STRANGELY ENOUGH! by C.B. Colby

Author C.B. Colby delivers this collection of stories taken from his "Adventure Today" newspaper column. There's no pretense to "fully documented" facts in this one, as Colby cheerfully admits that these are campfire stories meant to be shared and enjoyed. There's a load of urban legends here with multiple vanishing hitchhikers, ghosts in graveyards, and specters like ol' Ocean Born Mary and the Shadmock! That missing Eskimo village is back again, along with that missing Chinese army. Colby also includes frequent flyers like Flight 19 and assorted saucers, plus the Devil's Footprints of Devon and the moving coffins of the Barbados Vault. All told, Colby packs in 99 bite sized entries in 125 pages, a rapid fire pace that rivals Smith and Steiger. 

Given their status as spooky campfire tales, Colby's not above a little fabrication here and there. For example, the story of the "Tragedy Atop the Glacier" which references a real plane crash of a C-46 cargo plane in the PNW. In Colby's telling, the bodies of the dead mysteriously disappear and are never found, an assertion not backed up by any documentation.  Most of the stories lack enough specifics to even necessitate any fakery on Colby's part, and he invites the reader to take it or leave it as part of the fun.

Other stories give a hearty dose of American culture in the 1940s, especially a trio that deal with Native Americans. These three tales reinforce the ontological identity of the "dead Indian" wherein Native Americans exist solely to die out, making room for white settlers. In "The Old Chief's Tomahawk" a dead Indian returns to save a white child from a hungry wolf, the young girl having previously shown him a kindness as he was dying. "The Indian Guide" is a similar tale of a girl saved from a blizzard by her old Indian friend, unaware that he's been dead for two days! "Outsmarting the Indians" is a more straightforward story of frontier conflict, as a pioneer woman outwits marauding Indians by rolling heavy cheese wheels down the stairs.

A reprint by Scholastic Books in 1963 cemented the title as a nostalgic memory for many, with multiple reviews and retrospectives available online, including this one which showcases some of Colby's illustrations, which are MIA from the 1959 Popular Library edition. Strangely Enough is available to read and download at archive dot org.

C.B. Colby: the name that guarantees cheap thrills!

Popular Library, 1959 (original pub. 1940)

JEANE DIXON: PROPHET OR FRAUD? by Mary Bringle

And the verdict: FRAUD! Big time fraud! These kinds of "_____ or _____?" books fall into three categories: 

1. Hagiography disguised as neutral reporting (think of the many books on Edgar Cayce or Uri Gellar)
2. Recitation of "just the facts" on the level of 4th grade book reports (the oeuvres of Brad Steiger and Warren Smith)
3. Actual analysis and investigation (much rarer)

Not only does author Mary Bringle deliver on the third category with gusto, tackling the many bizarre and scattershot predictions of celebrity psychic Jeane Dixon, she cuts deep with some incisive writing on Dixon's reactionary race-baiting. Dixon made frequent predictions as to African Americans' fitness for equality, in some cases saying that they simply weren't ready for the burden of equal rights and also fear mongering over the "communist plot" behind the civil rights movement:

Bringle nails Dixon as the quintessential white moderate that MLK described in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," someone who may believe themselves free of personal prejudice yet:

"Is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Bringle also connects Dixon's bloodthirsty attitude in her predictions of MLK's assassination to a wider ghoulishness in the celebrity psychic field, especially in regards to assassination predictions which were flying fast and free during the 60s and 70s. Everyone who was anyone in politics was seemingly doomed to die by a gunman's bullet, be they a Kennedy or a King, of any stripe in any nation. This balm of doomsaying is a peculiar function of the celebrity psychic that's cropped up before.

A final detail: the bizarre shape of this book! It seems that Tower Books didn't mind shipping out this slightly mangled text, which has been die cut into a trapezoid. A trashy publisher for an excellent work, dismantling the rotten heart of a shining icon.

Tower Books, 1970

WORLD OF THE WEIRD by Brad Steiger

"All new, all true!" Technically that's correct, in that Steiger doesn't copy/paste any prior work here, but this is another of his patented potpourris, ladled with plenty of old fashioned ghost stories and some frequent repeaters such as Ivan T. Sanderson's giant penguin/dinosaur of Clearwater, FL. Steiger leaves out Sanderson's penguin pronouncement in favor of the saurian solution, though he does quote extensively from Sanderson's mumbo jumbo about the impossibility of creating the tracks mechanically. Other big shots like that Tasmanian globster and the Beast of La Gevaudan make their obligatory appearances. Warren Smith would recycle Steiger's chapter on the Beast of La Gevaudan with some minor word changes in his Strange Monsters and Madmen, typical of their writing relationship. The Acambaro figures "discovered" by Waldemar Julsrud also appear, and have had a long life in paranormal and Creationist literature. 

A chapter on "American monsters" is some good fun, with wolf men, apemen, and giant lizards stalking the countryside! Some more spooky stuff: sea serpents, seances with the Fox sisters, and the reincarnation of Shanti Devi! Too bad Steiger fills out his other chapters with some weak sauce such as the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences and a "quirky" rundown on phobias. Dragons and vampires get some filler chapters too. A chapter on the Navy's dolphin training program reads more sinister than weird nowadays. Oh well, at least the Cardiff Giant is also on hand. That one's a classic and even Steiger can't avoid disclosing its well established hoax status.

1970 Belmont reprint

THE END

Table of contents:

1.  Beware of Greeks 2700 Years Old (5)
2.  The Night a Dinosaur Came to Call (9)
3.  The Devil Rider of Chisholm Hollow (13)
4.  They Came to Acambaro (17)
5.  The Wild, Wild Rocks (20)
6.  Miss Morton's Pet Ghost (24)
7.  Haunted Canterbury (28)
8.  The Phantom Marchers of Crete (32)
9.  The Mystery of Lightning Balls (35)
10. Science and the Sea Serpent (39)
11. Premonitions of Kennedy's Death (46)
12. The Girl Who Lives on Bee Stings (48)
13. Tut Tut, King Tut (50)
14. Abe Lincoln's White House Spooks (55)
15. Superhuman Strength Comes to Farmwife (59)
16. Phatoms of the Ocean (61)
17. The White Lady of Lover's Lane (64)
18. The Strange Dancers Who Perform While Entranced (66)
19. The Ghost Who Was Photographed (69)
20. A Sea Monster Dies in Tasmania (72)
21. Crazy Coincidences (77)
22. She Remembers a Past Life (80)
23. America's Home-Grown Monsters (84)
24. Man's Fine Finned Friend (88)
25. From Out of the Sky (90)
26. Headquarters of the Spook Chasers (94)
27. Witches' Holiday (98)
28. What Are You Afraid of? (103)
29. An Astrologer's Apprenticeship (106)
30. The Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Knocking (109)
31. The Woman Who Saw Without Eyes (114)
32. The Beast of Le Gevaudan (118)
33. The Incredible Eusapia Palladino (123)
34. The Peeping Tom Who Never Left Home (127)
35. The Gurkha Ghost (131)
36. North Carolina's River of Penicillin (133)
37. Land of Zombi and Voodoo (135)
38. There's a Haunted House in Washington, D.C. (141)
39. The Mystery of the Medicine Wheel and the Stone Circles (147)
40. The Legend of the Dragon (150)
41. The Phantom Monk of Basildon (154)
42. Curse of the Vampire (156)

World of the Weird is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Books, 1966

STRANGE HAPPENINGS by Michael Hervey

Another Fortean free-for-all by Michael Hervey, this time split between legitimate historical weirdness and fantastical nonsense. Such strange-but-true factual cases include the so-called "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick, the Collyer Brothers who famously perished inside their hoarded NYC apartment, Jack the Ripper, and the hypothetical planet Vulcan which was proposed to exist between Mercury and the Sun. We stray into fantasy land with accounts of Atlantis, the Shroud of Turin, and the Count St. Germain, though Hervey's eclectic selection of stories is appreciated. The 1900 disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse crew is one mystery that still persists today, although Hervey's invocation of sea monsters and pirates seem unlikely solutions.

Hervey mentions the mystery ship Joyita again in passing, this time wondering if yet more sea monsters ate the passengers and crew alongside some other missing ships in the South Pacific. At this point we see that the story of the Joyita is so well established that Hervey can simply toss the ship into some random mystery mongering with no real connection to the facts of the case. The apocryphal Ellen Austin also shows up, with some invented dialogue of superstitious sailors scared of the kraken! This is yet another illustration of how these stories evolve to become spookier and spookier as successive authors add flourishes and invent new details. 

Despite Hervey's freeness with the facts, he has a sharp eye for subject matter. Rather than recycling endless ghosts, UFOs, and ESP tales ad nauseam he sprinkles in some real shocking stuff like Australian Aboriginal death curses and the Berbalang ghouls of the Philippines. Careful with those ghouls, though, because "published information on the subject is based on a single report by Ethelbert Forbes Skertchly, a resident of Hong Kong and an officer in the British Navy." Wikipedia continues:

Skertchly's article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal also attracted the attention of English academic and ghost-story writer M. R. James, who in turn introduced it to Rupert T. Gould circa 1911. Gould discussed the subject and reproduced Skertchly's account of the Berbalangs in a chapter of his popular book Oddities, first published in 1928. Modern awareness of the Berbalang lore largely derives from Gould's book.

Talk about some strange happenings! 

Ace Books, 1966

AN OCCULT DICTIONARY compiled by Howard V. Chambers

An occult dictionary for the millions! Chambers warns us in the forward that this is NOT to be a definitive volume, and thank goodness he does. If you don't already know your Zabulon from your Zaebos you'd be in a peck of trouble if you had to reach for this book in the middle of a ritual! To wit: the entry for Zabulon  leaves out the demon's Biblical namesake. The focus on "parapsychology" on the cover is also odd, considering the entries obviously cover all manner of occult fields.

Occult dictionaries and encyclopedias hit it big in the midcentury. No longer dusty grimoires or specialty texts, you could find plentiful ads for these books in Fate magazine and within other paperbacks, often as enticement for book club memberships:

From a 1969 paperback

From Fate, 1973

From Fate, 1973

From now on any such text will be tagged under Guide, and no need to summon Verdelet.

An Occult Dictionary is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1966