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A poster on one of our rival lists just yesterday asked if anybody knew any details pertaining to a vampire reportedly buried in West Chicago, Illinois', Resurrection Cemetery. Scratching noises supposedly come from the grave. I pointed out that while I'd never heard anything...

Getting to be time for this thread, and let me post the first predictions: Actor and ex-Senator Fred Thompson on the GOP Presidential ticket. Late in the year the stock market briefly flickers past 15,000 - followed by the Crash.

The following list appeared in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER for July-August, 1998. I find myself wondering if anyone other than a Professional Skeptic would so easily dismiss EVERYTHING on the list as hoaxes. The comments below are my own. I'd appreciate reading other opinions. 1. The...

This is something I've never seen mentioned in connection with the O. J. Simpson case, although I've personally wondered about it from the start: Could the "knocks" or "rappings" which Kato Kaelin heard on his cabana wall within minutes after the double-murders have been one of the...

I've several time encountered a rumor/report that on April 19, 1995 a military jet (unspecified) loaded for bear with Army and Air Force generals and Navy admirals flew towards Washington, D. C., with the specific purpose of overthrowing the Clinton Administration and appointing a new President...

One of the "givens" of the Paranormal is that sleep at least seems to be closer to the psychic world than the waking state and that some dreams appear to offer limited peeks into the future and/or the greater world beyond our bedroom walls. Now exactly how much truth there is in the above...

Dr. Wallace C. Minto was a legitimate American physicist but he spent much of his scientific career investigating "fringe" physics - inventing aura meters and building various radionic and psychotronic devices. He is most famous for his "radio to talk to fish" which received considerable press...

Last week at the Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention I picked up a MP3 disc featuring the voices of some of the most famous (or should I say infamous) flying saucer "contactees" of the 1950s. With one exception I'd never previously heard any of their actual voices. I'm talking about Dan...

I'm unable to find a thread on Daylight Apparitions, and thought it would be nice to have a repository for such reports. The two most famous examples, alas, are fictional - Peter Quint and Miss Jessel from Henry James' THE TURN OF THE SCREW. However this famous story was...

According to a couple of Spanish-language Paranormal websites there is somewhere in the United States a now-abandoned city called "Tomville." The reason the city was abandoned is that children kept vanishing from the place - hundreds or even thousands of kids. Today, according to...

According to an article by Jessica Shaughnessy in the April 30, 2004, edition of the CHESTER (England) CHRONICLE, two dead pedophiles may roam the Saughall section of Chester, "between the Vernon Institute and the Greyhound Pub." The two spooks apparently have a number of ghost children...

(Copied from the 'Human Mutilation Case Photos' thread) There was also the episode of the two Brazilian radio technicians who received instructions from the "aliens" to go to a high hill, lay on their backs, don leaden masks (which they'd constructed) and wait for contact. The next morning...

Jungian synchronicities are commonly such a minor and low-grade form of "paranormal" event that when we experience them we think about them for a second or two and then promptly forget them. Yet there were two I experienced four or five years ago, covering two subsequent days, that...

Did Aleister Crowley father surviving children? How many? Ann Lea ("Poupee") Crowley was born to Leah Hirsig Crowley in January, 1920, but she died at less than nine months old. (The birth and death are listed in the standard Hirsig genealogy.) There was also Aleister...

How common - or indeed how rare - ARE Paranormal phenomena? This question came up on another Fortean list three or four years back The estimates suggested ranged from a paltry 100 or so (through all human history!) to roughly 100,000. I thought even the latter estimate was 'way...

I need someone to check the factual appendix at the rear of Guy Endore's novel THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS. The information I need concerns a Ninth or 10th century British bishop (?) whose sarcophagus in Westminister Abbey (I think) was opened by modern antiquarians circa the 1890s...

Years back I read Daniel P. Mannix' novel THE WOLVES OF PARIS, set in mediaeval times and featuring a monstrously-large pack of highly intelligent but starving wolves who attack the City with very nearly military precision. While the tale is fiction, it was supposed to have been based on...

Elisheva Barsabe has suggested that it's time for the 2007 thread. So here it is. 2007 sees a massive nuclear explosion within North Korea. This will probably be an accidental detonation.

Fairly complete FATE indexes for the first several hundred issues can be be found in the back files of [email protected]. The noted St. Louis, Missouri, Fortean Ray Nelke posted them there five or six years ago (he was NOT the compiler). There are separate indexes for author and title...

Perhaps the single most effective "ritual" I ever used, years ago, was "writing" my desires in the air, at night in a darkened room, with a lit cigarette. But I gave up cigarettes years ago. Can anybody suggest an effective substitute? A candle gives an image too big and blurry...

The follwing is quoted in its entirety from FORTEAN TIMES, No. 122, June, 1999, page seven, right hand column, second item under "Sidelines": To Protect and Serve: The inscription on the metal bands used to tag migratory birds in the USA has been changed.The bands used to bear the...

Did the Jews originate in Peru? This is the theme of one of the very strangest books I've ever encountered - THE GREAT MIGRATION, by J. FitzGerald-Lee, LL. D., M. A., Ph. D. Originally published in 1932, my copy is the revised and expanded edition of 1951, posthumously edited by G...

I suspect the following is merely a more- sophisticated-than-usual Urban Legend, but I don't know for certain: "If you could walk into a bakery in ancient Babylon with an ounce of gold they'd hand you 300 loaves of bread. If you walk into a modern supermarket bakery with that same ounce...

Last evening (Friday night-Saturday morning) George Noory on the COAST-TO-COAST radio program interviewed Lionel Fanthorpe, science fiction author, Anglican clergyman and Fortean/ paranormal buff. Fanthorpe related, as a factual experience, a yarn which I have long understood to be an...

There's a common rumor in the United States that it tends to rain after midnight on July 5th, that precipitation caused by all the particulate matter put into the air on July 4th from both amateur and professional fireworks displays. The theory is that if there's the least bit of...

As a just-turning teenager around 1954 or 1955, it was common knowledge here in the American Midwest that those new-fangled sink garbage disposals were banned in New York State. (I first head this "fact" from my late Dad.) The fear, you see, is that murderers would use this method to...

In her book TIME TRAVEL, Jenny Randles in writing of "the now derelict sites of former Nazi concentration camps" remarks that "[e]ven animals will not go near according to some sources." Any documentation for this?

I'd like to start a thread for specific dates on which two or more separate Fortean and Paranormal events have occurred - be they ghosts, UFOs, "old hags" cryptozoological beasties, demonic encounters, fairy sightings, Mothmen, Yetis, time glitches and so on. [For various reasons, primarily...

There's a brief mention of this on the "Jack Klugman" thread, but surely the story's strange enough that it deserves a thread of its own. The famous Hollywood character actor and arch-villain George Zucco (Moriarty in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce SHERLOCK HOLMES films, among many...

This is inspired by a recent discussion on the "Crying Boy" thread, where it's getting just a hair off-topic and thus seems to deserve its own thread. Question: "Are Urban Legends strictly fictional accounts given a certain air of verisimiltude by constant repitition OR might many of...

I very often feel guilty about being here in the FTMBs since I so rarely read FORTEAN TIMES - for reasons one hundred percent financiaL. I was kept pretty much underemployed by Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Clinical Depression for the final dozen years of my working life and today exist on...

Just last evening I learned of something called the "Fort Worth Debris Footage." The still photographs I saw included "I-Beams" with "hieroglyphs" eerily-similar to (but not identical with) those shown in the Ray Santilli films publicized a decade ago. Can anybody tell me more about...

I could find no FTMB thread on this particular vampire tale so decided to start one. I include it here rather than under Cyryptozoology since it is almost certain nothing more than an Urban Legend. According to the legend which exploded across Peru in 1993, Sarah Ellen Roberts was a...

What I know is very vague - at some time during the middle of the 18th Century the wife of a Workington, Cumbria, blacksmith by the name of James Warren was reportedly attacked by a vampire. A short time later a second woman was attacked in her farmhouse a short distance from the town...

Here are the ones I remember: Age Four. Dreamed that my Mother and I walked down to the dentist's office in my hometown. Every person we encounted was a STICK PERSON. But my mother recognized them all and greeted them by name. My dentist and his nurse were also stick people. This was a...

Hoodoo and Jinx Ships In this fascinating discussion of ghost, hoodoo and jinx ships nobody's yet mentioned the American vessel SQUANDO and the Russian ship IVAN VASSILY. I'd like to know a great deal more about these two boats, since both stories seem to be "too bad to be true' and each of...

Mirrors One of the folk-belief reasons given for covering mirrors with crepe during the days of home funerals was that if a coffin got reflected in a mirror it would get "stuck" there and remain there always and you could never ever get it removed ("And they even tried Bon Ami!"), outing...

The following is from "Timeline for Taphophiles": "[In 1904] 'ghost dogs' dig up a Virginia potter's field and eat the corpses." The only other reference I know of to this gruesome bit speaks of "pauper's graveyards," PLURAL. So can anybody flesh out this report a little...

Here are three of mine to start this thread: 1. There are two huge wooden boards out in the middle of the ocean, slimy with seaweed and yoked together by great iron hinges. These boards rhythmically slap together, over and over, creating the tides. 2. The only difference between...

Back in the late 1940s or possibly very early 1950s, in my parochial grade school, a nun related the following "true" horror story to the class. According to Sister it was a comparatively recent newspaper account. Parents give their precious two- or three-year-old son a Superman suit...

From my collecting and archiving of recorded broadcasts from the "Golden Age" of radio, the 1920s through the late 1950s. Mostly American but some BBC stuff too. I started at age 18 in the early 1960s but the OTR avocation didn't become popular until around 15 years ago.

It strikes me that there are two main types of cryptids: The first category is composed of animals which, if they truly exist, are 'merely' those mammals, avians and reptiles which have not yet been regognized by Official Zoology nor protected/confined/displayed in Zoos. Yetis and...

All orthodox meteorologists and astronomers seem to be in agreement that meteors travel through space at absolute zero (or nearly so). Because of this, no meteors can land "hot." The friction of their passage through the atmosphere may cause their outermost layers to heat up to a depth...

I regularly scour the major Internet "true ghost story" websites and several months ago it became apparent to me that there seemed to be an inordinate number of hauntings (and other paranormal phenomena also) reported from Bluefield, West Virginia. So a couple of evenings back I decided...

A close friend of mine, a highly-educated woman with considerable university faculty experience, tells me the following story, which she claims she read about 1950 or 1951. She says that she most likely read it in READERS DIGEST, CORONET or PAGEANT magazines. (CORONET was a slightly poor...