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What Drew You to Forteana?

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Anonymous

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What drew you to Forteana? We're all here for a reason, but what is that reason?

A particular 'field' with little interest in other Fortean subjects? For example, interested in Cryptozoological phenomena but nothing else.

Did a life event change your outlook or even life? "I was abducted by the ghost of an alien!"

Possibly a skeptic who feels the need to point out how people are deluding themselves?

You have no choice, it's work-related. "I'm in the family business of Spirit Mediumship".

Maybe just always always been attracted to the 'quirky'?

All of the above? None of the above?
 
Always attracted to the quirky I guess. Constantly swinging between scepticism and belief and just the love of gathering info.

After reading a few posts I think I can get a bit of an education here even if a lot of it is over my head.
:confused:
 
The cute little A5 quarterly's with the woodprint covers of comets, UFOs and sea serpents.
 
What drew me to Forteana? Having a inquiring mind and being a nosey bugger, I suppose... ;)
 
1. The mythology/occult section in my local library
2. D&D
3. Lovecraft
4. Charles Fort
5. Forteana

In that order, beginning at about age 11.

Funny, my mom was a religious fanatic who forbade me to play D&D, or read about occult subjects.

Where there's a won't there's a way! :D
 
My father's collection of original 1950s and 60s UFO books ('We Are Not Alone', 'Flying Saucers Have Landed' and so on) and his dozens of books on ghosts and other paranormal/Fortean subjects.

I was a big reader and ploughed through them all many times as a child. This was the 1960s/70s - a girl my age was supposed to like Enid Blyton! :lol:

My mother's side of the family are spooky people and we are used to ghsots, precognitions etc.

So it all seemed sort of natural. :D
 
I'm sure we do this one over and over periodically.

Von Daniken and Project Blue Book for me, followed by The Unexplained magazine, all my older brother's doing.

He's dull as ditchwater now.
 
_Lizard23_ said:
I'm sure we do this one over and over periodically.
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Yes, but the over the 18 months or so, there's been a big turn over in board members. Lots of old posters going and lots of new comers and lurkers coming out of the shadows.
 
Von Daniken (believed every word of it when I was 10!), prob. too much Doctor Who/Space 1999, then later D&D and various RPG's.

Got introduced to the FT cira 1989 by a friend from school, didn't really get into it until a few years later.

Tbh guess I just like weird stuff. It makes me feel more normal :D
 
My Junior school had one or two books with unexplained and ghost photos in them that we could pick in our reading time; i loved looking over those.

Oh, and whilst looking at the stars my cub scout leader explained to me (and the rest of red six!) that even if there was only the very smallest chance of life on another world the vast number (perhaps infinite: that took some explaining to an 8yr old!) of other planets out there meant there was still a damned good chance of finding something, somewhere!

That though blew me away and got me thinking...
 
My brush with the Easter Bunny, story here.

Also a factor: my dad was a Navy veteran who had been stationed in Puerto Rico in the '40's, so he had loads of Bermuda Triangle stories.

Also my mom is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying member of the Skeptical Rationalist No Nonsense from YOU Missy Party, by which I mean she'd ask Jesus for his driver's license before she believed it was the second coming. No, I never told her about the Easter Bunny.
 
About the age of eight, our growing family swapped quarters with my widowed Grandmother next door. Now she had the neat ground-floor flat and we had the full Victorian house with its varous outbuildings and sheds.

My Grandfather had been the Company Secretary of the local paper and I think he threw nothing away. The sheds were bulging cabinets of curiosities - piles of old papers and glass photographic plates, boxes of old radio parts, dating back to the twenties.

Indoors, the vast mirrored sideboards were still filled with the detritus of war-time waste-not want-not constipation. Not the stools themselves, exactly but practically everything else!

Paper has a limited interest to kids but the old records seemed, to my brother and I, to contain mysteries more horrid than anything history contained. Even the vowel sounds were different, as we struggled to comprehend the simplest of ballads.

The books were everywhere and I vowed that one day I would read them all. Well I've ever since chickened out of Ivanhoe but I did wade through The Herbal Way To Health and the dozens of old travel books and the Hundred Wonders of the World and the complete Poetical Works of Longfellow in search of enlightenment.

Ah, the endless promise of a vast, chilly mildewed future was irrestistible! Meanwhile there was the promise of miracles! :shock:
 
Well, I've lurked here for around 3, 4 years. At first, I tried to register, but it said that my email wasnt good enough or something. So I contented myself with reading the entire IHTM, ufo, ghost and crypto forums over the year.

All of this changed when I tried to register for a tenth time, to realise that my email was suddently acceptable. I suspect a change in the administration for this. But alas, the forum doesnt seem active as they used to be, to my sadness.
 
It's always been an area of interest to me , but what I think really sparked it off was the eraly 80s partwork The Unexplained. That was pure class , the likes of which we could do with again . Also , about the same time there was Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World on TV .
 
I, too, was inspired by The Unexplained. That and being brought up in a big ol' Victorian house with a rather unreliable poltergeist.
 
Altogether now..

The Reader's Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts, at about 10 years old.

Then, an old, dust covered copy of Flying Saucers Have Landed I found in a box in the loft at my grandparents' house.

Then, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, The Unexplained.. and I never looked back.
 
Picked up a book at a car boot sale when I was 8, something like "1001 amazing facts" and there was a section about ghosts in it which started things off. Spin forward and I begged and pleaded for my mum to get me every copy of the Unexplained and then, much to my joy, picked up a copy of the Fortean Times back in the early 90's as something to read on a long coach journey (only picked it up because it had Mulder and Skully on the front cover). Never looked back, fearfully peeped round the corner of a dark corrider, occasionally had to sleep with the lights on after reading this forum and nearly have heart attacks when I hear things going bump in the night, but never looked back :D
 
Reading these comments I notice that The Unexplained has a lot to answer for . Maybe we should all start a campaign to bring it back
 
Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Greek and Norse Mythology the John Michell's 'The Flying Saucer Vision", then Von Danekin (picked holes in him from the start) and the other usual suspects.
 
Three very different and truly paranormal experiences, which in turn led to lots of reading. Still no wiser, but enjoying it ;)
 
Ever since I was about seven years old and heard about the supposed ghost in the school library and seeing a book flying off the shelf.
 
Ever since I can remember. Growing up in the seventies, there was a lot of paranormal stuff about in the media, a bit like the nineties I suppose. I even saw a couple of UFOs when I was about three or four. Went on to borrow as many "spooky stories" books from the library as I could throughout my childhood. Never lost the fascination.

I once saw that Reader's Digest book in a second hand bookshop. Didn't have enough money on me to buy it though. Maybe it's still there?
 
stuneville said:
Altogether now..

The Reader's Digest Book of Strange Stories and Amazing Facts, at about 10 years old.
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Oh laws yes. We had that one and a few other of the RD "spooky/unexplained/ancient civilizations" ones. They're worthy of their own entry in the Fortean hall of fame, I think. One of my parents, and I'm still not sure which, often brought home books about UFOs, Bigfoot etc. and I got hooked very early.
 
Some of the best RD books ever

(another one is the British Folklore tome)

I have always been interested, right back before i could read I loved to listen to folktales
 
Then, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, The Unexplained.. and I never looked back.
Click to expand...

Yep - count me in on that club too. Always, no matter how unlikely or absurd those stories, there was always that nagging question: what if...?

Also, those countless times during my teenage years when myself and a load of pals would sit up late scaring each other shitless with 'it's-real-you-know-it-really-happened' UFO and ghost stories.
 
My defining moment came at about age 10. I was in school and we were given another assignment to test reading comprehension. These assignments consisted of a three to four page narrative that were usually boring as all hell. We were then asked multiple choice questions about what we had just read. Now these assignments were from some educational company called SRA and came in a cardboard box consisting of about 30 different projects, so no student got the same one at the same time. We were expected to work out way through all of them during the school year.

Lo and behold, after reading countless fictional lame-ass stories like Ginny Has Some Jitters Before the Big Swim Meet, I get assigned one called THE DEVIL'S FOOTPRINTS. This article told the true story about some very odd tracks that were left in the snow one night across a British countryside. I remember the details like it was yesterday. The tracks look like horseshoes, except they were smaller and in single file. The depth and the spacing between the tracks never varied. The tracks covered amazing distances in one night. They appeared on top of 10-foot walls and on haystacks and roofs. They'd stop at a river and pick up on the other side. And the very best part, in some case the tracks would appear to stop at a dwelling's window...as if to observe the occupants inside. :eek!!!!:

After that, I got hooked on the unexplained. Our little school had exactly one book on the subject. It was mostly about ghosts. But I remember the first story I read from it was about that houseguest who awoke in the middle of the night to see a strange man lugging a coffin across the courtyard. That had me adequately creeped out, but then when the coffin man turned to look up at the houseguest I knew I probably wouldn't ever be able to sleep again. And then it actually got CREEPIER from there.

I'm so very tired........
 
Very early issues of FT i found at "Dark They Were And Golden Eyed" 's basment comic section..(was a big SF book shop in St Anes Court Soho)... bought it ever since, well till three months ago.... :cry:
 
Aha, THE DEVIL'S FOOTPRINTS. I read that story in a kids' comic when I was about 9 or 10. I still come across it now and then, like meeting an old friend. 8)

The 'coffin on the back' story too, that features in the kids' Usborne Book Of The Paranormal which I thoughtfully gave to my kids for xmas one year and which tainted or inspired (depends on how you look at it ) their world view from then on.

When I find books like that I pack them off to my friend to encourage her young Fortean son.

I didn't see the RD one until a few years ago, but we had the Unexplained part-work. You can get various combinations of that in books too. I have one here. The one with the terrifying painting of the black cat. :shock:

The supernatural used to scare me when I was a kid. As I grew up I realised that I was scaring myself by believing everything I read, as kids do, and needed to question more of it and think for myself. Otherwise I'd have been still hiding under the duvet at 50. :lol:

A good way to learn healthy scepticism. ;)
 
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