COLLISIONS WITH REALITY by John Macklin

It's time for another round of maybe-fiction "true" stories from John Macklin! The first chapter is a good start, with a mysterious memorial to a dead Luftwaffe pilot in the UK. Things get even better with the ugly ghost of Hoddeston, showcasing Macklin's relative subtlety in a field awash with the likes of Brad Steiger and Robert Tralins. We also get some treatments of relatively true tales like French UFO occupant sightings, Rasputin, and the Wilkins-Sherman ESP tests.

One chapter, "The Cave Monsters of Galloway," is an obvious fictionalization of the legend of Sawney Bean, with the cannibal patriarch renamed Cashel Logan. Bean's apocryphal cannibal clan have been used for horror thrills by L.A. Morse as The Flesheaters and Guy N. Smith as, well, Cannibals.

Another chapter, "The Man Who Was Murdered by Light," is taken from a bogus news item about German soldiers buried alive and living for years underground before being released. From The Madera Tribune, June 18th, 1951:

Macklin names one of the soldiers Kurt Holz and says he immediately dies of a heart attack upon exposure to sunlight after his rescue! Wild, John, wild! For more real world thrills, psychic bullshitter Gerard Croiset gets a promotional chapter, as does spontaneous human combustion and 1966 UFO sightings at the Wanaque reservoir. Kaspar Hauser and an Ica-inspired Brazilian pebble carving of a UFO round out some more Forteana in between more stories of "true" hauntings and supposed "case files" from Macklin's archive - now, remember, Macklin is a pseudonym, so how the heck does he have case files?

Speaking of Macklin's enthusiasm for trains, here he makes up a Welsh train disaster in 1927 that killed 16, at "Cynon Gap." Two boys on a cycling tour in 1956 see a spectral reenactment of the crash during a storm, and signalman Joshua Thomas laughing maniacally. The chapter is titled "Witness to a Train Disaster - 18 Years Afterwards" which is truly some kind of collision with reality if you do the math.

The final chapter is another Fortean classic, the missing Eskimo village of Lake Angikuni. Researcher Garth Haslam at the Anomaly Info site has outlined the history of this story, which was popularized by Frank Edwards in Stranger Than Science. Oddly, Macklin uses the "Angikuni" spelling, whereas Edwards wrote it as "Lake Anjikuni" - both are listed as variants online, while Haslam calls Anjikuni a misspelling, but either way it means that Macklin made a deliberate decision to spell it that way even though it's most likely he got the story from Edwards in the first place!

If your appetite's been whetted for more spooky true stories, Ace provides some ads for more Macklin madness, a whole page of Hans Holzer titles, Michael Hervey's Strange Happenings, plus a Steiger book on reincarnation. 

Macklin's Collisions With Reality is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969

FOREST FIRE by David James

About a block from the depot, a horse pulling an empty buggy flashed by him towards the center of town. The horse would die in the fire, O'Rourke thought as he turned the corner by the burned-out feed store. It could not be helped. He did not have time to chase it.

David Hagberg returns to the disaster scene under his David James pseudonym, this time with an ambitious period piece about the Cloquet Fire of 1918, which killed almost 500 people as it swept through the isolated communities of Northeastern Minnesota. Says the Minnesota Historical Society:

What is often called simply the Cloquet Fire was really a host of fires, fifty or more, that combined in a single event. It had two major theaters, one called the Cloquet–Duluth Fire and the other the Moose Lake Fire.

Conditions for both had been building for months. Lumbering, the region’s main industry, created giant depots of cut, dry lumber and left the countryside littered with wood waste. Farmers routinely burned fields and brush. Locomotives, contrary to law, spewed sparks and embers. The summer and fall of 1918 had been extremely dry.

Hagberg focuses heavily on the locomotive factor, and on locals' disbelieving mindsets: a fire would be too terrible, unthinkable even, so it can't possibly happen. One man who's all too ready to accept the awful truth is Chief O'Rourke. His life is currently falling apart, what with a pregnant mistress and political machinations against his office (we first meet him as he stops a white-on-white lynching, earning the ire of a local big shot), and even if he sounds the alarm it may be too little, too late. Those duplicitous trains, spewing hot embers, are nonetheless the lifeblood and lifelines of the north country, and O'Rourke will need to move fast to organize Cloquet's evacuation via rail. The few citizens who own automobiles can choose to ride off down the road, at the risk of driving right into the inferno.

Writing in that far off, futuristic year of 1975, with its satellites and phone lines and computerized whats-its, Hagberg makes it starkly clear for readers how limited the toolsets were in 1918: telegraph and couriers. A distance of 20 miles becomes an insurmountable hurdle, and the search for a missing child across town becomes a Herculean task. Poor form from Belmont Tower, by the way, spoiling the fate of O'Rourke's mistress on the back cover and letting us know that there's a "miracle of Cass Lake."

Besides Belmont Tower's spoilers, there's a certain stiffness to the narrative, maybe owing to its period setting. Whether or not we're experts on the Cloquet Fire of 1918, or had never heard of it before this book (raises hand), we know Hagberg is working with somebody else's script, as it were. Per usual, his writing is strong, but we're just missing that spark (ha!) that's present in his other 1975 disasterpieces Blizzard and Twister. We almost get there, with the firestorm proving a crucible for characters like reporter Sullivan, nursing shame from a cowardly episode on the Western Front, and poor, doomed mistress Mindy, but ... alas.

Forest Fire must have taken the most research out of the three 1975 titles, so it's disappointing that it's not quite as good. Not bad by any means, but still not as good as we know Hagberg can be.

Belmont Tower give us a nice spread of ads in the back pages, fiction and nonfiction, including the YA classic Walkabout and a story about the "confused, tortured world of the homosexual" title Boychick.

One final, humorous note: the anachronistic whirlybird almost hiding behind the title text on the cover art. Carelessness from Belmont Tower, or a deliberate attempt to hide the period setting from would-be buyers? When the smoke clears, Hagberg's Forest Fire earns a respectable 3/4 rating and sits comfortably enough alongside his other disaster work. Y'know, there's as much distance between now and 1975 as there was between Hagberg and his 1918 setting? Far out ...

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

PASSPORT TO THE UNKNOWN by John Macklin

When a man of such practical outlook and training as the doctor - a man who had once been as skeptical as any about occult matters thus becomes convinced ... it must surely mean something ...

So sayeth John Macklin! The man: Frederick Wood. The occult matters at hand: his past life regression that reveals his prior turn as a general in Pharaoh's armies, some 2,000 years ago! That dating puts him in a pretty rough time for the Ptolemaic dynasty, so it's probably just as well that it's all in the past.

The lovely crystalline cover welcomes us into another reliable roundup of Forteana, courtesy the indefatigable (and pseudonymous) John Macklin. The weakest story in the volume is the very first one, about a ghost who wakes up, and some people see him. Yeah. But we're off to the races after that, with a cursed train, a cursed orchid, a cursed diamond, a cursed u-boat, deathly foxes, an Apartheid assassination attempt, and much much more! Macklin's generous this time around, and we end up with 55 chapters of rapid fire thrills.

We even get a chapter on Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction, plus George King's contact with Venus. King founded the Aetherius Society, a UFO religion. These bits of UFO history are packed between haunted cellars and phantom footsteps, stories alternately either long forgotten or just totally made up by Macklin. Cursed train engine D326, for example, really existed and really did have a reputation for being jinxed!

The death train D326, looking not-so-threatening in North Wales

The deadly blue orchid of the very next chapter, though? Well, the internet has only a fragment of the true breadth of human knowledge out there in the world, but I'm drawing a blank trying to verify "Christofo Martena" and "Dr. Andermart" of the "Institute for Tropical Illnesses" of Rio de Janeiro ...

Macklin takes some liberties with the true stories as well, to spice them up. Like D326, German U-boat UB-65 had a real life reputation as a jinxed vessel - but comparing Macklin's version to a 1990 write-up by Commander Richard Compton-Hall of the Royal Navy (retired) hosted at the U.S. Naval Institute shows Macklin gilding the lily a fair bit compared to the possible true fate of UB-65. Macklin's version has UB-65 adrift as a sitting duck off the southern coast of Ireland, but mysteriously exploding before an America sub can fire upon it. The ghostly figure of the dead first-lieutenant appears on deck as the submarine sinks. Comptom-Hall's version plays out as realistic submarine warfare, with the American sub not even sure if it's in battle with one U-boat or two, and unsure which if either has sank. 

Complicating things further, wikipedia describes UB-65's fate using the "sitting duck" narrative (minus a ghost) but does not cite any sources for this! The wiki article does go on to finger one Hector Charles Bywater, British journalist, spy, and military writer, for promoting the haunted ship narrative. Further reading leads to Lost at Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries by Michael Goss and George Behe, which has a chapter on the legend of UB-65 that, while not mentioning Macklin, does trace the evolution of the "hoodoo curse" from Bywater down to writers like Raymond Lamont Brown publishing in Fate magazine during the '70s.

In analyzing UB-65's legend, Goss and Behe consider the fatalism of German submariners as WWI dragged on, as well as the propaganda value of a "cursed ship" as utilized by Britishers like Bywater.

As for Macklin, one can imagine him thumbing through the same archives trawled by Brad Steiger and co., selecting true tales to titillate and adding his own perfect little touch to each one, to titillate even further - or simply adapting a previously juiced up version of a once-true tale. It doesn't end there, though, as even the copy writers for this book got in on the action: the child's doll that "becomes a killer" on the back cover conjures up images of Chucky, but the actual story is about a family barely escaping certain death due to a premonition not to touch the doll, which lies next to unexploded ordinance on a beach! Keep your wits about you, anyways.

Macklin's tale of newspaperman Ed Sampson's premonition of Krakatoa's world beating eruption turns up online reprinted by the magazine Ireland's Own. Still shocking readers after all these years ...

Indeed, this title is almost 60 years old, and some things have changed less (or less faster) than expected: Macklin ends his chapter about the cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond wondering whether or not Charles will wear it at his coronation, as it supposedly brings bad luck to men. So many midcentury paranormal authors and ESP prognosticators who name checked him would never live to see Charles attain the throne, but Macklin personally may have been relieved to know that when the time did finally come, Charles went without the Koh-i-Noor, and in fact it's on display as part of the Crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, at the Tower of London. Crisis averted!

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

Ace Books, 1968

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