WONDERS IN WINNIPEG

Serena Keshavjee (Editor). The Art of Ectoplasm; Encounters with Winnipeg's Ghost Photographs. University of Manitoba Press, 2023.

Of all the phenomena of Spiritualism and mediumship, ectoplasm seems to me to be the most implausible, even ridiculous. The photographs recording the phenomenon are surely faked, and any supposed physical evidence is never really evidence of anything. And what has it got to do with the University of Manitoba?

🔽

WESTWARD HO!

Robert Bard. Paranormal Berkshire. Amberley, 2021.

Since a large portion of it was sliced off and handed over to Oxfordshire, Berkshire has sometimes been slightingly referred to as "the hard-shoulder of the M4". This book reveals that there is far more to the county than Welcome Break service stations and business parks.

🔽

MIRROR WRITING

Barry Fitzgerald and Brian Allan, The Deception of Gods and Men: The Price of Power Has Never Been So Great, Flying Disk Press, 2022.

Ghost hunter Barry Fitzgerald and Brain Allan, editor of the online Phenomena Magazine, expertly advance the notion that our interaction with the unknown has shaped and guided the history of humanity.

🔻

PARANORMAL CULTURE

Richard Reichbart. The Paranormal Surrounds Us, Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture and Psychoanalysis. McFarland, 2019.

I approach the word paranormal with a certain amount of apprehension. It conjures up psychics, clairvoyants, telepathy, precognition, telekinesis and ghosts. Now I am not a believer nor am I a total sceptic on these issues. There are unnatural phenomena in this world that cannot be explained by science.
🔽

HIT THE ROAD

Peter A. McCue. Paranormal Encounters on Britain’s Roads. History Press, 2018.

This book covers a wide range of supposed paranormal phenomena, from UFOs, missing time and phantom hitch-hikers, to anomalous animals and mystery vehicles. Although some historical examples are included, the reports described are largely from the past twenty years or so. As such this makes an interesting collection of memorates of anomalous phenomena.

🔽

ENGAGING WITH ENTITIES

James McClenon. The Entity Letters: A Sociologist on the Trail of a Supernatural Mystery. Anomalist Books, 2018.

This is a serious book on a strange and unusual subject, that of the author’s researches as a sociologist into psychokinetic phenomena (PK). His researches began in 1982 when he befriended members of a PK group in the USA called the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT).

🔽

ART, NOT ELECTRONICS

Wladimir Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, The MIT Press, 2017.

The apparent incongruity of this book’s title, which seems more at home in Nexus magazine, and its publisher raises questions and expectations. Is it really a serious academic study of research not just into mind control but psychic mind control?
🔽

JOURNALISTS ON THE PARANORMAL

Annie Jacobsen. Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government’s Investigation Into Extrasensory Perception And Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

---

Leslie Kean. Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Crown Archetype, 2017.

These two books by award winning journalists take very different approaches to the subjects they discuss. Annie Jacobsen is a cool, detached outsider, not willing to align herself with any of the factions involved. Her book has a long list of notes, and bibliography, the latter including the list of people she interviewed.
🔽

SNIFFING OUT A MYSTERY

Joshua Cutchin. The Brimstone Deceit: An In-Depth Examination of Supernatural Scents, Otherworldly Odors and Monstrous Miasmas. Anomalist Books, 2016.

This book might have been titled or subtitled “By your nose ye shall know them” and, while there have been numerous books on supernatural sights and sounds this is almost certainly the first on supernatural smells. Cutchin notes that strange odours are associated with a variety of anomalous experiences., and here he concentrates on tales of UFOs, ghosts and Bigfoot.
🔽

IT WAS HERE A MINUTE AGO

Tony Jinks. Disappearing Object Phenomenon: An Investigation. McFarland and Co, 2016.

If you are like me, you will find from time to time that things in the house go missing; the keys you knew were on the table, the rail-card which should be in your pocket or that book that you just can’t find.
🔻

HIDDEN AMONG US

S. D. Tucker. The Hidden Folk: Are Poltergeists and Fairies Just the Same Thing? Fortean Words, 2016.

---

Albert S. Rosales. Humanoid Encounters: The Others Among Us,  2010-2015. Triangulum Publishing, 2016.

If you asked most people they would argue that belief in fairies is a dead superstition and that the stories told of them were purely cultural inventions and not memories of actual experiences. These two books challenge that view, one explicitly, the other implicitly. 
🔽

MULTIDIMENSIONAL MUSINGS

Jack Hunter (editor). Strange Dimensions: A Paranthopology Anthology. Psychoid Books, 2015.

This anthology includes sixteen articles from the journal Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal over the period 2013-2014. We tend to associate anthropology with remote ‘exotic’ societies of the sort that feature in the National Geographic and TV shows.
🔻

BELIEVING IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

Etzel Cardena, John Palmer and David-Macusson-Clavertz (Editors.) Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century. McFarland, 2015.

This large, 400-plus page work presents 31 papers under nine headings, which seeks to update the original Handbook of Parapsychology, edited by Benjamin Wolman and published by McFarland in 1985, itself an update of a work first published in 1977.
🔻

SOUND AS A BELL

Steven T. Parsons and Callum E Cooper (editors). Paracoustics: Sound and the Paranormal. White Crow Books, 2015.

This collection of papers by the editors and a number of contributors covers several areas of sound and the paranormal, after general discussions of the physics and psychology of sound. The first area of discussion are the various knocks, raps and imitative sounds encountered in haunted houses; in many ways these, rather than visual experiences, constitute the essence of the haunting experience and a number of examples are given.
⏬

WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD…

J.H. Brennan, Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World, Duckworth Overlook. 2013.

Brennan is a well-known elder statesman of the more New Agey end of popular occultism. He comes over as a nice guy and writes in an engaging, accessible style, which is always a plus in these rushed days when a book must seize the imagination within seconds or never be read at all.

🔻🔻🔻

EXTRASENSIBLE PERCEPTION

Brian Clegg. Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind. St Martins Press, 2013.

It probably takes some guts for an established science writer to write a book about ESP and the like, and not to immediately write the whole thing off without a moment’s thought. Perhaps being an outsider to the academic establishment Clegg is freer in such regard.
🔻

DARKEST DEVON

Daniel Codd. Paranormal Devon. Amberley Publishing, 2013.

Regional studies of the unexplained are always welcome, and this particular one is based both upon personal investigations carried out by the author, and citations from published sources going back decades and even, in many cases, centuries.
🔽

A GOOD GUIDE TO STRANGE STUFF

Roy Bainton. The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena. Constable and Robinson, 2013.

This is yet another of those monster books from Constable and Robinson that try to cover as much as possible, with the inevitable result that some parts are better than others. For me the best part of this book was the one dealing with sea mysteries, because it is clear that this is a topic that Bainton, a former merchant seaman with multiple family connections to the fishing industry, knows and cares about.

🔽

THE MATHEMATICS OF THE PARANORMAL

James D. Stein. The Paranormal Equation: A New Scientific Perspective on Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance, and Other Inexplicable Phenomena. New Page Books, 2013.

Dr Stein is a professor of mathematics and he believes that there are truths about the natural world that nominally fall within the domain of science that might be impossible for science to discover. He thinks that some as yet undiscovered natural laws might account for some of what appear to be paranormal phenomena.
🔽

STRANGE! INCREDIBLE! PUZZLING!

Jerome Clark. Unexplained! Strange Sightings, Incredible Experiences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena. Visible Ink, 2013 (Third edition)

This is the third and much updated edition of Jerry Clark’s round-up of a variety of Fortean topics. This time he has ditched such well covered topics as UFOs and the Pacific Bigfoot to concentrate on a variety of lesser known anomalies. 

🔽