THE STRANGE AND THE SUPERNORMAL by Pauline Saltzman

A flashy reprint collection of articles by author Saltzman, dating from 1949 through 1967, with many previously featured in Fate magazine. There's loads of ghosts, cursed opals, black dogs, and more old fashioned fun including the Stans Poltergeist of Switzerland, which tormented the Joller family "over a period of two years starting in 1860" with incessant knocking and thrown objects. This copy was much loved, with lots of underlining!

Paperback Library, 1968

STRANGE DISAPPEARANCES by Brad Steiger

Steiger burns some pages detailing the mysterious end of Ambrose Bierce and retelling some of Bierce's classic mysterious tales before launching into one of his patented paranormal potpourris, weaving together everything from interdimensional Bigfoots to UFO kidnappers to hoary old tales like missing Chinese and British armies. Steiger freely offers up his sources in fellow paranormal writers such as Harold T. Wilkins, John Keel, Frank Edwards, and Brinsley Le Poer Trench, even as he recycles some previously unsourced stories from his own prior work with the ghost ships Marlborough and Iron Mountain. The good ship Joyita also makes a reappearance. Such is the incestuous ouroboros that was the classic paranormal genre!

The case of missing child Donald Lee Baker (among others) would be resurrected decades later by modern day mystery monger David Paulides and his Missing 411 series. Steiger's original telling, recycled from his 1966 volume The Unknown, is just as thin as Paulides' modern takes, with an obvious forced incredulity at missing children in the forest that borders on insulting.

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Lancer Books, 1972

FRATERNITY OF THE WEIRD by Michael Hervey

Hervey leans heavily on ghost stories in this one, along with some classic Forteana bits such as the ghost ships Ourang Medan and MV Joyita and the Bell Witch House. There's also the bizarre story of the "Apes of Planet Oros," which Hervey claims to have deciphered from ancient African hieroglyphs and replaces modern evolutionary theory with a fable of four-toed humans degenerating into apes. Well, if you say so!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Ace Books, 1969

PSYCHIC PHENOMENA by Bradley & Bradley

"Is a thought a thing?" Such are the heady questions asked by one-hit-wonder paranormal authors Dorothy Bomar Bradley and Robert A. Bradley, M.D. in this dense study. The authors were inspired by experiences in their beautiful English Tudor era home, and undertake an admirably thorough exploration of ghosts and poltergeists (not the same thing!) ESP and clairvoyance (ditto), and other sundry PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. Hugh Lynn Cayce of the Association for Research and Enlightenment provides an introduction new to the paperback edition, and academic translator Siegwalt O. Palleske delivers an epilogue.

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Paperback Library, 1972 (original pub. 1967)

KNOW THE FUTURE TODAY! by Brad Steiger

Brad Steiger presents a promotional primer on celebrity psychic Irene Hughes, focusing on her supposed startling accuracy in mid-century affairs.

It's easy to snicker at psychic predictions of the Vietnam War ending in 1969, or famine in Italy by 1972, but beyond the simple failure of prophecy it illustrates the role that these celebrity psychics play in voicing our hopes and our fears. Another constant theme in these books is China launching a nuclear war - the PRC only got the Bomb in 1964, a fresh scare for Americans still reeling from a bipolar Cold War order. Assassination predictions for the Kennedy clan and marriage for widow Jackie are an easy gambit. Her prediction of "big business" helping out farmers (page 150) is a particularly bitter piece of black comedy given the '80s farm crisis.

Paperback Library, 1970

COVER UPDATES: ATLANTIS RISING and BEYOND EARTH

Pretty as a picture, a painted cover for Brad Steiger's Atlantis Rising, from Sphere Books, 1973.

And a sinister looking 1976 reprint for Ralph and Judy Blum's Beyond Earth!

GHOSTS IN IRISH HOUSES by James Reynolds

New year, more new (old) books! And another entry in the see-through ghost gals cover gallery, along with a somber blurb that skeptics will either be petrified or fully converted by the stories within ... which is a bit beside the point as the 22 tales within don't offer themselves as anything other than folklore. Perhaps this 1968 reprint by the Paperback Library was trying to fit in among the then-current crop of scientific ghost books which promised hard evidence and PROOF of the other side. Not to say there aren't some real corkers here, selected by author James Reynolds out of over 200 (!) stories he catalogued from the Emerald Isle. This title has enjoyed frequent reprints through the years, a testament to the evocative stories from those "richly imaginative" Irish!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Paperback Library, 1968 (original pub. 1947)