Furious Female Forteana! Warren Smith has collated a tidy little volume full of witches and widows, victims and villainesses, ghosts and visions and whatever other weird women-centric happenings Smith could dredge up! We start off strong with a disturbing tale of body swapping across time, sadly unsourced and almost cheerfully bogus in its high melodrama. Tracking the origins for all of Smith's entries is almost its own paranormal cross-time saga. The "Ape Woman of Patang" (who would turn up again in Smith's Strange Abominable Snowmen) seems to have sprung from the kernel of this story in Frank Edwards' 1959 volume Stranger Than Science, with a newly invented "Dr. Gordon Mueller" to authenticate the creature. That accursed biting Bug Eyed Monster also pops in on his whirlwind tour through the paranormal pulps, as writer Garth Haslam describes at his invaluable site for Anomaly Info.
One of the most intriguing tales is of poor (but pretty!) English schoolgirl Eileen Jane Welch, who is snatched up into the the air and then smashed to the earth by some unknown force! There really is a Hanson School in Yorkshire, but everything else about the story seems to be totally fabricated. For some reason this Spanish language horror site turns Eileen from a student to a teacher and pushes up the date to 1973. On and on it goes ...
A short chapter on Helena Blavatsky looks like the seed for what would become Smith's dependable cut and paste chapter on Theosophy featured in his 70s Zebra specials.
On a final note, I admit I'm smitten with the Witch Queen of Hell, who looks like a very gracious hostess inviting you to her blood sacrifice.
Popular Library, 1968
A short chapter on Helena Blavatsky looks like the seed for what would become Smith's dependable cut and paste chapter on Theosophy featured in his 70s Zebra specials.
On a final note, I admit I'm smitten with the Witch Queen of Hell, who looks like a very gracious hostess inviting you to her blood sacrifice.
Popular Library, 1968
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