STRANGE HAPPENINGS by Michael Hervey

Another Fortean free-for-all by Michael Hervey, this time split between legitimate historical weirdness and fantastical nonsense. Such strange-but-true factual cases include the so-called "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, the Collyer Brothers who famously perished inside their hoarded NYC apartment, Jack the Ripper, and the hypothetical planet Vulcan which was proposed to exist between Mercury and the Sun. We stray into fantasy land with accounts of Atlantis, the Shroud of Turin, and the Count St. Germain, though Hervey's eclectic selection of stories is appreciated. The 1900 disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse crew is one mystery that still persists today, although Hervey's invocation of sea monsters and pirates seem unlikely solutions.

Hervey mentions the mystery ship Joyita again in passing, this time wondering if yet more sea monsters ate the passengers and crew alongside some other missing ships in the South Pacific. At this point we see that the story of the Joyita is so well established that Hervey can simply toss the ship into some random mystery mongering with no real connection to the facts of the case. The apocryphal Ellen Austin also shows up, with some invented dialogue of superstitious sailors scared of the kraken! This is yet another illustration of how these stories evolve to become spookier and spookier as successive authors add flourishes and invent new details. 

Despite Hervey's freeness with the facts, he has a sharp eye for subject matter. Rather than recycling endless ghosts, UFOs, and ESP tales ad nauseam he sprinkles in some real shocking stuff like Australian Aboriginal death curses and the Berbalang ghouls of the Philippines. Careful with those ghouls, though, because "published information on the subject is based on a single report by Ethelbert Forbes Skertchly, a resident of Hong Kong and an officer in the British Navy." Wikipedia continues:

Skertchly's article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal also attracted the attention of English academic and ghost-story writer M. R. James, who in turn introduced it to Rupert T. Gould circa 1911. Gould discussed the subject and reproduced Skertchly's account of the Berbalangs in a chapter of his popular book Oddities, first published in 1928. Modern awareness of the Berbalang lore largely derives from Gould's book.

Talk about some strange happenings! 

Ace Books, 1966