Wide Atlantic Weird: A Phone RInging In A Deserted Hotel

Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that attempt to create that feeling you get when you come across a delicious little fragment of weirdness, a story that's so out-there it can't possibly be true, yet one which you can't dismiss out of hand. When you stumble across such a tale buried in a chapter of an old collection of 'unexplained' stories, or when a friend reluctantly tells you an impossible story in the small hours after a night of playing Resident Evil, that's Wide Atlantic Weird.


Source: An email from a friend I will refer to as ‘Chris Redfield.’

Hi Cian,

We’ve been talking a lot recently about the subject of the supernatural, and I know you’re looking for some stories to read on your show. Well, I’ve got at least one story I can share with you that I think would be suitable. I haven’t told it to you before because it’s from a somewhat dark time in my life, and it brings up some bad memories. I don’t know for sure that this is because of the unexplained event that happened to me, but this strange happening and my dark mental state at the time are inextricably linked for me.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

So I watched The Boys from Brazil recently, and it send me on a bit of a quest to track down any and all occult-Nazi-themed books or movies I could find. Turns out I had at least three of them already festering on my bookshelf, waiting for my fickle attention to turn to them. First up is Bitter Seeds, the first book in the so-called 'Milkweed triptych'.

The Future Eve (1886) by August Villiers de L'Isle Adam

A word of warning: The Future Eve is not a novelette that you’re going to find easily. Not in English anyway; from what I can tell, the only available English translation, apart from some rather academic and expensive-looking journals, is in a strange collection called The Frankenstein Omnibus which is almost definitely out of print. So, chances are, you’re probably not going to be reading it, which is a shame. For this reason, I may be a little more lenient with the spoilers this time.

I’ll admit upfront that The Future Eve is not really anything to do with Imperialism or colonialism, but it is choc-full of other points of interest to the nineteenth-century enthusiast. For starters, the author was a fin-de-siecleFrench bohemian who hung out in cafes writing, drinking (absinthe, presumably), being poor and attempting to get rich society ladies to marry him (a bit like my life, really. Except I'm not French, obviously). The novelette is a sort of take on the Frankenstein theme, and what makes it interesting is its distinctly romantic/decadent spin on the subject.

At the beginning of the story we’re introduced to one Professor X, who sadly is nothing to do with the X-Men, but is in fact a sort of literary stand-in for none other than Thomas Edison. That’s what the intro says, anyway; if it’s true then the general public (in France at least) must have had some pretty weird ideas about the man and his abilities back in the 1880s. We first meet Not-Edison rambling about in his mansion outside a city (presumably New York), being attended to by the disembodied voices of artificial personalities he has somehow created using ‘electricity.’

Not in this book.

One of the great joys of reading literature from this period is the almost mystical reverence that was given to electricity. I guess even this late in the century it was still seen by many people as being wondrous and a little bit mysterious… the kind of ill-understood force that could be capable of almost anything. Think of Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues telling his captives that ‘my electricity is not the same as everyone else’s’ in an attempt to handwave the workings of the Nautilus. Way to fluff your research there, Verne.

Electricity in Victorian novels is always a plot device for creating monsters, bringing people back from the dead or other Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, mostly based on its demonstrated ability to make dead frogs twitch. Makes perfect sense, really. In the 1950’s, its place as a magical monster creator was taken by atomic power, and later by genetic engineering, which are similarly both misunderstood by the public and misused by narrative media. Read this for a bizarre real-life example.

This is exactly what Victorian science was like.

Not-Edison’s devices are described and explained in very strange ways in the novelette. The science isn’t ignored or handwaved away like in Wells, nor is it excruciatingly and accurately thought-through like in Verne. Instead, the author does go into quite a lot of detail; it’s just that none of it makes any bloody sense. There’s lots of talk about telephone wires and reflections, vibrations and currents. Of course, none of these descriptions really address how Not-Edison has achieved artificial intelligence, no matter how long they go on for. But they do bring a wonderfully romantic feeling of science-as-magic to the story.

How did I do it? I'll never tell!

 The scientist receives a visitor: the young and handsome Lord Ewald. But despite being the very picture of virile English manhood, the lord has a problem: he’s desperately lovesick. Despite having a position and profile that would win him the heart of almost any woman he meets, he’s gone and got himself hung up on a girl who’s doing him wrong. Things are so bad that he’s considering suicide.

The girl, one Alicia Cleary, is so beautiful that she’s regularly compared to the Venus of the classical world. She is, in a way, attached to Ewald, but he is constantly disappointed by her because the silly chit’s personality is not equal to her beauty.

Ah, yes. It would be neglectful of me not to mention that The Future Eve contains more than a strain of misogyny. In fact, it’s rather famous for it: the misogyny is the main thrust of most of the literary criticism that has been written about it.

Professor X and Ewald talk over the particulars of the situation. Apparently Miss Cleary is so physically perfect that Ewald is willing to die for her, he is so in love. They also agree that her personality is deficient: she doesn’t like opera or sculpture, she’s small-minded and selfish. The two men discuss which aspects of her being are acceptable and which are lamentable, and they both agree how wonderful it could be if they could somehow keep the former while jettisoning the latter.

And then Professor X realizes that, actually, he knows just how such a thing could be achieved.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, it’s pretty despicable. There’s no getting around that. Ewald, like all romantic/decadent heroes, is so hung up on this girl that nothing else in life really seems to matter. Fair enough, we’ve probably all been there. But the explicit fact that he’s only in love with her beautiful exterior, and cannot stand her personality, makes him utterly shallow. And that the two characters coldly and rationally decide what characteristics are desirable and not desirable in a woman makes them both pretty unlikable. Also, their limits for what’s desirable, personality-wise, are offensively narrow, which I suppose was probably typical for the time.

Eventually, Professor X reveals his plan: he will create an electronic facsimile of the girl, an exact copy: an android (the first use of the term in literature, fanboys!). Ewald is at first horrified, noting that even if the physical likeness was perfect, her store of conversation and actions would necessarily be woefully limited. Professor X mentions that they’ve both observed in the past that a proper society lady is nothing more than a limited number of learned conversations and actions. Shudder.

The two then retreat to Professor X’s gigantic underground cave of electronic wonders, where he explains in fascinating (and horrifically offensive) detail exactly how one would go about making a perfect woman. He ‘proves’ to Ewald that real women aren’t that ‘real’ anyway, because they use make-up and can alter their appearance. It’s this that a man really falls in love with, he says while pointing to a drawer full of cosmetics. An illusion. So really, falling in love with an automaton isn’t that different. Again, the superficiality is staggering.

This section is fascinating, if ghoulish and ethically questionable. Again, the author goes into masses of detail about how the android will be constructed, how she will function and how perfect the likeness will be. And even though he’s despicable, I liked how Ewald’s emotions swing constantly as he see-saws between revulsion and lust at the idea of having his desires granted in this unorthodox way. By the end, I wanted to find out what was coming next as much as the lovesick Lord.

Later, there’s an amazing scene in which Ewald has a surprise meeting with his automated lovedoll that prompts us to think about what it is that we really fall in love with. Ewald is obsessed with an ideal of Alicia; an impossible vision of her that is no more or less real than the automaton is. It’s an interesting idea, and one the author delves into in some detail, only to slightly spoil it with his underlying shades of misogyny, as well as the fact that he cheats by having the android inhabited by the essence of one of Professor X’s artificial personalities through supernatural means, thereby giving it a bona fide soul, as it were.

Large portions of the novella take place in real-time, with the Professor and Ewald having long conversations (while smoking cigars and drinking brandy, of course) that allow the writer to indulge in reflections on morality, science, and emotion. Even if some of the ideas are now repugnant to us, it’s still a good deal more interesting than the flat characters that usually turn up in Victorian speculative fiction. Ewald in particular fascinated me as a man who knowingly and deliberately buys into his delusion in the most literal way over the course of the story.

The Future Eve is not easy to come by in English, but it’s well worth looking out for.

Mmm... gentlemanly.

Madam Crowl's Ghost by Sheridan Le Fanu

Bringing up the Irish contingent in the Victorian ghost story sub-genre is Sheridan Le Fanu. He's a well-known writer of early spook stories, and was much-respected by the later greats such as M. R. James.


However, he suffers from having been over-influential. Today, virtually all of his plots and situations will be over-familliar to pretty much any reader, and the stories seem tiresome and hackneyed as a result. Perhaps in his day he was able to send shivers down spines, but after  a few stories I really couldn't take another formulaic yarn about evil deeds done in creaky old houses.

Le Fanu does set a couple of his stories in Ireland, and it is interesting to hear his take on the rural accent... some things about it seem not to have changed even over one hundred and fifty years. For the most part, however, even his Dublin-set stories are interchangeable with the standard London-based horror fiction of the Victorian period. Le Fanu did occasionally make use of Irish folklore as part of his story-telling, but not in this volume.

I can't really recommend this book except as a curiosity, or to anyone who is tracing the evolution of Victorian fantastic fiction, and even then it isn't very interesting.

Sorry Le Fanu, I really did want to like your work! You being from the ol' sod, and all. Ah well.

The Table-Rappers by Ronald Pearsall

The Table-Rappers is presented as a scholarly and exhaustive take on Spiritualism and other Victorian occult phenomena. It isn't that exactly, but it still makes interesting reading.

What the book really is, for the most part, is a sort of high-brow, skeptical version of the works of Charles Fort, or even the later books by Colin Wilson on the supernatural. In Table-Rappers, seemingly hundreds of individual cases and incidents are chronicled in an endless array of brief encounters.
Like Wilson's books, there are many fascinating stories buried somewhere within each chapter, though the 'filing' system seems rather odd (some of Wilson's stories stuck in my head for years, prompting much flipping through his strangely-edited chapters to find them years later). And as an Irish connection, I was delighted to learn that gangs of occultists wearing 'all-concealing black robes' were operating in Dublin during the late Victorian period!

Rather than attempting a chronological history of the subject, Pearsall has opted to separate his chapters based on the various types of phenomena- seances, spirit photography, etc. In a way, there is a loose chronology, as there were slightly overlapping 'waves' of interest in these subjects, but it's done at the expense of a more meaningful, interpretive take on the subject. And while many of the incidents alluded to are fascinating, shockingly short shrift is given to many of the most important spiritualists who shaped the movement: the Fox sisters, whose 1840's table-banging marked the beginnings of Spiritualism, D. D. Home, the only psychic who was never caught cheating, and the Davenport brothers. The book gives little hint about how the movement was perceived in the world at large, or how important these characters were during their lifetimes.

Most of the book is taken up with these brief accounts of Spiritualism, giving the feeling that the Victorian age must have been absolutely full of fraudulent mediums, all squabbling for their 15 minutes of fame and quick to besmirch one another's reputations. Pearsall's tone is skeptical throughout, assuming foul play and trickery in every case. It's true that most mediums were caught cheating at some point, but it's interesting to compare this book with Peter Lamont's The First Psychic, a book that's primarily a biography of D. D. Home, but which serves as a very effective commentary on the Spiritualist movement and the Victorian need to believe. Lamont never assumes that any mediums were cheating unless they were caught; he does eventually confess his own personal skepticism, but on an academic level his scrupulous fairness is impressive.

Later on in Table-Rappers, Pearsall includes a few chapters on other aspects of Victorian spookiness, including poltergeists and good old-fashioned haunted houses. For some reason I enjoyed this stuff better- perhaps because they're just stories, and he can neither prove nor disprove them with his slightly sarcastic prose. But because he was writing in the 70's, when the supernatural- sorry, the paranormal- was having a renaissance in credibility, he does let slip that although most Victorian 'mind-readers' were bogus, we of course now 'know' that there is definite evidence for telepathy (!). He cites some unspecified 20th-century research to prove this; I suspect that he's referring to the work of J. B. Rhine and the Duke University Parapsychology Lab, an interest subject in itself. (In fairness, Rhine seems to have been a serious, rational-minded scientist who worked extremely hard for decades, using only variants on the Zenner cards theme, to provide statistically significant evidence for telepathy without ever getting caught up in the silliness that often comes with the subject). There's also a fascinating chapter on the feud between the outrageous Madam Blavatsky (creator of the break-away movement 'Theosophy') and the mostly-rational Society for Psychical Research.

Late in the book, Pearsall does throw in a few chapter of analysis, but it's very 70's-type analysis that includes some of the odd ideas regarding the paranormal at that time. It's weird to find this skeptical author drawing a line between Spiritualism and manifestations, which he believes to be bogus, and clairvoyance and table-rapping, which he does not. It's still a worthwhile read, however, for the countless strange stories that characterized the 19th -century occult scene.

The Walsingham Ghosts: An Update

2020 UPDATE: This is an article from a very long time ago. For ten years, it floated about on the internet, containing a very serious error. Originally, I mistakenly attributed the popularisation of the Walsingham Ghost tale to the famous London journalist W.T. Stead, in his 1891 book Real Ghost Stories. I then proceeded to tell various stories about Stead, including his connection to the infamous British Museum 'cursed mummy-case' and his death on the Titanic.

Whether through sloppy research or a genuine mix-up, my younger self was seriously in error. Stead never wrote about this story at all. The first book to reprint this newspaper story was in fact True Ghost Stories, written in 1915 by Hereward Carrington. Getting the names of these two books mixed-up is understandable, and Stead is not an unlikely source for stories like this. He was a prominent spiritualist, and he did after all write collections of 'true' ghost stories. However, not going back to primary sources to check was poor journalism on my part.

Carrington was an interesting character himself - a British-born investigator of the strange who moved to America at the turn of the 20th century. He was an SPR member, maintained an odd balance between skepticism and belief in mediums, and was probably best-known for investigating and writing about the 'Amherst Mystery' poltergeist case - that of the infamous 'Esther Cox, You Are Mine To Kill' quote.

I’ve written before about the Usborne Supernatural Guides. When I read them now, I’m struck by the lack of verification for each story. Some of them are well-known cases of the paranormal, but many are not. So where did these stories come from? How did the writers decide which ones to include? With this in mind, I attempted to track down the origins of one of the most interesting tales in the Ghosts, Spectres & Haunted Houses book: The tale of the Walsingham Ghosts. Boy, did this one scare me as a kid, especially with those patented Nightmare Fuel Usborne oil painting illustrations. One particular image was so terrifying to me that I learned where it was in the book so that I could skip the page whenever I read it. I still loved the book even though I was scared of it, so this was quite necessary. The story starts when a farmer called Walsingham moves into a new house in Georgia in the Deep South. According to the illustrations, it was a damn-creepy Gothic mansion, to boot. He finds a bunch of bones in the house and throws them out. Locals warn that they may be human remains, but Walsingham’s a tough customer and he doesn’t care, not even when hideous moans and groans begin to ring out through the house. Soon, invisible forces begin to cause havok within the house. The artist chose to portray all of these as being the work of an evil-looking blue spectre. Here he breaks the neck of the family dog. The family has a teenage daughter. One night she’s doing her makeup when she feels an icy-cold hand on her shoulder, but can see no reflection of it in the mirror- it’s that horrible blue man again. An invisible bare-footed man follows Dad around in the garden one day. Now things get serious- another family has come over for a dinner party, but the ghosts ruin things once again. A horrible moan is heard from upstairs, then blood starts to drip from the ceiling onto the dinner table, forming a huge pool. The Walsinghams run upstairs, but there is nothing to be found. They rip up the carpet, but there is no explanation for the blood that continues to drip onto the table. Next day, a reputable chemist examines a sample of the blood and declares that it’s human blood. This entire scene should be stolen to add to the best horror movie script ever. The Walsinghams justifiably abandon the house, and according to locals, it sits empty for some time, as more moaning and screaming echoes from within. Then a guy called Horace Gunn agrees to spend a night in the house for a bet. He experiences a number of horrifying things, climaxing with this horrible image (the eyes, the eyes!)- Brr. I’m glad that’s over. Horace runs from the room, but that old blue man is still hanging around, and ‘icy’ hands grip his ankles, knocking him to the ground and then trying to choke him. By the time he escapes, he’s reportedly wound up in an asylum. Poor, brave Horace Gunn. Hope he won some money for that.

Carrington's book cites, as his source, an article in the San Francisco Examiner. Here's the beginning of it, dated to 29th Nov 1891, and locating the haunted house in the town of Oakville, near Savannah Georgia.

Another newspaper version of the story I turned up comes from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, dated Dec 5th 1891.

These seem to be the earliest available versions of the story.

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

It strikes me that there are certain kinds of ‘supernatural’ occurrences or superstitions that most people take more seriously than others. Obviously, few adults are deeply troubled nowadays by movies that feature stock horror elements such as vampires, werewolves and the like. But mention demonic possession, or ouja boards, or satanic worship, and these same people will begin to harden their eyes and quiver their lips.

“Well, I’m not superstitious,” they’ll say, “but there are some things out there that are just not worth messing with, right? I mean, just in case.”

For some reason, these elements are in a vague way treated seriously, and even with some element of real fear, by otherwise skeptical persons. Moreso than other fantastic evils, they seem to belong in some arcane corner of our real world. We all know a spooky story about someone who messed with ouja, and we’ve all noticed those ‘satanic abuse’ scandals which occasionally pop up.

It seems almost like shooting credulous fish in a skeptical barrel to make a scary movie using these elements- The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, and today’s feature, The Devil Rides Out, are all excellent films that gain at least some of their power from the fascination the public has with their esoteric subject matter.

Many moons ago, as a child, I was prevented from watching a movie by my mother. No matter that I gorged myself on daily repeats of taped-off-the-telly VHS versions of Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As scary and brutal as those movies are, they seemed to her to be definitely ‘fantasy’, and thus not deeply unsettling. But this old-fashioned, plodding supernatural chiller about uptight Englishmen messing about with pentagrams and goats’ blood, though containing little overt horror, was, for some reason, a no-no. Her reaction left a deep impression on me- that this kind of horror was somehow more serious, perhaps because it was something that actually happened in the real world.

Years later, I was able to track it down using the wonderful ‘I Need to Know’ board on IMDB. Turns out it was The Devil Rides Out, starring Christopher Lee, with a screenplay by Richard Matheson. Now that’s pedigree!

Christopher Lee plays the Duc de Richleau, an upper-class English gent who discovers that his close friend Simon has become involved with the Occult. Eventually, it becomes clear that the somewhat naive Simon, along with the beautiful Tanith, has come under the power of the black magic adept Mocata (played by one-time Blofeld Charles Gray). The Duke and his stalwart companion Rex Van Ryn track down Mocata’s satanic cult, crashing their midnight sabbat and having lots of car chases through the British countryside.

Richleau lives in a 1930’s Britain where the attitudes and class system of Victorian days has not yet entirely faded. He is an aristocratic gentleman of leisure, of the kind that would not survive the next War- his friends are all upper-class, and have servants and nannies for their children. Despite the budgetary constraints of the Hammer studio, the period feel is wonderfully evoked through the use of old country houses, fantastic sets and beautiful 1930’s cars. It’s a fun look at a dying world.

One of the strengths of the film is its restraint- the horror builds through a growing sense of unease rather than through frequent horrific imagery. Of course, in a movie about the occult, the film-makers are going to have to show something supernatural sooner or later. Aside from one early apparition, the film delays doing this for as long as possible- and with good reason, for the special effects are mostly disappointing. It’s really the only element at which the low budget really slaps the viewer in the face. It is strange to hear Lee constantly enthuse on the commentary that the film would have been much improved by the use of elaborate CGI boogies- seemingly missing much of what makes the film so effective.

Lee seems to have been a bit of a Dan Ackroyd for the 60’s, given his intense interest in the occult. He did much of his own research for the movie, making sure that all the Duke’s esoteric ramblings have a ‘genuine’ background in lore. Its something the movie shares with the source material- the 1931 novel by Denis Wheatley- and adds to making the subject seem credible.

All in all, The Devil Rides Out is an entertaining watch for those with in interest in Hammer films, British society in the early 20th century, and of course, those who enjoy performing the age old rite of the sacrifice of the white hen and the black cockrel when the planets are in alignment.

And for real Grand Masters of the Left Hand Path, here’s a link to a documentary about Hammer films.

Traumatising Paranormal Literature

A strange and unsettling thing began to occur during the early 1970’s- the term ‘paranormal’ began to replace the older word ‘supernatural’. This may seem a trifling point, but it actually has a subtle importance. This new term was deliberately intended to indicate that the study of the weird had evolved into an actual science, with established rules and methods.

As a child, I was led by the literature I consumed to believe that the ‘paranormal’ was taken seriously by all. I presumed that most universities probably had departments dedicated to researching this most important of topics, with methods standardized by decades of practice. If the evidence was as overwhelming as was claimed in the books I was reading, surely only a fool would remain skeptical. After all, they laughed at Copernicus too, right? Obviously, movies such as Ghostbusters and Poltergeist didn’t exactly help to straighten me out on this issue either.

But at least I knew they were fiction. It’s those who promoted this stuff as fact, often to impressionable children, that I will concern myself with in this article.

A certain brand of scientific-seeming paranormal literature continued until the 1990’s, but it was certainly at its apex during the 70’s, when it seemed you couldn’t even pick up an astronomy book without reading at least a short chapter about those puzzling (but factual) flying saucers. But there was one man who did more than his fair share to convince me that we lived in a strange world. He was an Englishman named Colin Wilson.

Wilson is an infamous figure in British literature- a self described ‘genius’ whose philosophy work was first hailed and then reviled in the 1950s. During his extended exile from literary respectability, he produced books about the paranormal. Most appeared to be harmless potboiler-type collections of odd tales, with generic titles such as World Famous Strange But True. A closer look, however, reveals a more calculating, scientific approach that made the super-normal seem far actually believable (and hence utterly terrifying).

In the period after spiritualism had failed to change the world and the first wave of New-Age mysticism had broken, Wilson saw the ‘paranormal’ as exactly that- simply an extension of the natural world that we couldn’t yet explain. An umbrella term that could encompass apparitions (the term ‘spirit’ had too many religious, non-scientific connotations), UFO’s, extra-sensory perception as well as all manner of other weirdness, the ‘paranormal’ was different to what had gone before. For one thing, there was no spiritual aspect whatsoever. Any unusual phenomena-that most delightfully non-commital of words- was expected eventually be explained as a natural law. Kitchen implements are floating around your house? Spoons are bending? It’s just some aspect of physics we haven’t figured out yet. We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it. This week Uri Gellar, next week cold fusion. That’s science. This was the attitude that prevailed during this time.

By this logic, ghostly encounters that early 20th-century investigators would interpret using outmoded ideas like ‘souls’ and ‘demonic possession’ would instead be seen in the light of proper ‘scientific’ ideas such as ‘psychokinesis’ and ‘telekinetic energy’. Yep, I can sure see the boffins down at the lab congratulating themselves on that breakthrough in weasel-words.

Even old Freud was dragged into this reassessment of values, as the unconscious mind was called upon to carry out what was once the Devil’s work. Wilson in particular liked the idea that poltergeist cases were not what they seemed. Even if a poltergeist openly declared itself to be a demon or a witch or the spirit of a dead person, this was nothing but a cover story. The real poltergeist, according to Wilson, was the suppressed sexual energy of some troubled adolescent in the house. It’s true enough that most reported poltergeist cases have revolved around a child close to the age of puberty. It’s also true that during puberty, frustrations and tensions often cause intense feelings and emotions. And lastly, it’s true that there is much we have still to learn about how the mind works. Perhaps the unconscious mind sometimes taps into some store of energy during this turbulent time? Given an already-existing belief in psychic energy, the whole thing almost sounds reasonable! It’s a stirring concept- a poltergeist as a powerful manifestation of teenage angst; a pimply Creature from the Id.

When presented in the guise of a ‘factual’ book, these ideas were very impressionable to the young mind. Wilson believed he was helping to figure out and demystify the workings of the universe, but in fact he was making traumatizing phenomena seem horribly plausible. Imagine being a child in a world where at any time, for no reason at all, your house might be invaded by forces that could explode windows, cause chairs to march about the house, and create a cacophony of inexplicable sounds at all hours of the night. And knowing that ghosts might be explained by ‘tape recordings’, or energy from a violent, emotional event that is somehow trapped by the surroundings, makes them no less disturbing. If anything, it makes them moreso, simply by providing a convincing explanation.

Wilson was not, in fairness, writing for children. An outfit that does write for children, and that made some extremely strange decisions round about this time, is Usborne Publishing.

It was the 70’s. Everyone was getting into the whole ‘paranormal’ thing. But Usborne was, and is, a tried-and-trusted brand known for producing quality children’s books. When they publish a book about rockets, or pets, or the countries of the world, you know it’ll be a solid, educational read. So when they produced the Supernatural Guides in 1979, it was akin to announcing to the children of the world that this stuff was real.

The Haunted Houses, Ghosts & Spectres Guide is chock-full of traumatising nightmare fuel- floating heads covered with blood, poltergeists throwing children out of bed and pulling their hair, the spectre of a tongueless woman, spirits setting houses on fire- and all illustrated with horrifying pulp-esque oil paintings. Not only were the pictures seriously scary for a book with writing apparently pitched at the level of a ten year old, but nowhere did it indicate that this stuff might not be real. To the literal mind of a child there is no difference between a Supernatural Guide and a newspaper, so the presentation of the material in this way raises some serious questions.

A sample ‘ghost report form’ is even provided, with tips on how to investigate hauntings in a systematic way. Information was also provided on the history of the Society for Psychical Research, without mentioning that they were, at best, a group of dedicated, largely-amateur enthusiasts rather than a pillar of the scientific establishment. Prior to the age of instant information, how was a child to have the slightest shred of doubt that ghost-hunting was an accepted, matter-of-fact science?

Similarly, the Mysterious Powers Guide includes rundowns on ESP and other oddities of the mind, all of which are, again, treated as though they are completely real, accepted phenomena. The use of Zener cards (recognizable from the opening of Ghostbusters) to scientifically quantify the existence of mental powers is mentioned. So is the work of Cleve Backster, who famously believed that he had proven, using polygraph testing, that plants respond emotionally to the world around them. Such examples seem to provide the trappings of real scientific research, when in fact they were already discredited, fringe works. It is not the place to begin explaining how these researchers acquired false positive results -the explanations are far more complicated and less interesting than the initial results. The use of such material, out of context, provides a false image of the place of paranormal research within the scientific thinking of the day.


























These publications could only have happened in the 1970’s, a time when the paranormal was briefly regarded as a legitimate field of study by some. Today’s reader has to wonder whether the writers believed that this was really an important topic for children to read about, given the climate of the time, or whether they were simply careless in how they presented the material.