CLAIRVOYANCE IN WOMEN by Robert Tralins

"A new casebook of psychic phenomena?" Sign us up! Unfortunately, author Robert Tralins gives the game away in his preface: he says he's randomly chosen 50 examples of womanly ESP out of the staggering 3,668 case histories and reports in his files, all never before published, all deliberately written down in a casual style for ease of the reader, and all stripped of any confusing jargon or scientific distractions. Hmmm ...

This is, in fact, another story collection a la Steiger and Smith, with zero evidentiary or archival value. Since these are all "never before published," we don't even get any reused stories from Fate or the Society for Psychical Research! Note Tralins' cheeky admission that he's changed some of the names in a few of the cases ... more like, he's made it all up whole cloth! The clumsy and obvious stories that follow the preface make it obvious that Tralins is pulling our chain. 

His prose is sub-Steiger. Consider the very first story about the "death bobbins" - not content to give Mrs. Chun a vision of a miniaturized grim reaper cutting yarn, Tralins also throws in that, oh yeah, her mother told her about this very phenomenon as a child, but somehow Chun "can't say how [she] knew" what the vision meant! Make it make sense, Bob!

Author Robert Tralins (1926-2010)

Tralins was a prolific working writer who put out a handful of paranormal titles, so we can't judge him too hard for phoning in this one. It must have sold decently enough, because Lancer Books reprinted it a few years later:

Lancer Books, 1973 edition

The rest of the stories follow a type: people rush home just in time, or pick up the phone at just the right moment, or follow some sign to a date with destiny. The just-so sameness drags on, as does Tralins' seeming lack of care. Consider the chapter about a white tiger. Judith Satterlee has a vision of the beast while on safari ... in Africa. Now, maybe spectral felines aren't exactly bound by time and space, but it seems to me that Tralins didn't do his homework, as tigers aren't native to Africa! The actual ESP portion of this chapter is lackluster as well, with Mrs. Satterlee knowing her father has died because she dreamed of the tiger eating him.

"A tiger? In Africa?"

Just about the only chapter with any real verve to it is "Mrs. Henry's Dead Dog," a predictable but well done short about a sick woman's dead dog visiting her in hospital. This chapter works well enough to be on par with John Macklin, even! 

Meanwhile, a chapter on "Armagh Armageddon" shares Macklin's train fixation but falls flat, as Mrs. Lucy McHugh warns her uncle and brother not to take the train. They don't listen to Lucy, and so it's bye bye uncle and brother as they ride straight into the Armagh rail disaster of 1889! A list of the dead doesn't feature any McHughs, and this would be an odd one for Tralins to have changed names of real people for (if for the sake of humor we take him at his word), so here Tralins is making up fake victims of a real life tragedy. He also seems to have picked the Armagh disaster at random, because there's no details about the actual crash in his chapter and nothing about it is especially relevant to the story he came up with. A large number of the real life victims were schoolchildren on an excursion, which feels like it may have made for a more dramatic chapter, but as Tralins has written it, a couple guys took the train, it crashed, and they died. No moral!

That's sort of the problem with the whole text, really. After the preface, Tralins never actually engages with the idea of clairvoyance in women and what it could all mean. It's just story after story, until the very last chapter, and then: the end.

 

Lancer gives us just three measly ads in the back for more paranormal thrills, including another Tralins title and our pal Steiger promoting psychic Dorothy Spence Lauer.

After all is said and done, Tralins' Clairvoyance in Women sits alongside Steiger's Possession as a maybe-fiction meatloaf and shelf filler. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org ... if you dare.

Lancer Books, 1970

COSMIC DEBRIS: Unlock Character Analysis With Key Books!

For just $2.00 apiece - or three for $5.00 - you too can unlock the secrets of character analysis. The folks at Key Publishing Company have even included a "no-risk" coupon, so frankly you'd be wasting money if you didn't order all of 'em!

For some reason, the ad doesn't credit the authors of each book, which include Walter B. Gibson, Felix Fairfax, and Leona Lehman ... plus our old friend Dr. Leo L. Martello!

I guess the overall theme was more important - buy now!

From Fate magazine, Volume 23 - Number 11, November 1970.

BEYOND ALL REASON by John Macklin

We're on a kick with these Macklin collections, which are a rush of fresh air after one too many duds from the likes of Brad Steiger and Warren Smith. Macklin once again presents a bunch of ghost stories as "true case studies" from his files - Macklin being a pseudonym, this is a delightful bit of fakery and primes us for some enjoyable drama.

Standout chapters include "Bird of Death" and "The Curse of the Chinese Magician." The "Bird of Death" is a quickie chapter that simply nails the maybe-fiction formula, with a frightening specter and a neatly done twist.

The "Chinese Magician" chapter, meanwhile, hinges on a family never translating the Chinese characters on a cursed plate. Of course nowadays we could just point our phone at it! Macklin lets the weight of history settle on his stories, for the better: the family's cursed in the first place because their patriarch "Sir William Belford" is an attache to the British embassy, and players in the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi would like some revenge for the Opium Wars and national humiliation that China had been put through. As Britain moves through the years to WWI and WWII, the curse unfolds with historical precision. Another sign of the times: Macklin calls Cixi "Tzui Hsui" in the old Wade-Giles style.

"The Pointing Bones" is another good chapter, creatively describing an Aboriginal death curse against a wealthy sheep farmer, with a climax at a horse race - Steiger would never go the extra mile here! In general Macklin writes with a great deal more subtlety than Steiger ever bothered to, not always giving us the easy answers or such neatly wrapped up storylines. Sometimes, even in fiction, the unknown is truly that.

This volume is very light on real (or "real") Forteana, but does feature the channeling musician George Aubert, who (supposedly!) was able to play music from the greats like Mozart and Bach without any training, and indeed without any control over what exactly he played. Aubert is poorly documented online: he makes a brief appearance in this article by one Melvyn J. Willin for the Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, and in this thesis, also by Willin. I'm assuming that Macklin's grisly end for Aubert (slashing his own throat in an alley after his gift has failed to enrich him) is a bit of dramatic license. Either way, poor Aubert.

True to maybe-fiction style, Macklin doesn't cite many of his sources for the true story chapters - though the final, very beefy chapter, about "An Age-Old Power Beyond All Reason," does cite such historical figures as Paul Le Jeune, Henry Schoolcraft, and Sir Cecil Denny, as Macklin explores Amerindian and First Nations healing and cursing. Macklin also references The Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society by Alfred Irving Hallowell - though he misspells Hallowell's name as Hollowell!

It's not all pale faces in this final chapter: Macklin names one Wan-Chus-Co, former medicine man turned Christian convert, which leads us to a writeup by one William Johnson in an old French publication from 1871 titled the Revue Spirite Journal D'Etudes Psychologiques, available in more readable form at this link. Who knows how many more dusty journals and brittle old books Macklin paged through to whip up his chapters ... all we have in the current moment is this volume in front of us.

The back cover promised that Macklin "soars beyond the horizon into the shadows of silent, endless nights" ...  well, he's knocked another one out of the park, anyways! Or if that's too hyperbolic, at the very least, he's hit a triple. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1970

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: BEYOND BELIEF

Stefan Elg's Fortean collection Beyond Belief is now available to read and download at archive dot org! This marks the title's digital debut.

Courtesy Tower Books, 1970 (original pub. 1967).

SCORING THE SEERS IN 1969 by Brad Steiger

It's easy for them to make the predictions, but how do our psychic stars actually score on their prognostication? Steiger grades a nice clutch of midcentury psychic stars here, most of whom would become regulars in his '70s book series coauthored with Warren Smith: What the Seers Predict - Smith would continue this series solo as the Predictions for 197X line before scuttling it after the final entry for 1977.

Supposed "hits" include Richard Burton and Liz Taylor going round and round, which tells you what to expect here. Conflict in the Middle East is another easy "prediction." Steiger rates predictress Irene Hughes especially high, with visions of de Gaulle's retirement and Ho Chi Minh's death among other hits. Steiger would cobble together a promotional volume for Hughes later this year with Know the Future Today!

Jeane Dixon's prediction of Governor Reagan having issues with rioting is part of a forgotten saga where Reagan proved his hippie-bashing bonafides via vehement rhetoric towards campus protests in California. See John Dolan's classic article "Reagan's Cheshire Snarl" for a window into this memory holed piece of the Gipper's career. Race baiting Dixon also predicts that Nixon will do more to advance the Negro's status than "any other man in the last 100 years" ... Steiger wisely considers this one too soon to call.

Frequent fliers like John Pendragon, Malva Dee, Paul Twitchell of the Eckankar cult, and the Countess Gypsy Markoff Amaya round out the proceedings. Amaya whiffs on a prediction of Castro's fall in 1970 ... woof! One of the most recent traces of her online is on the blog Eleanor Britton's People, where an anonymous commenter describes caring for Amaya's chihuahua and says the last they knew of her was in 1989. It's entirely possible Amaya suffered the same fate of so many predicting Castro's downfall, and ended up preceding him by quite some time.

Gypsy Markoff Amaya

The commenter ends by saying "we are trying to figure out what happened to her." How sad that so many of the psychics here have faded into history, with neither hide nor hair of their final fates before passing on to the great unknown. At least we know that John Pendragon passed in 1970, as sad as that knowledge is - he was relatively young at just 59 years old!

  

A rare pic of the addled John Pendragon!

This article is also available to read and download at archive dot org.

Courtesy Fate magazine, Volume 23 - Number 1, January 1970.

ON THE TRAIL OF BIGFOOT by George H. Harrison

From National Wildlife magazine and editor George Harrison (no, not that one) comes a shocking update on the hunt for Bigfoot! It's not the big man himself who provides the scares though, but rather the colorful antics of expedition leader Robert W. Morgan, who poses for paramilitary pics and says he plans to use drugged bait on Bigfoot and then track him with, specifically, a specially trained Labrador. Harrison ends things with the classic Warren Smith-style line "What do you, the reader, think?" and ponders if federal funding might not aid in the hunt. This article also references an older piece on the Patterson-Gimlin film and claims that Roger Patterson passed a polygraph test over the PGF's authenticity in the course of being interviewed by this magazine!

"Quit scarin' the neighbors, Bob!"

Nowadays George Harrison keeps us posted on how to understand bird plumage and mating habits, marking this vintage article as just one small piece of a long career in wildlife writing.

George H. Harrison, in an undated photo.

Robert W. Morgan meanwhile is quite the character, with a filmmaking career that includes the documentary Big Foot: Man or Beast? and the Bigfoot/hicksploitation horror flick Blood Stalkers and a stint as (he claims) an informant/two-fisted vigilante against mob drug running! Morgan's still alive and kicking today at 90 years old ... way to go, Bob!

Newspaper ad for Big Foot (1972)

Blood Stalkers (1976), which was never banned anywhere.

And a tip of the ol' hippo to Stef for the lead here ...
this book's a trip!

"On the Trail of Bigfoot" is also available to read and download at archive dot org.

From National Wildlife magazine, Vol. 8 - No. 6, Oct/Nov 1970.