Author Archive

The first of an occasional series on Interesting People, featuring Mr. Edgar Garton Stokes from Connecticut who collected rocks containing the souls of famous people.

For Father’s Day weekend, the father of a bereaved household leaves a final token of his love in a mysterious image on the window.

In 1901, Washington DC was excited by mysterious shadows on the columns of the east and west porticos of the White House. Prophetic images or pareidolia?

While this post is not Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, there is a modest collection of Fortean oddities in and around the White House that goes well beyond the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences, the zero-year curse and the ghost in the Lincoln Bedroom. Part 1 on The Fortean White House.

A grim and grewsome look at people who drink blood and plunge their children into entrail baths–all in the name of health. Comes with a doctor’s warning: “the appetite for blood becomes even stronger than that for liquor, and cases have been known where it has produced mania of the most violent type.” You have been warned.

Some vintage blather from opera singer Madame Helen Alberti on the possibility of human flight, the cosmic laws of the ancient Greeks, levitation, and the engines of the human body. Top-flight stuff.

While today we are all too well-educated by the Internet to believe the canard about the evil mummy from the British Museum sinking the Titanic, a decade before that maritime disaster there was much discussion about the malign coffin board and about other “cursed” mummies, either whole or in pieces. Every visitor to Egypt, it seemed, brought home a lethal souvenir….

Another nonsensical “mockumentary” about mermaids from Animal Planet provides an excellent excuse to float some older accounts of mermaid sightings, including some fresh-water specimens.

A mysterious map of the battlegrounds of Europe appears on a sooty ceiling in a Texas house in 1919. The face of a man and a coiled serpent also materialized. What did it all mean?