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What Was Your First Interest In Fortean Topics?

I was raised on it. My father's mother was a Spiritualist and told us kids stories of Manifesation Mediums :shock: (which she witnessed many times) and my father collected books on every Fortean subject known - UFOs, ghosts, the Yeti, the hole in the earth, Atlantis, teleportation, you name it. :D

My mother didn't hold with any of this, while regularly seeing and hearing ghosts. :lol:

Having seen how the gullible can be exploited by the cynical, I tried to bring up my own family with a healthy scepticism but was thwarted at every turn by their unsettling experiences of ghost cats, nature fairies, our 'Phantom Drip' and numerous other phenomena. :roll:
 
Mythopoeika said:
My first interest in Forteana was through reading Countdown and TV21 comics when I was about 10 or 11.
I had a stack of Countdown comics. They had a regular, well-written section on UFOs - it really sparked my young imagination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(Polystyle_Publications)


Edit: I also had a stack of Look and Learn magazine, which also similarly inspired me in many ways. Why aren't comics like that around these days?

Edit 2: Just remembered - Ranger magazine - that was brilliant too!
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Great to be reminded of Countdown & TV21! Now that I reflect on it, they were the likely source of my Fortean interests.
 
Mythopoeika said:
My first interest in Forteana was through reading Countdown and TV21 comics when I was about 10 or 11.
I had a stack of Countdown comics. They had a regular, well-written section on UFOs - it really sparked my young imagination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(Polystyle_Publications)


Edit: I also had a stack of Look and Learn magazine, which also similarly inspired me in many ways. Why aren't comics like that around these days?

Edit 2: Just remembered - Ranger magazine - that was brilliant too!
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Look and learn ('look in' was considered to subversive by my father) was probably responsible for some of my early interest too, though the only issue I can remember now was the one with the beheading on the cover.
 
Another real influence on me was discovering FATE magazine one month after I turned 16.
 
I used to love 'Sapphire & Steel' when I was a kid and remember one episode about a WWII ghost on a train station that freaked me out, but peaked in interest in things Fortean. Also the Armchair Thrillers series, the one about a nun with no face, had the same effect on me.
 
I found a link to the Armchair Thrillers series. This is about the nun episode, the link is about the whole series:

"The next serial was 'Quiet As a Nun' by Julia Jones from the novel by Antonia Fraser. This started out as though it were a fairly run-of-the-mill murder mystery albeit it the unusal setting of a convent as tv investigator Jemima Shore (Maria Aitken) looks into the events surrounding the death of a nun who was her childhood friend. Its use of a ghost in the form of a faceless nun terrified the living daylights out of a whole generation of children and is widely-remembered a quarter of a century later despite never having been repeated. Less remembered is the fact that one of the convent girls in the story is played by a very young Patsy Kensit! Of course the ghost eventually turns out not to be a ghost at all. And Jemima Shore of course survived to have her own tv series a short time later called 'Jemima Shore Investigates.' With Moira Amstrong directing, this made 'Quiet As A Nun' highly unusual for its time in that it had a female producer, writer, director and also a cast that was predominantly female too."

http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/armchairthriller.htm
 
Was that the one where a faceless figure was seen under the stairs making a "Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Vrrrrrrrrrrrr!" noise?

If it was it scared the shit out of me as a child! :wince:
 
The one that sticks in my mind most is "A Dog's Ransom". Perhaps I was more terrified of poodle shit disguised as chocolate than I was of faceless nuns. I'm still not fond of poodles.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=747SKishQPg

Christ on a bike! :shock:

That's me not sleeping for several weeks.

I wonder if the Faceless Nun and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water used to knock off after a busy day of soul reaping and cackle at their evil misdeeds over a cheeky half pint or two! :lol:
 
Nah, thats not the one I was thinking of.

Mine was a woman (in what looked like nun's robes) under the stairs in a normal house, clutching a baby and making that weird "Vrrrrrrrrrr!" noise.

Anyone else remember this?
 
danny_cogdon said:
Nah, thats not the one I was thinking of.

Mine was a woman (in what looked like nun's robes) under the stairs in a normal house, clutching a baby and making that weird "Vrrrrrrrrrr!" noise.

Anyone else remember this?
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That, my friend, is one weird coincidence! I was watching that the other night! It's an episode of Nigel Kneale's horror anthology Beasts called Baby, and the scene you describe is the very horrible ending with the spectre inducing the miscarriage the main character has been dreading for the whole story.

It's on DVD if you feel brave enough to watch it again, but it's still really chilling, especially with the noise the spectre made.
 
I've been trying to find any clips of that one online. Sounds creepy.

The acting/effects of the 1970s British TV horror may be a bit ropey but I think they terrify on a much better level than the CGI/gore of modern horrors.

Been slowly working through the Hammer TV series and there is just something very creepy about that whole era. Without the 'benefit' of CGI the scares had to come from a deeper psychological place than just the visuals afforded by a big CGI budget.
 
I got into this feild through a few experiances i had as a child. One of them involving a dis-embodied arm on my headboard when i was trying to sleep.

Other then that i am a occultist and got more intrested through that way.
 
Well me and my brother and i where staying in my mums (we wernt living with her at the time). and because it wwas such a small house we had to share a bed, he went bottom i went top. I was about 10 and my brother would have been 4 at the time. So about 10 mins after we went to bed i looked up at the headbored and there was a semi-transparent arm laying across the headboard. At first i thought i could have been my mum coming to say good-night but then i realised that the way the arm was the person would have had to be on the right hand side of me, but the bed was against the wall on that side. So the person the arm belonged to would have had to have been through the wall. At that point i panicked and hid under the covers, like kids do lol, untill i went to sleep.

The next day i asked my mum if it was her and she said no.

Another time in the same house we saw a small child run past the door and i knew it wasnt my brother as he was sitting next to me at the time.

Strange thing that. It has always stayed in my memory.
 
gncxx said:
That, my friend, is one weird coincidence! I was watching that the other night! It's an episode of Nigel Kneale's horror anthology Beasts called Baby, and the scene you describe is the very horrible ending with the spectre inducing the miscarriage the main character has been dreading for the whole story.

It's on DVD if you feel brave enough to watch it again, but it's still really chilling, especially with the noise the spectre made.
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Spooky! :shock:

I'm going to have a look and see if I can find it being errrr.... 'shared' online anywhere. ;)

EDIT: Nope, can't find it. Probably just as well as it would give me nightmares.
 
I've remembered!
When I was a kid one of my friends gave me a huge pile of old comics. Most of them weren't my cup of tea, but there were a few issues of Uncany Tales which I loved. I think that must have been the real point where I took an interest in all things bizarre.
My mum was disgusted when she found me reading them put the lot in the bin sadly.
 
I've tried to remember, but really have no idea why I'm interested in all this stuff.

However, yesterday my sister found some of her notebooks from primary school, and we discovered that one of them had stuff about UFOs, Bigfoot, Cottingley Fairies, haunted ruins and other oddities. I'm not sure if they were stories and things she made up, or if they were from a textbook or something. Most of the subjects include drawings too. She has no recollection of why her schoolwork covered such topics. I'm going to try and find my school books to see if I did the same kind of work the year before.
 
At the age of five I became an atheist so totally and abruptly it almost qualifies as one of Sir William James' "reverse revelations". For a couple of years there I was completely fearless at night; I slept on top of the covers certain there were no witches or demons out to get me.

Then, at the age of seven, I went to a neighbor's house to fetch my little brother and, while I was waiting, I happened upon a little paperback entitled Strangely Enough, by C. B. Colby. Although now I know that at least half the book describes what we now call urban legends, I was severely freaked out to learn that grown people reported to this very day ghosts, flying saucers, mysterious disappearances, and other things so weird it was difficult even to describe them (just read "The Whistle" or "The Doomed Sentry"!).

Back under the sheets I went. But out again I came occasionally to pick up books by Brad Steiger, Ivan Sanderson, John G. Fuller, and eventually Fort himself.
 
I was interested in astronomy from avery early age, certainly before I was eight, when we moved house. A new neighbour there, learning of my interest in space, lent me books by George Adamski, and I was soon hooked on UFOs as well.

From there, it was all downhill... 8)
 
Like other people here, my first exposure was in the Reader's Digest book Mysteries of the Unexplained. My aunt had a copy, and every time we visited their house I'd get the book and read if for practically the whole day. I loved stories like Spring-Heeled Jack and the Devil's Footprints. Other stuff freaked me out a little more, like spontaneous combustion and the story about the jogger who disappeared.

Not long after, interest in the paranormal skyrocketed on TV (in the early 90s) and my interest grew while watching Sightings and (some of) Unsolved Mysteries.
 
I guess it was watching "The Twilight Zone" as a tiny tot. It seemed fascinating compared to everything else on TV (90% westerns, blah). My interest/love was soon fueled by what we schoolkids knew as "Slumber Party Stories" which we know now are Urban Legends.
But the Lady of White Rock Lake is real, I swear!
https://whiterocklake.org/white-rock-lake/lady-of-the-lake/
 
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Early memories of things that interested me in "this type of thing":
  • My step grandparents having a copy of Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain, which I read every time we visited them.
  • My RE ("religious education") teacher lending me Stonehenge Decoded. He also introduced me to my lifelong hobby of Morris dancing, and we remain in correspondence 40 years after my last RE lesson.
  • Reading various books about the Loch Ness Monster, and concluding that it was probably an eel.
  • Reading the Werewolf of Paris, Guy Endore. My copy was from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult. I had never come across a novel which included letters written by the characters, and bracketed by an introduction and epilogue which maintained the illusion that it was true. As a young and very naive teenager, I was confused and genuinely believed that this meant that it was based on a true story.
  • Reading an equally scary book about the "actual" vampire of Highgate Cemetery and being unsure whether to believe it because it was present as fact.
  • Reading the books of T Lobsang Rampa, and swallowing the story more or less whole.
  • Reading the books of Erich von Däniken and starting to rumble his trick of throwing away big percentages of his evidence to show how fair he was being, but always leaving a handful which "cannot be explained away" and therefore "proves that there must be something in it" which then "justifies revisiting some of the cases we have previously discarded."
Other than reading books, I played D&D as a teenager (Basic Rules, late 1970s) which got me interested in fantasy fiction which led to an interest in the real historical periods that the fantasies were loosely based on. I followed that thread backwards and developed an interest in hill forts, and prehistory.
 
I learned to read before I went to school, so as a consequence I was on the top end of the reading scheme at the age of 7. There was one particular set of books which included a recounting of the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 that piqued my interest. I also had some of the Flower Fairy books by Cicely M Barker, so I was exposed to that stereotype of the Little People at an early age. The Puffin ghost compilations were a big favourite of mine too. By the time I was 9, my dad had started buying into the Unexplained piecework, and I suppose I was hooked from there on in.
 
Frideswide said:
can you pin down what that book was @Mikefule ? pretty please? :)
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Sorry. I no longer have the book; it was 40 years ago, I can remember it was quite a thin and physically flimsy paperback. I have just spent a few minutes browsing Google images and Amazon and have not found anything that rings a bell.

Looking at reviews of the books on Amazon, I think it may have been linked to the "Vampire Research Society". Looking at what I've found today there was a lot of fuss at Highgate around 1974 at which time I was rising 12. I guess I read the book a year or two after that so it may have been one of the earlier written publications, maybe even self published by one of the two key players, Manchester or Farrant.

Sorry, I can't help you more.
 
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