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What Drew You to Forteana?

I can say four things drew me to it:

I read a book on ghosts when I was very little, one of the Usbourne ones. It seriously terrified me, but drew me in...

Later on, my nan collected those cards that were given away free in PG Tips boxes about various unexplained things. I still remember them very vividly.

I read one of Von Daniken's books when I was a young teenager, and fell in love with with the idea of ancient astronauts. I got very spooked by this, but in that good way.

The last thing, which really put the icing on the cake, was reading articles taken from usenet and put on disk magazines like Grapevine, which were part of the Amiga demo-scene. These were all about UFO related conspiracies and abductions. This was dynamite stuff to my young teenage brain, which I don't think was really very rational yet. :?
 
Several things:

1. My mother had an old copy of Charles Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle which fascinated me as a kid.

2. I saw several UFOs before the age of 15.

3. I instinctively knew Bonewit's Laws of Magic before I read them at the age of 14.

4. I loved the Thor stories that were run alongside the Spiderman stories in the old landscape style marvel comics.

5. The Tomorrow People. Nuff said.
 
Just sort of gravitated towards it at an early age. I read a lot of spooky books as a child and was totally hooked on horror movies at one point. I can remember seeing a horror comic book at the grocery when I was very young. There was a baby with a frog tongue who ate flies, and a guy who dramatically changed into a tree by first vomiting roots that plunged down into the earth. I couldn't buy the books then but I've always remembered those images. Then in later life came The X Files, which seemed to fill a void in me I hardly knew existed. I became a devoted fan. Somewhat strangely I discovered this particular website during a quite dark, depressing time in my life. It just seemed to perfectly suit my tastes and provided an intriguing escape. It seems like every day I learn something new here, and I like that.
 
I started on this kind of thing way early, some time in elementary school I think.. They had a bunch of those "history of UFOs" books and stuff (and some neat myth books). I think the desire to experience something unusual had to do with it, plus the fact that ghost books and those alien TV shows scared the willies out of me. Something between the adrenaline rush and the desire to be different, I guess.. that, and the fact that if there weren't an 'unknown' I would find life horribly boring.
 
In common with others here Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World and the Unexplained when I could afford it (I was fortunate enough to pick up vol.s 1-9 second hand for about UK£13 a few years back!) as well as Von Daniken, all at around the ages of 10-13. But even before that my mother's ghostly tales from her country village upbringing (exorcisms, violent poltergeists and ghost cars) and her Franciscan spirituality (as opposed to the RC religion they had in school!) imbued me with a sense of the otherworldly from an early age, leaving me predisposed to the first three sources I mentioned. My interest has never really flagged since then, and my own supernatural experience of poltergeist type activity in my early 20s confirmed once and for all my skepticism of the naturalistic worldview (at last I KNEW rather than wondered "if"!).
 
I love these sorts of threads because it highlights the importance of the books you read when you're between 8 and 14 - not coincidentally, "my" age group!

I was always interested in anything mysterious, and discovered early on that, while fiction satisfies the desire for solved mysteries, non-fiction satisfies the desire for unsolved ones! At the same time I started checking out novels (second grade) I started checking out those cheap, mass-produced anthologies of ghost stories, "real life mysteries," etc. I remember some My Weekly Reader books about haunted houses and sea monsters, Hans Holzer, and of course the incomparably unselective Frank Edwards. My brother bought them, too, including Von Daniken :roll: , and I've inherited most of his.

We didn't call them "forteana." We called them "rumor books." I still love reading them on the balcony on a sunny summer afternoon, eating potato chips and drinking ice tea.
 
PeniG said:
I love these sorts of threads because it highlights the importance of the books you read when you're between 8 and 14 - not coincidentally, "my" age group!
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Oh you don't look a day over 10!! ;)

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For me pinning it down would be difficult.

I suppose things like:

Where the Wild Things Are (which i still have)

and the one about the hunt for the Zipperumpazoo (cryptozoology for kids) and the one about the goblins coming down from the hills and a train kicking them out of town (I'm sure I've done this before and dug out the names).

Then later the Boy with the Bronze Axe and all sorts of junior sci-fi and fantasy.

Then Alan Garner.

Comics galore.

There were also a few books of odd stories - there is a nifty Puffin book on Magicians (Merlin, Maskylene, etc.) and others with odd mysteries in - the Devil's Footprints, toads in rocks (even a pteradactyl unearthed by French? miners), etc.

Then I read everything in the school library like Heinlein, etc. (Starship Troopers when I was 11 I think) and all sorts like John Carter, Conan.

Then Tolkein, David Eddings, Thomas Convenant, Michael Moorcock and much more.

I suppose I was well primed so that by the time I stumbled across my first FT a few years later it was like it was meant to be. ;)
 
Alan Garner is a favourite for me The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was probably the first fanatasy novel I read (at 13)

I still (over 30 years later) Have 2 copies of it just in case I lose one
 
giantrobot1 said:
Ah! The mystery hands! They're a classic!
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We had a whole thread on that card which I have been unsuccessfully trying to dig up again (can't seem to find it).
 
svart said:
Alan Garner is a favourite for me The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was probably the first fanatasy novel I read (at 13)

I still (over 30 years later) Have 2 copies of it just in case I lose one
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I still have the ones I read 25 years ago ;)
 
I was introduced to Fortean stuff by a book called Mysteries of the Unexplained which has short articles on hundreds (maybe thousands) of things, reaching across everything Fortean. To this day the best book on it I've ever read. It even has sources cited. I didn't know what Fortean meant at the time, but one of the most heavily-cited sources was The Complete Book of Charles Fort.
I tell ya, though... I could fill up every forum on here with threads based on stuff from that book I haven't seen discussed elsewhere.
 
svart said:
Alan Garner is a favourite for me The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was probably the first fanatasy novel I read (at 13)

I still (over 30 years later) Have 2 copies of it just in case I lose one
Click to expand...

Excellent book. We had that read to us at grammar when we were about the same age. Our English Lit. teacher, Trog, at that time was a massive bloke with a booming, cavernous voice to match. He used to read this book whilst whittling wood into the classroom bin. Fantastic.
 
Have been reading through those pg tip cards and the quote

Some have been attributed to wandering groups of Vikings or Welshmen
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really really made me laugh..how often, when thinking of ancient Amerindian 'Effigy Mounds', have I though about ancient Welshmen :lol:

Then it struck me as a little sad that as a child I would have read through those cards with my eyes wide with wonder and believed every word and now as a crusty old grown-up I just tend to think "yeah right"..

I think that only children can be truly Fortean as they do not have the cynicicm of adults

anyway back on topic...
 
What drew you to Forteana

July 20, 1969...

Ghost stories, UFOs, myths/legends, archaeology, grappa! :oops:
 
I saw a UFO*, and ended up reading about that sort of thing. (I hadn't yet separated cryptozoology, UFOs, the paranormal, and fortean occurances in mind.) My belief was later replaced by skepticism, but I still find all those subjects interesting. I must confess I use this board mainly for ideas for RPGs.

*UFO is used in the most literal sense, that is, as an Unidentified Flying Object. It most certainly was not a spacecraft of any kind, and was probably part of a weather balloon. They were doing lots of atmospheric tests back then due to pollution.
 
Survival

I started the same thread on fort@yahoogroups several years back.

I stated at that time that the root cause of my Fortean and Paranormal researches was to discover indications of human (and perhaps even other animal) survival of consciousness past the point of physical death.

Without in any way rejecting the above, today I might express this a hair differently - to uncover evidences of human (and possibly other) multi-dimensionalities in a multi-dimensional Universe.

Now if you ask me what in the heck out-of-place kangaroos in Kansas City or MIBs in Manchester or ghostly hitchhikers in Honduras have to do with human survival, I'd be extremely hard-pressed to give you an answer....but I'm convinced that it's there SOMEWHERE.

After 40-plus years of this stuff I still don't have any firm answers, but I'm slowly getting some vague idea of what QUESTIONS to ask.

Another 10 to 15 years on the Internet and I may finally have framed some firm QUESTIONS.
 
Although I've had strange things happen ever since I can remember, as a child I stopped asking questions about things that happened having grown tired of Rose Fyleman's "There are fairies at the bottom of my garden.." being quoted. It wasn't till I was 18 that I began to notice experiences again. However after I had my last child things began to speed up after I found some of Edgar Cayce's books at a market. After that I started looking for books to explain the things that happened. I was so happy when I found this site because I found that other people had interesting things happen to them too.
 
I think it's in my genes. I recently came across a book in the library that I loved when I was about two. It's a pop-up book, called "Haunted House."
 
My grandad's copy of The Readers Digest 'Mysteries of the Unexplained' was what drew me in. Particularly the section covering coincidences for some reason. Whenever we went to visit my grandparents at some point my grandad would unlock the bookcase and hand me 'my book' and we'd sit and look through it together. I was about 14 before I was allowed to look at the photos of supposed SHC cases!
But despite a life long fascination with the spooky and fortean, I have never had anything happen to me that couldn't ultimately be explained.
 
Loads of little bits of things

My Grandmother's Manx Ghost stories
Charles Berlitz books on the Bermuda Triangle
Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World on TV
The Unexplained Magazine
My Dad telling me it all had a rational explanation, and I was wasting my time in looking at it anyway.

Flip/Flop belief/scepticism
 
For me it would be just having been a bit of an 'outsider' as a child and being intrigued by things that were 'on the outside' - known, but not explained. I am otherwise a very logical and analytical type, but anomalous data always intrigues me - because something must have caused it.

Also, meeting my doppleganger twice kind of kept me interested!
 
For me I always had a child's interest in ghosts, monsters, weird stuff. I got into horror, sci-fi, fantasy as a nipper and then whilst on holiday in Ireland at a little cottage my mum rented, I found a copy of FT that the previous tenant had left behind. I have not missed an issue since. This was 15 years ago....
 
Comic Books and FATE

My interests developed via this route:

1. Being absolutely fascinated by fantasy comic books as a young child during the late 1940s and early 1950s;

2. Discovering scienc fiction at age 13 (1954-1955), the stories of H. P. Lovecraft at 14 and numerous fictional ghost story collections that same year, the works of Charles Fort at 15 and FATE magazine when I'd just turned 16; [I wrote frequently for FATE during the 1970s.)

3. At 18 I began a 40-year career in new, used and rare books during which I was able to read almost all the old Fortean and Paranormal classics. For most of that period I worked within a few blocks of the Cincinnati Public Library (while Cincinnati is a smaller city, it has the second-largest public library system in the United States), and I managed to at least glance through EVERY item in the Occult and Paranormal stacks, back through the 19th century stuff.

Old Time Radio (George Wagner in Cincinnati, Ohio)
 
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