THE OCCULT IN THE ORIENT by Christopher Dane

Mystery man Christopher Dane takes us to the other side on the other side of the world for a sinister survey of THE OCCULT IN THE ORIENT! Nice to see a fresh face around here ... or so you would believe! Things are never what they seem in the world of the paranormal paperbacks however, and author "Christopher Dane" is none other than bad old Brad Steiger, moonlighting under yet another pseudonym. This particular title is Steiger's store brand version of John Keel's influential occult travelogue Jadoo and Dane must have been Steiger's more upmarket moniker, because Popular Library spared no expense with this volume, shelling out for some cool cover art and even a table of contents - that's almost unheard of for them!

Keel's Jadoo in several editions

A colonial haze hangs over the stories, whether we're talking phantom hitchhikers in Okinawa or a drawn out death curse afflicting an American consul's house servant in Jakarta. That servant, Djam Hari, draws the ire of a rival when he attains the rank of "Number One Boy" in US Vice Consul Robert Pierson's household. You see, Steiger informs us that "an Indonesian's position on this ladder [of servant rank] decreed the degree of respect accorded to him from his people." Djam Hari is a grown man, by the way, but Pierson and Steiger still refer to him as "boy" throughout. This casual infantilization casts a sickly pallor over the rest of the book, especially since the story drags on far too long before we get the expected ending. It's pure page padding and an especially bad sign of things to come since we're only three chapters in!

Front left is Robert Pierson, "U.S. aide"

Moving on, we start to recognize Steiger's formula as he staggers quick hits (like a "Negrito ghost child" whose disembodied voice calls to the living) between longer chapters, mostly pulled from his prior books or summarized from Fate magazine stories. Thankfully none end up as overlong as Djam Hari's tale, and Steiger is good enough to credit the original Fate writers when necessary. He gives a decent overview of the New Guinea UFO flap of 1959, when multiple Anglican missionaries and their local flocks reported seeing low flying spacecraft crewed by mysterious beings. This flap is sometimes named "the Gill Sightings" after one of the missionaries, Father William Gill. Another Fate summary follows with the very British sounding Arthur Grimble (of Her Majesty's Colonial Service) witnessing a death curse he christens as "Raku-nene madness," where the spirit of Raku-nene is called forth by a spurned man to possess the woman he desires and drive her to madness and death. The original story Steiger cites by writer E.P. Herman can be downloaded at the Luminist Archives, as part of the September 1953 issue of Fate.

Three Argentine Navy cadets have a scare when Deception Island vanishes from sight, leaving them adrift in a dingy on the open ocean! This is from another Fate article, written by one of the cadets, Carlo Bel Moro. Steiger mines the Flying Saucer Review for some UFOs over Hawaii, and then recaps Mary Margaret Fuller's piece on Balinese cremation rituals, which can also be downloaded from the Luminist Archives as part of Fate's August 1954 issue. The ghost of an executed French soldier haunts some Americans at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, having been "decapitated like a common criminal" by the cruel communists after they overran his position. Steiger laments the "fierce, though vain struggle" by the brave Frenchman, another example of the upside down moral logic of colonialism. This chapter ends with a cornball joke about the Frenchman being able to look for his own head after death because he was a radar officer. 

The ruins of Nan Madol give Steiger a chance to mention Lemuria as well as American atomic testing at nearby Enewetak Atoll, another clash between the modern space age and a mythical golden age. Steiger mines the August 1954 issue of Fate again for missionary May Elliot's experience in Tahiti with a spirit named Uratua. Strange lights in the South Pacific skies include a report by the crew of the Morgantown Victory in 1966 and a 1774 sighting off New Caledonia by the naturalist Johann Forster, recorded in a diary of Captain James Cook's second voyage. Steiger calls this "Captain Cook's sighting" though he's not named as seeing anything. That's typical ballyhoo by Steiger, and it's followed by a repeat of the invisible biting bug eyed monster of Manila, a Steiger staple through the years. The hoaxed Monongahela sea serpent report is also here, again, having just been seen in Weird Unsolved Mysteries by Steiger writing as Eric Norman. Burton Klein, an American GI in Vietnam, saves his wife Janice from a car accident 9,000 miles away with an ESP message. Another GI, WWII veteran A.R. Thompson, relates his story from the May 1955 issue of Fate about a disembodied voice that has saved him from plane crashes and car accidents.

And now Steiger really starts to recycle, with four straight chapters of Max Freedom Long and his manufactured Huna magic! It's a good chunk of pure nonsense padding. After this, another headless ghost visits soldier Lawrence Stevens in Seoul and performs a gruesome show, holding up his own head and saying "I'll sure be glad when these three months are up!" Later Stevens realizes that the ghost predicted the end of the Korean War! Steiger stretches the definition of "the Orient" when he profiles Komar the Hindu Fakir, whose real name was Vernon Craig and who hailed from Ohio, USA. Komar performed feats of endurance in character, and there's a brief but touching post at the Magician's Forum by someone who remembers him. Steiger and Komar would later coauthor a book, seen below:

Komar, aka Vernon Craig

The occidental fascination with Eastern thought continues with Steiger's next subject, the Master Subramuniya, who was born Robert Hansen in California before a religious experience at the age of 6 inspired him to walk the path of enlightenment. After reaching Sannyasa in Sri Lanka, Subramuniya eventually opened an ashram in Hawaii, where Steiger catches up with him. Steiger doesn't spill much ink over the guru, just noting that he disapproves of drug use and and is happy to see more young people meditating. Disappointing that this intriguing man doesn't deserve more than a quick filler chapter, while Max Freedom Long gets five whole chapters to to peddle his fraudulent "Huna" magic. You can tell that Steiger is just looking to fill pages now. Author and photographer Wilmon Menard stars in another long story of murder and magic in Tahiti which is padded with pulp fiction prose by Steiger.

Did I say five chapters of Huna bull? Yes I did, because Steiger now slips in "Huna Healing Techniques" as if realizing he still has some content to fill before the end. And after this is another telepathic warning, saving soldier John E. Rebel Thomas from death at Guadalcanal. American missionary and CIA operative Harold M. Young relays a grisly account of jungle werewolves in the hill country of Thailand, and like Edward Lansdale's faked vampire attacks in the Philippines the story reveals more about the casual sociopathy of imperialism than about primitive monsters or native superstition. Young describes shooting a Taw werewolf and tracking the blood trail to a hut. Inside that hut is a dead man with a bullet wound, and Young's mind is boggled at the implication. We all know from the movies that dead werewolves revert to human form, so Young must have really shot a werewolf! The darkness inside modern "civilized" man is laundered through purported barbarity and illogic in the "savage" Third World.

True to form, Steiger reused the story of the Taw multiple times. Turning and turning in the widening gyre ...

Popular Library, 1974.