in sober seriousness and with straight faces, that this had to be taken into account during the construction of the reactor plant as a very important design consideration.

"So we built a nuclear reactor on a haunted site associated with myths of bad-tempered Elves?" Terry asked, touching metal. Also wondering how to spin this one for PR if excitable people found out about it and started making a nuisance of themselves. He visualised bus-loads of hippies and unworldly fairy groupies and perhaps more serious Fortean investigators turning up. (TP may well have been an FT reader - he alludes a lot)

"Well...." said the engineers. It turned out that during construction, an entire JCB digger, the one with the spade and shovel attachment, had become so dangerously contaminated with radiation that it had been deemed most cost-effective to bury the whole thing and then entomb it in thirty feet of earth. This was known, as a private joke to engineers on site, as the Fairy Mound. They speculated as to whether calling it this had been a fairy-trap - that they'd made (and named) a sort of bird-box, a home for elves looking for a mound to colonise, and whether if, when the circumstances were right, on a full-moon night a glowing fairy chariot might burst out of the hill to go on a joy ride. Or whether the whispered tale might mutate and take on life in the local community, as a local piece of folklore of great antiquity, started perhaps ten years ago by themselves, and if so, what time-hallowed centuries-old legend might emerge.....
 
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Mine's is here today. Just had a swatch at it, but sad to see Mythconceptions isn't in it again. Polt article looks v. promising. Congrats to Nigel Watson, always good for high strangeness.
 
Got it: the reference is Terry Pratchett, A Slip of The Keyboard (collected non-fiction-writings) In which he relates having to deal with a German newspaper who had heard about the pixies who lived at the nuclear power plant and who, if not suitably appeased, could close down operations.
 
Cracking issue this one. Read every article for the first time in ages, and bought the book by Javier Sierra after the Prado feature. More like this please.
 
I liked that a case revealed as fake on the Letters page led to a case in IHTM that was very similar, but purported to be true (the lido one)!
 
Got it: the reference is Terry Pratchett, A Slip of The Keyboard (collected non-fiction-writings) In which he relates having to deal with a German newspaper who had heard about the pixies who lived at the nuclear power plant and who, if not suitably appeased, could close down operations.
And... the book Terry Pratchett wished he had written - in fact he contibuted a foreword to a new edition - concerning (among other things) odd possibly fortean) things at nuclear power plants and their eccentric management, is the Leaky Establishment by David Langford.
 
Some spiritualist schools of thought say that suicide is punished on the other side - if only to point out to the post-suicide soul that you can't get away as easily as that, if you were driven to kill yourself then you have issues to work out before you can move on...
Other occult schools say that a person is made of several parts. What I'm writing here fits something called Golden Dawn and its offshoots.

The astral part remains alive until what would more or less be the time of the natural death. This part perform processing of emotions, imagination and memory, so in principle these aspects of the mind would still be working on a ghost.

However, there are some factors preventing perception of these ghosts. The ghost itself may be, so to say, "sleeping", in a state of dream-like consciousness and less able to interact with other persons. If a person is more "aware" (a person who knows to be in a dreaming state, the so-called lucid dream) will be more detectable, but this, of course, can only be done in an astral level. It would be easier for this ghost to appear in dreams.
 
Re: Salvador Dali's Perpignan Station (p.56), the translucent figure (took me a while to see it) looks like a copy of the central falling figure rather than a crucifixion as the leg on the left can be made out.
 
So I was just reading the Battersea poltergeist article (okay, so I'm behind - a LOT of issues arrived in a very short span) and I thought it unusual that one aspect mentioned in the chronology, the exchanging of gifts with the polt at Christmastime, was not addressed in the article proper. Apports of things like jewelry that we assume were not previously known to the family is some pretty heavy evidence. And why did they want to give him presents if he was so malicious?
 
maybe same reason as you leave out nice things for the Fair Folk to have?
Good point. I have indeed done this. I never got into the cocoa and cookies for Santa, though.

But back to my main point: the gifts like the pendant and its "original bag"- why was this not investigated further? Surely this is either proof of a hoax, proof of mental illness, or proof of something REALLY spooky.



EDIT: Changed "it's" to "its". I hate when people make that mistake.
 
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maybe same reason as you leave out nice things for the Fair Folk to have?
There is the Russian entity called the kukimora, a sort of negative house-elf that charms you into thinking it's your best friend in all the world, and a friend does things for a friend, so I'll have the best vodka, the best cut of meat, and you wouldn't deny a friend that lovely clothing... basically a kukimora is a parasite who will take everything, give nothing, and show its thanks by playing sadistic practical jokes, or else wrecking things if it gets angry...
 
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There is the Russian entity called the kukimora, a sort of negative house-elf that charms you into thinking it's your best friend in all the world, and a friend does things for a friend, so i'll have the best vodka, the best cut of meat, and youy wouldn't deny a friend that lovely clothing... basically a kukimora is a parasite who will take everything, give nothing, and show its thanks by playing sadistic practical jokes, or else wrecking things if it gets angey...
I used to have a 'friend' like that.
 
Today 31st Oct 2021, the Mail on Sunday's "You" magazine is running a paranormal edition with Halloween-themered features. (Sombody else in the household buys it, before you ask....)

There's a four page feature on the Battersea Poltergiest and Shirley Hitchings that looks like it's been lifted from FT404 but which isn't attributed to FT. (I guess magazines do this sort of thing - syndicate and sell on articles for extra revenue?) Shame they couldn't namecheck FT.
 
Today 31st Oct 2021, the Mail on Sunday's "You" magazine is running a paranormal edition with Halloween-themered features. (Sombody else in the household buys it, before you ask....)

There's a four page feature on the Battersea Poltergiest and Shirley Hitchings that looks like it's been lifted from FT404 but which isn't attributed to FT. (I guess magazines do this sort of thing - syndicate and sell on articles for extra revenue?) Shame they couldn't namecheck FT.

From what I've heard, the tabloids just copy and paste loads of stuff and pass it off as their own. Sounds like FT is a victim of that.
 
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