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The O.P. sounds like neither going into "mental overdrive" nor hopping into an alternate universe would have helped -- unless there was a world where a right-angled road turn was straight there. Sounded like a high-speed, instants-away-from-impact hit right into a stone wall -- even if the...

Anyone here familiar with Philip Jose Farmer's "Wold-Newton Family?" His books Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life PROVE that Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan were real people!!! . . . . As were Professor Challenger, the Shadow, Dr. Clarke Savage, Jr., Allan Quatermain, Lord Peter...

I remembered this IHTM story from long ago. It's in one of the IHTM anthologies, but it's also here on the board: Crawling Skeleton

One of my hobbies, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is finding/correcting/expanding the sources of John Keel's Strange Creatures from Time and Space. And if we're still looking for bare bone walking, here's an old classic: [SCFTAS p. 25] Another Unbelievable had the poor taste to show up uninvited...

I always like when an already fortean tale carries a detail that makes it all the stranger, such as the fact that the skeleton sometimes marched purposefully across the sands yet at other times it stumbled in circles like a confused Roomba. In my own essay on the skeleton, I mention Borrego...

Paulides says he has five or six criteria for considering a missing person case unusual. I think there's something to it all, not simply because of his claims in his books (though I've read twice each, making many notes), but because of cases that just slightly miss his criteria -- cases that...

(NOTE: This topic has been spun off into its own thread.) ... (H)ere's a little ditty from my book I Heard of That, Too, which is to be published . . . sometime after the pandemic: The earliest report came from an old desert rat known only as Charlie Arizona. One dark night he was camping...

There was an updated version in the 1990s, called The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings, which added a chapter on Communion and abductions, plus a scattering of new paragraphs here and there, but it was unsatisfactory, leaving in many mistakes (like dating the Croglin Grange vampire to 1875)...

Didn't know where to post this, but Fortean Pursuits/Fortean Culture sounds good. I struggled through 2019 without celebrating the 100th anniversary of Fort's Book of the Damned, and before this infinitely worse year of 2020 passes I want to make mention of the 50th anniversary of John A...

Well, I have (or had) just about every INFO Journal above #43, but I can't find #68. I recently moved, so perhaps it's ended up in some dirty, oily corner of my parents' barn (with most of my other belongings). I'll post again if I ever find it.

:oops: But are the Ubermensch on the Space Turkey or Dog-Man side?

Looked up the journal again. I must have just assumed the witness left in a hurry. Sounded like he wanted to. Oh, well, here's some Pwdre Ser: The shapeless space monster was probably inspired by an old fortean favorite, “Pwdre Ser.” Charles Fort wrote of various cases of gelatinous “blobs”...

Well, the Corvid 19 lockdown got me to continue writing the book I never thought I'd finish. Here's a little ditty that might fit in this thread: It Leaps and Creeps and Glides and Slides In September 1969, a young man named Maurice Colbert drove the young woman he was dating to...

Back in the '80s I wrote a novel called Beyond the Maelstrom, which was a sequel to Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. In its original form it was slightly longer than Moby Dick. I wrote it all in longhand, typed the first draft, typed the second draft, and when I finally entered the...

I'd read about this legendary magazine in the late seventies, but I had no idea in those pre-Internet days how to find any info about a magazine from Europe. However, at Oklahoma State University, a short, weekly newsletter appeared devoted to the paranormal (a la Nature or New Scientist for...

humanoidlord said: In that case I'll print another excerpt!: Kilometer 29 In early May, 1980, at about 8:30 PM, according to the Argentine newspaper El Independiente of May 14, a busload of country people and schoolteachers were riding toward the city of Chapas la Sur...

Sollywos wrote: Actually, I was calculating what time it was in Britain, to see if anyone would be up! It's probably just because it "seems" more appropriate, but I've only heard of midnight as the witching hour. (In fact, there's a comic book by that name: Witching Hour.) Actually, other...

I've just started the project that will probably take the rest of my life, reading all my Fortean Times in order. I finished The News no. 1 just last week. On page two it says: "Cover: adapted from an old advertisement for Selfridges, by Bernard Partridge." It also says, "single issues -...

I have a chapter devoted to "Cities and Castles in the Sky" in the book I'm presently writing, Other Realms, about possible dimensional overlaps. Here's an excerpt: Kentucky native Barton M. Nunnelly is best known as a cryptozoologist, being the author of books such as Mysterious...

I probably have 60 books on WWII -- and I've read one, so far. Never Surrender, the autobiography of a Japanese soldier who lived on a jungle island for 30 years without realizing the war was over. I started on Churchill's history, but he starts out with "You couldn't possibly understand all...

"Oh God, midnight's not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two's not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning's not bad there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon.But three, now, Christ, three a.m.! The blood moves slow.You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save...

I believe Dr. Omand (see above) blamed "Sea Madness" for the Seven Hunters Lighthouse disappearances (too lazy to dig through his whole book today). Didn't the (still human-looking) Deep Ones feel such a call in Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth?"

I could have sworn this "Call of the Sea" was a common phenomenon mentioned in all those paperback paranormal books of the '60s and '70s by the likes of Steiger, Keel, Bernhart Hurwood, John Macklin, etc., but searching around my personal library gave me nothing except a note in Harold T...

Dr. Donald Omand was the minister at Christ Church, Oxford, who famously exorcised Loch Ness and the Bermuda Triangle. When he was ten years old, he noticed that his grandfather, "a stern Calvanistic minister," seemed to devote a lot of time to praying for sailors and others who depended on the...

One of the great shocks in my life came when I read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. No, not Big Brother, the Ministry of Love, or "Ignorance is Strength" . . . After Winston Smith is incarcerated, he is surprised that he needs to urinate. After all, he had gone only four hours earlier. This...

This thread reminds me of one on clones a couple of years ago, and of the probability of recognizing your own double:

I've heard a few people remark over the years that they had seen someone who looked exactly like me -- different places and years apart. I had fun with one named "Chester W. Monday," though. Periodically I would apply for jobs at the University of Tulsa. The people at the Human Resources...

Around age twelve I was taken to a store (called Skaggs back then) and was allowed the treat of one paperback book. My choices narrowed down to either a horror/suspense novel, Crawlspace, or Day of the Triffids. Glad I chose the latter! I had read a few science fiction short stories before...

Got my own copy of Why Have They Taken Our Children? by Jack Baugh and Jefferson Morgan, about the Chowchilla kidnapping. May be too scary for me to read, judging by the photo section! It's bad enough kidnapping people but burying them alive too?! :Givingup: I read 83 Hours Till Dawn, about a...

Ah! Here's the thread I've been waiting for! Twenty-five years ago I started a fantasy trilogy with several fortean themes . . . but the more I wrote the fewer fortean references I had (I love to mention "real" fortean events in stories). And when I finished -- it just sort of sat there...

Sometimes I'm interested in negative correlations, such as when some phenomena stop happening. One of my more recent hobbies is reading the Missing 411 series of David Paulides, about mysterious disappearances of people in the wilderness and national parks (and more recently in more urban...

A lovely drawing of Momo

Throwing it at babies is the only use I have for cheese. I get ill just smelling the stuff. But I love Wallace and Gromit! Go and figure.

Yes, I well remember all the stories about MOMO, the Missouri Monster, back in '72. After all, the site of its appearances was only a two hour drive from our home! Momo, the Missouri Monster Whoops! Wrong Momo! Well, one of the creepier aspects about our Momo was that it had no apparent...

The stop-motion Gumby cartoons (no relation to certain Monty Python characters) produced some frightful images for children in the 'sixties, some probably unintentional. The most memorable outright monster for me was The Glob.

Perhaps identical to the Snake-Tree is the hideous Rattle-snake Bush of Mexico, mentioned in Charles M. Skinner's book, which was "a tree of serpents that wound its arms about men and animals that tried to pass, and stung and strangled them to death." From the Field Museum of Natural History's...

From Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants by Charles M. Skinner (1911): We may dismiss as mythical the travelled tale of a Venus fly-trap which was magnified into quite another matter before Captain Arkright was through with it, for such tales grow larger the farther they go...

But here in the Super-Sargasso Sea, just because something is impossible doesn't mean it doesn't exist! (But the thought of sea anemones makes me wonder: what if there was something that resembled a plant that started such stories? Like: In the September 24, 1892, Illustrated London News...

"Science Jottings," from the Illustrated London News, August 27, 1892: SCIENCE JOTTINGS BY DR. ANDREW WILSON I have lately met with the description of a very singular plant, given originally, I believe, in a provincial newspaper. As one is always interested in the strange and weird as...

A friend of mine originally from Mississippi many long (30+) years ago told me about the "Kudzu People," little dwarvish creatures that lived beneath the mounds of kudzu in the south. Those photos make it look like a whole kingdom could hide under there!

Well, I started the plunge and began House of Leaves again after several years. I'm up to page 50 with 600+ pages to go, but I was hooked by page 8. Much of the book is dedicated to describing what the protagonists are catching on video tape; certainly there are overtones of Ringu movies and...

At last! All that fortean reading was not a waste of time! From Troy Taylor's American Hautings Ink come my first genuine hard-copy book, I Heard of that Somewhere! Viz: A hundred years ago, a young boy went out to the well to fetch a bucket of water and never came back. His family went to...

I believe some of the Jim Harold and Steve Stockton stories are available only on Amazon Kindle, but I've heard both recite the tales they've collected on podcasts. I have a sizable number of "local" or regional ghost story volumes; they slide all over the board, to nearly all IHTM-like to a...

As usual, I'm in the middle of about 30 different books at the moment, but as memories of the first 200 pages or so of HOL come back, I want to dive into it again . . . as if I had the time.

Having endured just about every hypnogogic, hypnopompic, night-terrors, sleep-paralysis event known to Man, I'm wondering if psychologists and sleep-studies know that much about them. For instance, I'm convinced images wander through one's mind throughout the sinking-into-sleep period -- but...

As a kid, in the dreams, I'd think that it was just a room everyone in my family . . . just forgot to glance into when they first moved in. There were real-world places that struck me as pretty strange, though. Our grandparents house had an attic which, from the outside, seemed to have a floor...

If one see faces with one's eyes closed, I'd say they were hypnogogic images. That's a strange kettle of fish. In ordinary dreams, however weird, the little dream characters I see act like characters in a movie -- they're in the middle distance from "me" and are going about their business...

I could have sworn I read that HOUSE OF LEAVES started out as a web site, and that its multilayered narrations and side-stories are due to the different web-pages being crammed into ordinary book form. I started reading HOUSE many years ago but stopped after a couple hundred pages, not because...

I was quite the materialistic little fellow as far back as I can remember. I can't imagine a time when I would have looked upon a moving/talking teddy, doll, or other toy as anything but horrifying, or a time when I would not freak out if a ghost or imaginary playmate popped up. I had a polar...

These types of books are getting to be the only kind of forteana I like any more -- raw material in the witness's own words. It Was a Dark and Creepy Night assembled by Joshua Warren is like that. "There were only three rules when Joshua P. Warren began collecting these stories from around the...