Fake 'True' Occult & Mystery Books

MrRING

MrRING

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Okay, maybe there is a thread about this somewhere, but has anybody ever done a study to determine if a book of supposedly "true" fortean/occult/mystery stories is just a made up fiction or based on true reported cases?

My case in point is a book by John Macklin called Caravan of the Occult published in 1971. It says in the front piece: CARAVAN OF THE OCCULT is not the recounting of a unique, solitary supernatural incident, or the story of one extraordinry stranger among us. It is a highly instructive, authenticated, mind-boggling collection of TRUE stories, by an internationally recognized expert on the strange world of the occult.

So that tells me that these were supposed to be true stories. But I can't find any reference to any of the stories online, so maybe he just made them all up?? In particular, these cases seem like they should be authenticatable, because they mention so many specific names and places:

1) Squaw Mitsue is a wise Native Indian woman from British Columbia who curses fellow tribesperson Pierre Williams to a slow painful death, and his body was found caught in a bear trap months later. She cursed Pierre because he lusted after her niece but the niece had another boyfriend.

After visiting boyfriend Bill Gills one night, Pierre's spirit appeared to her (he was in jail at the time) and ordered her to kill Bill - Pierre was rumored to be able to force his will on people with his gaze. She did, but she later commited suicide after she told Mitsue what really happened. That's whn she cursed Pierre, and the rest is history. (No date, & no other names given).

2) The Well of Fear at "The Welcomes", which is a farm in Haynes Lane, Kenley, which is according to the book a London suburb. Owned by Reverend George Tombe, a rector of Little Tew in Oxfordshire, it was used by his son Eric Tombe and a friend Ernest Dyer, both WWI pilots, as a stud farm operation. After some embezzelment by Ernest, Eric dropped him out of the operation as he hadn't put any money into it. Eric then disapperared on April 5, 1922, and his father began to see a disfigured ghost of his son in a dream that pointed to the well on then property.

Ernest Dyer was living in Paris and forging Eric's names on checks, so the police didn't believe his story. He pushed the police though and they eventually drained the well, where they found a nude body. They couldn't identify it as his son.

But the police started to look at the Paris checks closer, noticed they were forged, and sent over the local police to capture Ernest. When they got to him, Ernest pulled out a gun, but a ghostly force made him turn the gun on himself and shot himself in face the same way Eric Tombs was killed.

3)The House of Unease on Clarendon Road, Norwich, where from 1950 to 1955 the Dorian family experienced just about every kind of supernatural activity, from poltergeist to actually seeing a dark evil salamander creature. Aside from the parents (not named) the kids are Pauline, Gwen, Eric, Ian, Bernard & Andrew. When the manifestations started, they seemed harmless and they called the spirit "Barney", but there seemed to be another spirit there as well, and it had evil intentions. They started trying to sell the place, a "substantially built, three story suburban house" but apparently there was some kind of economic crisis in England at the time and they couldn't sell it easily & thus they had to endure two extra years of frights while they found a buyer.

Do any of the stories sound familiar? Or has this book been debunked?
 
The Squaw Mitsue story was in 'Fate' mag in the 1960s. I read it in a 'Fate' collection.

The exact words of the curse are-

'You will die slowly- alone- and in great pain!'

He was indeed found in the bear trap, so the story goes, with a gun but no ammunition, having fired it all to keep wild animals away.
:eek:

Don't remember reading the rest of the story though.
 
There's certainly a Hayes Lane, rather than a Haynes lane in Kenley, which is a South London suburb and Clarendon Road in Norwich, so if someone is making up the stories it's a bit unusual as made up stories tend to fudge details to thwart checking.

I found a ghosts of Norfolk website, but it doesn't appear to have anything on there about your tale.

Spooky Norfolk:
http://www.edp24.co.uk/Content/Features/SpookyNorfolk/asp/Norwich/defaultNorwich.asp
 
Intersting stuff - is Fate considered to publish authentic reports? I'm just not sure of it's reputation.

Two more British mysteries to see if they are known:

1) The Dartmoor Hands phenomenon in the spring of 1918. Basically, anybody riding through the area would feel hairy paws taking control of the steering wheel of their vehicle and cause them to crash. A Lieutenent Frost is mentioned in the story as actually seeing the hairy hands over his own briefly before the accident.

2) James Hargreaves in Nov. 1947 had "just passed through Morton Hampstead and was driving across the bleak wilderness of Dartmoor" when he had an accident and crashed. He walked to the nearet house in the blinding snow. He was met by a local named Harold Wickings, who was about 80, and his young wife Elizabeth, in her twenties & wearing old fashioned clothing. Expressing concern that his parents know about his crash so they wouldn't worry, Elizabeth said they know and they are not worried and furthur, his dad's health problems would soon improve. This and the age difference caused James to ask about the arrangemnt, where Harold told him that Elizabeth had died as his young bride but that she had been able to visit him briefly each year afterwords. James wanted proof, and he went to touch her arm and she was at first flesh, then immaterial.

James woke up the next day and only Harold was there, and they didn't talk about the event. When James finally got home, his parents said that a young woman had come to the house to tell them that James was okay...

And a last mystery:

3) Dr. Johann Kauffman, who claimed to be able to visit remote places by projecting himself there, dissapeared after leaving a note saying he was try to project himself to Mars.
 
The dartmoor hands is a classic - I have heard of it in a few places. No idea about it's authenticity, though- just a everyone knows about it kind of a thing.
 
The Dartmoor Hands has been mentioned in so many compendiums it's untrue. So many that it's started to achieve apocryphal status. Good story though.

(note how people stopped reporting the incidents after the story gained momentum though . . .)
 
Just got through reading another story in Caravan of the Occult. It concerned a rector named John Hawkes who was filling in for the regular priest. On his first night, a child's disembodied hand tried to attack him while he was reading a book. He fought it off and knocked it into the floor where it disappeared. He talked to the family, who had one daughter that saw it in the room he was staying in, though nobody believed her.

Through various machinations of story, a few years later Hawkes spoke to a spiritualist who chided him for being too scared to listen to what the spirit was trying to say. He tried to go back to the rectory, but the pastor he subbed for had already left. He eventually realised by just visiting the rectory that it wasn't the place that was important, it was the book and the day he was reading it. The book has a tale of a young girl who was playing a trick on her dad cutting wood and whose hand was severed. She survived, but the father and her slowly sank into depression. The hand was never found, it was lost when he ran the daughter to the doctor. The pair eventually disappeared, with the father eventually found drownd in a well not far away, and the daughter missing. The day he was reading the book was an anniversary of the accident, and the hand was probably trying to get his attention to read that passage.

Hawkes was able to locate the house they lived in, and found a weirdly constructed wall that held the body of a girl missing her hand.

It was supposed to happen in Birminghamshire, with the first ghost incident happening to Mr. Hawkes in 1922. Anybody heard of it elsewhere?
 
FATE

MrRING said:
"s 'Fate' considered to publish authentic reports? I'm just not sure of i's reputation."

FATE is now 58 years old and has had a very honorable history. Over the decades such noted Forteans, paranormalists and psychic researchers as Dr. Nandor Fodor, Hereward Carrington, Jerry Clark, Ivan Sanderson, Loren Coleman, John Keel, D. Scott Rogo, Grey Barker, Martin Eibon, Vincent Gaddis, among many others, have published within its pages.
Click to expand...
 
John Macklin

John Macklin took well-known urban legends and added specific names, dates and locations to make these old tales sound more evidential. He also updated mediaeval legends by many centuries to make them sound "more modern."

The classic example of the latter was Macklin's transferrence of the hoary old "Green Children" tale from its roots in 12th Century England to the non-existent village of Banjos, Spain, in 1887.

And unfortunately some otherwise-reliable Forteans have taken that "Spanish" version seriously and used it to validate the original 12th Century story! Look, they write, that old English report MUST have been true, because the same events transpired AGAIN in Spain 700 year later....
 
Re: John Macklin

OldTimeRadio said:
John Macklin took well-known urban legends and added specific names, dates and locations to make these old tales sound more evidential. He also updated mediaeval legends by many centuries to make them sound "more modern."
Click to expand...

Is the only proof of this his handling of the green children case? Or has he been discredited elsewhere in detail?
 
Re: John Macklin

MrRING said:
"Is the only proof of this his handling of the green children case? Or has he been discredited elsewhere in detail?"
Click to expand...

Personally, I found that more than enough.

It's been the better part of three decades since I last read much Macklin, but if memory serves the "Green Children" case was but one example out of many.
 
I always enjoyed Macklin's books. Pretty good storytelling. As long as you read them with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are at least a dozen other paperbacks just like Caravan of the Occult. There is no doubt he took old stories and rewrote them. In one of the other books he does a story about a Greek vessel that is sailing in the Indian Ocean in summer 1948, when suddenly it sends a SOS, then silence. Rescue vessels are dispatched and find the ship. All hands are dead with their faces in looks of sheer terror.

That story may sound familiar to some. That's because it is the (somewhat) well known story of the Ourang Medan which was featured in a number of popular books including Vincent Gaddis' Invisible Horizons. Macklin simply rewrote the story word for word, except for changing the vessel's country of origin to Greece, and changing the ending...(the real ship sank, Mackin's ship was towed to Athens).
 
I think #1 (to original poster) is repeated in the bit about sympathetic magic in the unexplained
I've felt "a bit funny" driving thru the road where the hairy hands were in dartmoor, only later discovering it ws the same one...
 
soaringspirit said:
"There is no doubt [Macklin] took old stories and rewrote them. In one of the other books he does a story about a Greek vessel that is sailing in the Indian Ocean in summer 1948, when suddenly it sends a SOS, then silence. Rescue vessels are dispatched and find the ship. All hands are dead with their faces in looks of sheer terror. That story....is the (somewhat) well known story of the Ourang Medan....Macklin simply rewrote the story word for word, except for changing the vessel's country of origin to Greece...."
Click to expand...

I can see (NOT approve of!) updating the "Green Children" legend by 700 years, to make it more saleable. But why in the world do that to the OURANG MEDAN, when the original story is scary enough in itself?

Alas, Macklin's tendency to do things like this has occasionally caused me to reject TRUE tales he relates. One of these was the "Phantom Coach of Eccles Hall," even though I collect Phantom Carriage stories. But I eventually found pre-Macklin documentation.
 
Unfortunately some of the very best writers in our field seem to occasionally fall victim to this peculiar malady.

Here are two examples from Tom Slemen, one of my favorite authors and a man who writes like the wind on fire:

1. In one of his books Slemen switches the story of the 1930s "Suicide Song" GLOOMY SUNDAY from its well-known place of composition, Budapest, Hungary, to Paris, France, for no reason that I've ever been able to decipher.

2. He also tells of "Soap Sally," an old hag from Liverpool who sold homemade soaps door to door - without of course, telling her customers that she obtained the fats for her soaps by murdering young girls.
Slemen even includes a supposed photograph of this serial murderess! But the truth is this - "Soap Sally" (under that same name) is a hoary old Urban Legend from the southern United States.
 
i notice in the current FT (208) Ulrich Magin casts doubt on Peter Costello's account of a monster in lake maggiore which he claims is sourced from something Stendhal wrote (p.46)

has anyone got any further information on this and on anything else peter costellio has written. (he's still alive and kicking so ... )
 
Michael Hervey

Michael Hervey is another. He published paperbound newsstand pop- Fortean books in the 1960s and 1970s and a few magazinre articles here and there. Several of his accounts are so vague as to hold nothing which can actually be researched. And one of his "true strange" assortments includes a tale, "The Apes of Oros," which seems to be a fictional short story added to pad out the collection.
 
I was surprised to find several occult books in the newsstand of a nondescript French petrol station.

I could have bought:
- The practical guide to previous lives
- The practical guide to spiritism
- The magical rituals of the Marseille tarot

Combined with:
- Sexuality is health :D

Well, where do you get such a selection of books at the roadside?

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e182/uair01/occult.txt.jpg
 
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