STRANGE WORLD: Monsters Along the Mississippi

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Monsters along the Mississippi ... and in Minnesota and Washington, too! It's another edition of Brad Steiger's "Strange World" column, with Brad recycling the Fremont, WI monster from his pseudonymous 1969 title The Abominable Snowmen, though he's off by one year on when it occurred according to his own original telling. Meanwhile, Warren Smith also used this anecdote in his own Strange Abominable Snowmen from 1970, and correctly dates it to 1968.

Everyone and their mother has written about the Minnesota Iceman, of course, and here Brad relays some of exhibitor Frank Hansen's evolving excuses/explanations for the creature. We're at the point where Hansen was claiming to have shot the monster dead himself in the Minnesota woods, which makes for a convenient cover story on why he's so reluctant to let the supposed corpse be properly analyzed. Nice sideshow zigzagging, Frank!

Brad finishes up with a 1970 Bigfoot expedition by National Wildlife magazine, headed by editor George Harrison. Harrison wrote his own account of this trip as "On the Trail of Bigfoot," for the October-November 1970 issue.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Clipped from the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, June 5th, 1972.

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE ENCOUNTERS WITH GHOSTS & WEIRD UNSOLVED MYSTERIES

Two more by Brad Steiger are now available to read and download: Weird Unsolved Mysteries (as Eric Norman) and Strange Encounters With Ghosts, from Award Books and Popular Library, respectively. These are two of Brad's better books, with juicy stories and good organization, so check 'em out!

Original reviews are here and here.

BURIED TREASURE GUIDE by Eric Norman

One more time! Warren Smith scrapes the last bit of ore from this vein with a final treasure hunting guide, coming after his Finders Keepers and buddy Brad Steiger's Treasure Hunting. Award Books packages this one up nice, even if they do typo "Bermuda" as "Burmuda" on page 74 while discussing diver Teddy Tucker's jackpot salvage of a 1597 wreck which netted him "a cool $100,000 tax free." There also aren't any maps, rare or otherwise, in this book, and the advertised guide to equipment sourcing was in Finders Keepers. Swings and roundabouts.

The emerald cross salvaged by Tucker from the San Pedro.
Photo credit to the wonderful Teddy Tucker dot com.

Treasure diver James Stillson is back from Steiger's Treasure Hunting, as is Padre Island, the Little Fleta, and all sundry lost mines and stolen payrolls! This time around Smith opts for a straightforward chapter format, listing entries one after the other: sunken pirate ships, lost mines, Spanish galleons, forgotten caches of cash, gold, or gems, etc., etc. Smith also throws in a state-by-state guide like the last two volumes, and a chapter on TWENTY whole lost mines - Steiger only managed ten in his book!

Chapter four sees young Peter Johnson discovering "Treasure in the Lost Pharoah's Cave," and gives us another typo from Award, right in the chapter title! Johnson and two Indian friends take shelter in a cave during a storm and find mysterious wall art and piles and piles of gold coins. Johnson takes one home, and while his father scolds him for fraternizing with Indians, years later Peter's grandson has the coin examined by a professor ... would you believe, the coin has an extinct mastodon carved into it? Was this incredible proof of an ancient lost civilization?

Smith doesn't tell us where he originally got this story (reused from his 1968 title Into the Strange) but it sounds like classic frontier bunkum, placing ancient pre-Amerindian civilizations in situ for settlers to discover. Mastodons were a favorite choice of OOP animal representation for the 1800s (as dinosaurs became in the 20th century), beloved by Thomas Jefferson and cropping up in mysterious Mound Builder accounts all across the eastern half of the country. Smith does name a Richard Gurnee, president of the National Speleological Society, as having an interest in finding the mysterious cave.

This story as related by Smith crops up on two modern websites: a thread on Treasure Net and an entry on Uncharted History. The OP of the thread on Treasure Net says they don't even know the name of the book the chapter came out of, because their copy was so beat! After a little discussion, user "Bsktkaz" gives some local context:

I grew up in Ticonderoga and I never heard this story growing up. That seems unusual in itself. I am greatly intrigued by this story but have many doubts of my own. The first doubt is the actual pages in the post. If these pages were as old as presented the outer edges should be greatly frayed not straight as razors. These pages are all pretty well the same color, if they were this old they would have stains and discoloration. The inside edges appear such that the pages were torn out of a book, but the pages 45-46 (should be back to back) do not match up like pages 47 and 48. The outer side rips on 47-48 look as if they were done on purpose not accidentally which would have to be the case on outer edge. Second, I have searched local censes and find no residences for Johnson's near Pharaoh Mountain in the 1840's, I may have overlooked though. They may have rented but his father made a living as a farmer, so I doubt it, most farmers especially in those times owned their farms. The Johnsons (Johnson's Farm and Johnsons Orchard) I found lived more towards Crown Point (near 7 miles from Ti). One last question I have is the time frame for the hike. Ti (Ticonderoga) is several miles (6-7 estimate) from Pharaoh Mountain. Like I said I grew up in Ti, well Chilson just outside Ti and even closer to Pharaoh Mountain and I grew up hiking those mountains, That kind of hike would take hours one way let alone to, playing around, waiting out a thunder storm the returning. A good estimate of time would be close to if not more than 12 hours. That father seems awfully calm for having his son disappear for 12 hours. Even if the boy was coming from Eagle lake area the closest to Pharaoh Mountain you looking at 4 miles or more one way.

There's something apropos about a quickie bullshit chapter from Smith becoming its own lost legend ...

A page of the chapter as it appears online ...

The eighth chapter, Lost Viking Mines and Mystery Ships, also utilizes Smith's pseudohistory background. Viking miners outside of Red Rock, AZ are also reused from Into the Strange, and are joined by Eric the Red's lost longship buried in the California dunes and the old saw about a white and bearded Quetzalcoatl. These are all comfortable old pseudohistorical legends that fit right into the treasure hunting theme. Smith also cites settler/surveyor Herman Ehrenberg and his research into a possible lost white tribe in the Southwest, and a story by one Mrs. Myrtle Botts and her husband, who met a prospector while camping and were shown his faded photographs of what appear to be viking longships half-buried in the desert.

This chapter also features two separate old Indians who begin their stories by saying, "Many moons ago ..." C'mon, Warren!

Meanwhile it's more of the same treasure teasing in other chapters, with cheeseball accounts of jackpot finds, quotes from professional treasure hunters, and quick listings of random locations, some more specific than others. A chapter on confirmed finds whets the appetite some more: like I said before, these treasure hunting volumes seem like they were made for armchair dreaming by daddy-o: "Man oh man, if we rent a metal detector next time we go to the Keys!"

The backpage ads offer money saving and self help titles ... plus a Sergio Leone novelization, bringing the dust, gold, and blood of the Wild West vividly to life for readers who'd just finished this treasure guide!

The final title for sale is a guide to suing the pants off everyone!

Award Books, 1970

PREDICTIONS FOR 1974 compiled and edited by Warren Smith

Here's a real load of midcentury occult meatloaf that must have been waiting to spring off the grocery store spinner rack, as working writer Warren Smith assembles 33 psychics of varying pedigree for predictions on the upcoming year of 1974! We get some big names like "PK Man" and all around self promoter Ted Owens, the Countess Amaya (last seen in The Strange Ones by Smith, from 1972), Malva Dee and Beaverton's own Tenny Hale, as well as also-rans and unknowns like "Aquarius" the anonymous college student, the "Black Psychic" Dr. Ernesto Montgomery (who seems ill-served by this reductive label), fake fakir Komar, and a host of others who are lost to the ages, with nary a wikipedia page or archived news article to commemorate them. Regardless of their purported status, we get the expected spread of generic, oddball, infuriating, and just plain wrong predictions about what to expect in '74 ...

Cancer will be cured, as will schizophrenia. Nixon will resign, be impeached, or be totally vindicated. Stuff will get more expensive. Young people will either accept their lot, or raise hell! China, the USSR, or some terrorist group will start a nuclear war ... or bring about world peace! Liza Minelli will divorce, get remarried, and divorce again. On and on it goes, a numbing litany of "predictions" that soon blend together between psychics, to the point where it would be hard to remember who to credit with any actual hits. Regardless, Smith and Award Books are sure to place a disclaimer front and center that NONE of the predictions within are to serve as the basis for any financial decisions!

One of the standout chapters features Leo Martello, a legendary gay rights and wiccan activist and author of an excellent witchcraft primer featured on the blog back in 2020. Martello's predictions seem less ethereally inspired than simply savvy, with a mix of accuracy. Near misses include predicting impeachment for Nixon post-Watergate and farm strikes which were still a decade off in actuality. Dead on predictions include the the implication of the CIA in SE Asian drug trafficking. Silly stuff from Martello includes massacres by psychotic Vietnam vets and "a dubious witch killed in a car crash," (now who exactly was he throwing shade at?) along with the usual celebrity divorces everybody else comments on throughout this volume. Martello is the rare left-wing celebrity psychic, and even predicts that reactionary race baiter Jeane Dixon will face public backlash for her stances.

Martello looking tres sinistre ...

... and a little more approachable!

In line with Martello, Tenny Hale ("looking chic like a model instead of a psychic") predicts that fundamentalists will take over Christianity in America. Again, this is less of an astral vision and more straight observation, though it's better than the piffle some of these other psychics dredge up to fill pages. India/Pakistan and Palestine/Israel are two big geopolitical topics that crop up again and again, with varying pessimism and perspectives. Another hot topic of the time is the status of the American Indian: some psychics are bullish on America's first people gaining full rights and reparations, while others feel the issue will fade from the headlines.

Tenny Hale

Our final chapter is from Ruth Zimmerman, the Illinois housewife who tunes in. True to the era and focus of this volume, she says Jack Paar may suffer a head injury and that Dean Martin should be careful of his nose! The backpage ads are solid gold, with Brad Steiger, Brinsley le Poer Trench, and some titans of SF represented.

Predictions For 1974 is available to read and download at archive dot org.

This book was owned by Earle L. Blanton, Jr.

Award Books, 1973

WEIRD UNSOLVED MYSTERIES by Eric Norman

Brad Steiger dons his alter ego Eric Norman and invites you to enter the doorway to the strange and discover some WEIRD UNSOLVED MYSTERIES! Presented with a verve and panache that rises above his Popular Library fare, this volume is a tidy little collection of themed mysteries, with a great table of contents courtesy Award Books - ol' Popular Library never bothered with that! Presentation counts, and even though this is the usual remixed slush pile from Steiger, it somehow seems fresh and intriguing, even as the thought starts to tickle the back of our brains, now where have I read this before?

Chapter one, for example, opens with missing child Tommy Bowman, who disappeared on a family hike in 1953. Steiger intones mysterious happenings of a trans-dimensional nature, though the truth seems far more prosaic, and sadder too, as Bowman likely was an unnamed victim of serial killer Mack Ray Edwards. Steiger will reuse this case, and pretty much this entire chapter, in his Strange Disappearances in 1972, just jiggling some words around. The missing Chinese army, the fictional Charles Ashmore, they may have all disappeared (or not) but they reappear in these pages over and over. A chapter on sea serpents follows, with many vintage 1800s case reports that buddy Warren Smith would paste into his Strange Secrets of the Loch Ness Monster in 1976, and some hoax accounts of the Lake Vorota monster of Siberia - which, to be clear, is a "real" unknown creature, with sighting reports that continue to this day. However, Steiger's claims of the monster devouring dogs and elk and an "undetermined" number of people are classic ballyhoo, adding just a little spice to a story to stretch it that much further. He also misspells the location as "Vororta" - go figure.

Next are ghost ships galore, and as we might expect the crew of the Ellen Austin performs their usual dramatic disappearing act. Various vessels are lost in the Bermuda Triangle before we move on to some classic spontaneous human combustion, and then unearth some mysterious artifacts like the Kensington Runestone. Steiger also gallantly defends James Churchward and his Mu fantasy against the snobby "sophisticates" with some cutting edge developments by botanist Dr. Albert C. Smith, who found "an overwhelming affinity" between Fijian and New Guinea flowers, which Steiger says is proof of an ancient  landmass stretching across the ocean. Balkan pyramids and super civilizations are another mystery that lingers in the present day.

Steiger's penultimate chapter is a knockout on monsters of all shapes and sizes. Strange sightings from South America would be reused by Warren Smith for Lost Cities of the Ancients - Unearthed! in 1976. Nice selection here by Brad. His final chapter is on fairy folk with a sidebar into their possible UFO connection. Charmingly, Steiger posits the alien babe who made it with Antonio Villas-Boas as a possible fairy queen! I like it. We also get a credulous bit on the Cottingley Fairies and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with technical arguments about the (im)possibility of hoaxing that sound similar to those marshaled for certain other mysterious creatures. Steiger ends on a high note though when he offers us a passport to Magonia, and ponders the "kernel of reality that may lie at the core of centuries of myth and legend." Bravo to Brad for this clean delivery of some old reliables. It must have paid the rent!

These Weird Unsolved Mysteries are available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1969

THE UNDER-PEOPLE by Eric Norman

Still high on his NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH from yesterday, Brad Steiger takes a spin under his pen name Eric Norman and delivers a rewrite of that same text, simply shifting the main focus from UFOs and Men in Black to the Hollow Earth and the startling discovery of THE UNDER-PEOPLE! It's (mostly) the same cast of kooky characters and twice-told tales, but Steiger tweaks the perspective just enough with some additional mythology. Material from this book would be heavily recycled by Steiger and Warren Smith for later Hollow Earth releases.

Who lives inside the Earth? Devils, angels, a master race? Cannibal lust demons? Steiger's just asking questions here, and there's room for reasonable debate! A revealing nitpick: Steiger cites the myth of Christopher Columbus disproving the Flat Earth as an example of the establishment brooking no dissent on the shape of the world. Of course, medieval people understood the Earth was round and weren't the ignorant dirt eaters the Columbus Myth would have us believe, but this citation of false historiography serves its purpose for Steiger's laundering of the fringe. A similar example is the common comparison of crank theorists to Galileo, persecuted by the Church. With that pedantic puffery out of the way, let's start digging into "one of the most provocative books of the year" and see if we can't unmask the Under-People!

Classic map by "Shavertron" artist Max Fyfield

Steiger must have had alchemy on the brain around this time, because that's where we lead off, before unearthing some OOP artifacts, mysterious roads and tombs, and celestial visions by trapped miners. There's also a weird black dwarf who gets drunk in a monastery wine cellar and is temporarily recruited as a monk, before being cast back into the darkness as a devil! Talk about a lost weekend. Shambhala and Agharta, Ultima Thule and Hadding Land, these and more mythologies figure into Steiger's decoding of the Under-People's identity. There's also the Zuni and other indigenous peoples' creation myths about an inner Earth origin. After a nasty overview of Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, with attendant myths of underground tunnels and secret treasures, Steiger cites his own New UFO Breakthrough and Harold T. Wilkins on ancient underwater ruins and nuclear bomb shelters.

One "Maggie Rogers" has her manuscript about contact with the Under-People summarized in a chapter. Originally published by Ray Palmer in Amazing Stories alongside the ongoing Shaver saga, it's a similar story, with "Tamil and Nephli" underlords and a druggy, sexed out atmosphere. That phony story of the good ship Jesmond landing on Mid-Atlantic ruins introduces us to a section on Atlantis, and Steiger casts quite a wide net here, dredging up ol' Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce among others. Next we hear from Gray Barker and his Saucerian Bulletin, setting us up for a dark section on Hitler and the Hollow Earth which would also be reused by Steiger and Smith in future. More recycling occurs with Olaf Jansen and the Smoky God - this chapter would be repeated verbatim by both Smith and Steiger in many later books.

We're nearing the end of the saga, checking in now with modern proponents of Hollow Earth such as Marshall B. Gardner who asks "Have the poles really been discovered?" His full text from 1913, A Journey to the Earth's Interior, is available for reading at the Sacred Texts website. His book seems to be the source for the story of the "mysterious origin of the Eskimo" which, again, wound up in many of Smith and Steiger's other books. Finally now Steiger rolls in the big guns and gives us Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer, the two men who most popularized modern Hollow Earth with their eminently readable paranoid pulp fiction. Steiger quotes heavily from an article by Palmer on Hollow Earth and UFOs, which seems to quote without citation from Dr. Raymond Bernard's book The Hollow Earth  on Admiral Byrd's expedition "beyond" the pole. Perhaps this is an error by Steiger or Award Books and Palmer cited Bernard in his original article. A quick sketch of early Hollow Earther John Symmes and a detour to mysterious Mt. Shasta are inserted before we make one final push into that blockbuster Shaver Mystery! By the way, the first five stories of the Shaver Mystery are available to read and download at archive dot org, so you can see for yourself Shaver's strangely compelling psychosexual Pellucidarian saga.

Shaver and Palmer together

After all this melodrama, Steiger ends abruptly by asking us "What do you believe?" This would become Warren Smith's go-to ending for his Zebra specials from the mid-70s, but it's a limp copout line if you ask me: "I dunno, here's some wild stuff. Crazy, huh?" Stick to your guns, Steiger! Or at least steal a better ending!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1969