People lie for different reasons: cowardice (the truth can hurt), cupidity (falsehood can be more profitable), arrogance (the truth can be improved), or ignorance (the truth is unknown). I don’t know what motivated Jeanne des Armoises.  True, she got attention and cash, but she must have known it couldn’t last.  In fact, I don’t know […]

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Many people have asked me about a memorial service for John.  We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, here’s a brief poem John wrote when he was sixteen.  It’s called “My Last Wish.” the thing I would like most to do is look upon my friends and hear what they say about me after my funeral ends. We’ll […]

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John A. Keel died a few days ago, on Friday, July 3, 2009. As some of you may know, I knew him for many years.  Larry Sloman and I were his medical proxies for the past couple of years, and did our best to help him with his legal and medical problems. He was in […]

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Spiritualism was all the rage in France in the 1850s; like many others, Victor Hugo and his household experimented with seances, table-rapping, and channeled communications.  This intriguing drawing dates from sometime around 1854. Hugo’s large body of graphic work may be unfamiliar to some of you: he left behind more than 3500 drawings.  He had a particular […]

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Forteana and family life don’t always mix.  The sketch above is taken from Thackerayana, an 1875 compilation of the graphic work of William Makepeace Thackeray: cartoons, illustrations, travel sketches, marginal sketches.  He made this one in the margin of “The Mirror,” a Scottish magazine from 1779.  And here’s the passage that inspired it: A wife is writing […]

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Today is Robert Browning’s birthday.  If he were alive today, that beard of his would be even longer. I suspect few read him today; I don’t know the statistics.  If so, it’s a pity.  I cracked him open not long ago to examine his portrait of a spiritualist, “Mr. Sludge the Medium,” and have been reading him […]

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One of the grand old men of British forteana, John Michell, died on April 24.  I only met him a few times; he was always kind and gracious.  The last time I saw him, we discussed our common fascination with the number 5040 (Plato’s ideal population for the Republic, among other things).  He was a fine writer […]

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Ben Hecht was the first “Fortean”: he coined the word, and staked his claim.  Like the other founders of the first Fortean Society, back in 1931, he had no particular interest in scientific anomalies; he just enjoyed the exuberant and provocative books Charles Fort wove from them. I plan to paste in snippets from those […]

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Jarry?  In the medical museum?  It’s a funny place to find him, but there he is: the following prose poem, “Les Cinq Sens” (“The Five Senses”), is taken from his first book, Les Minutes de sable mémorial (Minutes of memorial sand, 1894).  In it, the narrator makes his way through a natural history museum into a […]

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[Yes, Virginia, there is a Charles Darwin; and we continue to fete his bicentennial by serializing my talk on the impact of his theories on American culture.  Have a seat.] A few days after the Scopes trial had pooped out, Bryan died.  Mencken exulted, “We killed the son-of-a-bitch,” and ran a rather nasty obituary, calling […]

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