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IHTM-Style Books

Enid Coleslaw

Devoted Cultist
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Jul 21, 2016
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I have some time off work coming up and I was wondering if anyone could recommend any books that are similar to The Fortean Time It Happened to Me Books. Looking for books with shortish accounts that cross the spectrum - the kind of things you read across this message board. I particularly love the really weird, hard to categorize stuff and timeslips, less keen on UFOs, but would be happy with a good mix! Thanks in advance :)
 
i would also say paul austers Red Notebook, a collection of true accounts, mainly coincidence ... his fiction is full of this kind of thing also
 
also True Tales of American Life edited by auster from submissions for his radio show

That's a great book. Not specifically Fortean, of course - but one of those collections that make you realise that all life is remarkable, and sometimes, very odd. (And maybe, thinking about it, that actually is the essence of the Fortean.)

Very similar is style and ethos to IHTM (although based around a specific type of experience), True Ghost Stories of Our Own Time by Vivienne Rae-Ellis is a really very good read.

These are stories collected, if I recall correctly, after a series of radio appeals by the author, who asked for personal experiences, not local tales or FOAF's - and they aren't rehashings of anything you are likely to have read elsewhere. As the blurb on the back cover of mine states:
A considerable body of testimnony from ordinary people who have, in the common parlance, seen the most amazing things...With one or two exceptions, the reader is never in any doubt about the honesty of the accounts given...

Vivienne Rae-Ellis was Tasmanian, but lived in Bath at the time of publication, and the stories are generally, I seem to recall, UK based. The stories are almost all interesting, and there are a few which are genuinely quite frightening.
 
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I've got a book of first hand ghost stories from Singapore, it's from a series called True Singapore Ghost Stories by Russell Lee and is very much in the ihtm mould.
 
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 world: they had to be true, they had to be short, and they had to send a shiver down your spine ," according to Amazon. "The Burnt Airman" therein is one of the weirdest things I've ever read.

Annie Wilder's Trucker Ghosts Stories are an assemblage of accounts from long-haul truckers, who travel along the endless miles of North America. Has a few tales of people driving onto Twilight Zone roads that could not possibly exist. My favorite is "The Cross on the Car," like a "Stand By Me"-ish movie crammed into a few pages, with an apocalyptic ending (sorry -- no spoilers!).

A similar narrowing of theme is Fingerprints and Phantoms by Paul Rimmasch, which I devoured nearly overnight. Policemen meet ghosts and monsters and -- things hard to even define.

Mostly from one person's POV is Out on Foot by Rocky Elmore. As interesting as ghost and bigfoot sightings are his adventures as a border patrol guard on the USA/Mexico boarder. This book contains what I think is the greatest ghost story of all time. "I don't need any more ghost books," I said after I finished.

Haven't read the Jim Harold's Campfire Stories series or the Strange Things in the Woods books by Steve Stockton, but I've heard both speak on podcasts; they both solicit true (supposedly) stories from the public for their podcasts and books.
 
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 world: they had to be true, they had to be short, and they had to send a shiver down your spine ," according to Amazon. "The Burnt Airman" therein is one of the weirdest things I've ever read.

Annie Wilder's Trucker Ghosts Stories are an assemblage of accounts from long-haul truckers, who travel along the endless miles of North America. Has a few tales of people driving onto Twilight Zone roads that could not possibly exist. My favorite is "The Cross on the Car," like a "Stand By Me"-ish movie crammed into a few pages, with an apocalyptic ending (sorry -- no spoilers!).

A similar narrowing of theme is Fingerprints and Phantoms by Paul Rimmasch, which I devoured nearly overnight. Policemen meet ghosts and monsters and -- things hard to even define.

Mostly from one person's POV is Out on Foot by Rocky Elmore. As interesting as ghost and bigfoot sightings are his adventures as a border patrol guard on the USA/Mexico boarder. This book contains what I think is the greatest ghost story of all time. "I don't need any more ghost books," I said after I finished.

Haven't read the Jim Harold's Campfire Stories series or the Strange Things in the Woods books by Steve Stockton, but I've heard both speak on podcasts; they both solicit true (supposedly) stories from the public for their podcasts and books.

Thanks, going to try and get as many of these as I can.
 
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 book-load of the same dreary old ULs.
 
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