CFI Blogs

The latest item in the Fortean property portfolio is based in Sicily and was once the porperty of the self confessed wickedest man alive - Aleister Crowley.

For a mere £1.2 million it could be yours.

Near Cefalu it could best be described as a fixer upper.  It has been abandoned for years and has been overgrown.

Crowley moved there in 1923 after he was kicked out of Italy.  Whilst Crowley lived there it was the scene of many an orgy and Crowley decorated it himself.  That is he painted erotic frescoes which included men, women, devils, satyrs and serpents.  Despite the ravages of time some of these are still extant.  

The photographs are from Frater Kybernetes at http://www.inventati.org/amprodias/thelema/photo.htm

If you are wanting to buy it I suggest you hurry up.  Not because people are falling over themselves to buy it just it's in the process of falling over itself so if you wait too long it will be gone forever...

Ottoman executioners were never noted for their mercy; just ask the teenage Sultan Osman II, who in May 1622 suffered an excruciating death, "by compression of the testicles," at the hands of a wrestler-cum-assassin by the name of Pehlivan. There was reason for this ruthlessness, however; for much of its history (the most successful bit, in fact), the Turkish empire flourished thanks, at least in part, to the staggering violence it meted out to the highest and mightiest members of society.

Ok folks - a new era for the CFI blogs - we have enabled comments so we can get discussions going on soem of the topics posted about.  At the end of the blog entry there is a section labelled "add new comment" click it and comment away!

Off topic comments will be removed so keep it relevant to the post.  If you want to conact the CFI just hit the "contact us" button at the left hand side of your screen.

Enjoy!

It was hot and dusty in the crypt, and it had been hard work breaking into it. Now the vicar had gone, along with his invited guests, to take supper. The churchwarden and two workmen armed with spades were left to wait for their return, loitering by the grave they had come to examine – the tomb of Lord Byron the poet.

"We didn't take too kindly to that," said Arnold Houldsworth. "I mean, we'd done the work. And Jim Betteridge suddenly says, 'Let's have a look on him.' 'You can't do that,' I says. 'Just you watch me,' says Jim. He put his spade in, there was a layer of wood, then one of lead, and I think another one of wood. And there he was, old Byron."

"Good God, what did he look like?" I said.

"Just like in the portraits. He was bone from the elbows to his hands and from the knees down, but the rest was perfect. Good-looking man putting on a bit of weight, he'd gone bald. He was quite naked, you know," and then he stopped, listening for something that must have been a clatter of china in the kitchen, where his wife was making tea for us, for he went on very quickly,  "Look, I've been in the Army, I've been in bathhouses, I've seen men. But I never saw nothing like him." He stopped again, and nodding his head, meaningfully, as novelists say, began to tap a spot just above his knee. "He was built like a pony."

"How many of you take sugar?" said Mrs Houldsworth, coming with the tea.

[Rogers p.134]

A quick plug for Fortean Times UnConvention 2010

The weekend of 23rd adn 24th of October, the following talk and speakers are on offer

I guess Fortean jobs are like buses - wait for ages with nothing and then they all come along together.

In case you've missed it the internet is currently set to explode over the news of this one.  The following version of the report comes from Reuters, most other versions add no extra details.

Scientist's to Look for China's Bigfoot

BEIJING
(Reuters) - A group of Chinese scientists and explorers is looking for
international help to mount a new search for the country's answer to
Bigfoot, known locally as the "Yeren," or "wild man."

Over the years, more than 400 people have claimed sightings of the half-man, half-ape Yeren in a
remote, mountainous area of the central province of Hubei, state news
agency Xinhua said on Saturday.

Expeditions in the 1970s and 1980s yielded hair, a footprint, excrement and a
sleeping nest suspected of belonging to the Yeren, but there has been no
conclusive proof, the report added.

Witnesses describe a creature that walks upright, is more than 2 meters (6 ft 7
in) tall and with grey, red or black hair all over its body, Xinhua
said.

Now the Hubei Wild Man Research Association is looking for volunteers from around the world to
join them on another expedition to look for the Yeren.

"We want the team members to be devoted, as there will be a lot a hard work
in the process," Luo Baosheng, vice president of the group, told
Xinhua.

You might call it parapsychology's greatest mystery. Did Catherine Crowe – sixtysomething literary stalwart of the mid-nineteenth century, passionate advocate of the German ghost story, and author of that runaway best-seller The Night Side of Nature (London, 2 vols.: Newby, 1848) – really tear through the streets of Edinburgh at the end of February 1854, naked but for a handkerchief clutched in one plump hand and a visiting card in the other? And, if she did, was it because she had experienced a nervous breakdown, or because the spirits had convinced her that, once her clothes were shed, she would become invisible?

Crowe's name may not ring too many bells today, but a century and a half ago she was famous. Born in 1790, she was noted as a novelist (she wrote Susan Hopley, an intricately plotted crime procedural that was some way ahead of its time) and as a friend of the great and good (she knew Thackeray, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, among many others). Nowadays, however, she is best remembered as a pioneer parapsychologist – "a hugely important figure in the emergence of modern ghost-seeing culture chiefly because of her relentless calls for society to turn its attention to the unexplained phenomena in its midst and investigate them in an objective manner." [McCorristine p.10] 

Ok, I've posted a number of Fortean relevant properties on this blog but I hear you asking how can you possibly afford them?  Well you could get a Fortean themed job, for example

Psychology: Postgraduate Research Assistant

Applications are invited for a 33 month part-time (20 hours per week) Postgraduate Research Assistant to
contribute to a Perrott-Warrick-funded project that has been awarded to Dr
Caroline Watt to investigate psychology of precognitive dream experiences. The
post will be based with Dr Watt in the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, Department
of Psychology within the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
at the University of Edinburgh

The ideal candidate will have a good first degree in Psychology or a related subject, possess experience of
conducting studies in parapsychology/anomalistic psychology and have experience
in recruiting study participants.   The candidate should possess excellent time
management skills, first-rate oral and written communication and interpersonal
skills.  In addition they should have solid IT skills, including experience of
statistical packages and manipulating large datasets.

Interviews will be held on 1 November 2010. The start date is 1 January 2011.  The appointment will
be made on a fixed-term basis until 31 September 2013.

Salary Scale:
£25,001 - £28,983 (pro-rata)

Further details at

http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.detail&vacancy_ref=3013411

or if you don't fancy that there's always  Germany

http://www.igpp.de/english/eap/download/hiwi-ausschreibung-sept2010.pdf

The latest house for the Fortean looking to extend their property portfolio is the allegedly haunted Wymering Manor at Portsmouth, UK.

It's being sold at auction by Andrews and Robertson on the 21st of September with a guide price of £375, 000.

For this you get a seventeenth century building with ten bedrooms and four reception rooms.  For the past 40 or so years it has been used as a Youth Hostel.  It has its own chapel and basement and apparently 20 different spooks!  CHartered surveyor Jeremy Lamb, quoted in The Daily Mail, said

"This is a property of some renown for being haunted, so there is a fair
chance a future owner may use it as a guest house because of the novelty
factor attached to it.  It's certainly a unique selling point and not often that we offer a haunted house.  When
I surveyed it, the security guards told me they feel there is something
'fairly spooky' going on in the house and, though they patrol it on a
24-hour basis because it attracts lots of people who are intrigued by
its levels of paranormal activity, they refuse to work alone there at
night".

The full lot details can be viewed here and if you're succesful we'd love an invite!

"There is a most mysterious affair going on throughout the whole of India at present," wrote Dr Gilbert Hadow in a letter to his sister at home in Britain dated March 1857. "No one seems to know the meaning of it... It is not known where it originated, by whom or for what purpose, whether it is supposed to be connected to any religious ceremony or whether it has to do with some secret society. The Indian papers are full of surmises as to what it means. It is called 'the chupatty movement.'" [Hibbert p.59]

Eleven Popes have sat on the throne of St Peter since the turn of the last century, and most authorities would rank Pius XI (b. Achille Ratti, r. 1922-39) among the two or three most influential of that number. An able diplomat, fighter for social justice, noted critic of capitalism, fervent opponent of contraception and, inter alia, a one-time librarian and founder of the Pontifical Academy of Science, Pius was the first Pontiff in nearly half a century to abandon successive Popes' self-imposed exile within the precincts of the Vatican. In the course of his reign, he had to deal with the rise of Fascism and Nazism – which he condemned rather more forcefully and consistently than his controversial successor, Pius XII. But in his spare time, it now emerges, Il Papa was also an enthusiastic cryptozoologist.

Adam Sisman's sympathetic new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), the brilliant if acerbic historian, contains an unexpectedly fascinating passage on the great controversialist's declining years that sheds a ray of light on the way in which witnesses perceive ghosts.

In his late 80s, Sisman notes, Trevor-Roper was diagnosed with glaucoma and then developed a cataract. Soon afterwards, he began to suffer some alarming hallucinations: "He would look up from his desk and see the trees in leaf in mid-winter, or the landscape whizzing by as if he were aboard a train... Once, as he went to put out the dustbin, he found himself lost in a cemetery of dead machines, surrounded by rusting combine harvesters, lorries, cranes and derricks. Inside, the house grew an extra staircase." Other outlandish figments of the historian's imagination included gigantic trees and even a complete train at a platform at Didcot Station (which Trevor-Roper attempted to board).

Just a quick request - are you a web designer who would like to help out the CFI?  We're looking for someone to help us out on a redesign of the blogs pages and a few other web based pieces.

If you have the relevnat skills and are interested please drop a line charlesfortinstitute@gmail.com

Thanks

Gordon

I've recently returned from a holiday to Loch Ness.  Staying in the old Abbey at Fort Augustus no less.  I had a marvellous time, thank you for asking and no I didn't see the monster except, well - more of that later!  Whilst I was there I had the chance to chat to two men who have devoted considerable parts of their lives to Loch Ness and the reality - or otherwise - of its most famous inhabitant.

First up was Dick Raynor.

Nothing to do with the CFI but I'm currently in the process of writing a book on ghost photographs and I thought I'd give the opportunity to all our readers to get a ghost photograph they have taken published.  You'll get full credit in the book and a free copy as well.  I've got most of the pictures I need but there are some spaces left.  If you're interested you can email the pictures to me

I can't promise to use every picture but before I use anything I'll be in touch.

Thanks

Gordon

It's thirty years now, more or less, since I first began writing for Fortean Times, and in all that time I doubt we covered a more shocking or more important story than the great Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of 1989-1991.

It's hard to convey to those who did not live through those years just how widespread – and how widely accepted – allegations of SRA were. Cases actually began well before 1989, and ran past 1991, and they were reported from across the English-speaking world, most often from the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK. I know of no reliable overview of the entire panic, but it certainly involved, at minimum, well over a hundred individual episodes and must have affected several thousand families in all. What's most remarkable, looking back, is just how outlandish many of the allegations were. High-profile cases typically included suggestions that large gangs of well-organised, hereditary Satanists were abducting, abusing and murdering dozens, if not hundreds, of young children. Sometimes it was alleged that the abusers were using pre-schools to identify and groom their targets; in the UK, most of the cases involved families who were supposedly assaulting their own children. There were numerous allegations that the rituals included sacrifice – that is, murder – as well as abuse.

In the late 1930s, a frightening and phantomlike creature plagued Provincetown, Massachusetts. One October evening in 1938, so tradition speaks, a bizarre entity emerged from the dunes, "dressed in black – all in black..." The visitations of the phantom were to last seven years. Then, in 1945, its activity stopped abruptly and the entity disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. It was named ‘The Black Flash’ because of its supernatural agility. Today, the legend of ‘The Black Flash’ that terrorized Provincetown in the 1930’s is remembered as a haunting tale of the bizarre. Several websites mention it, and they are more or less consistent in their summaries. Perhaps not surprising, as there are so few sources and with anecdotes sensational enough, that there is no room nor need for distortion or embellishment.

Robert Ellis Cahill, New England's Mad and Mysterious Men, 1984.

We've seen, in two earlier posts, how the Saarland village of Marpingen experienced a dramatic series of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) during the mid-1870s, with associated claims of miraculous cures and healing, and how the leader of the three girls who claimed to have encountered the apparition in woods outside the village eventually confessed that the entire experience had been invented – thanks, in part, to leading questions asked, and pressure placed on the three child-witnesses by, the eager adults of the village. Today I'm going to conclude this series of analyses, drawn from David Blackbourn's magnificently detailed study of the episode, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century Germany, by taking a closer look at the reasons why there was so much expectation and religious fervour in Marpingen in the summer of 1876, and why the appearance of the BVM meant so much to the villagers themselves.

Ok folks it's here - a fully fledged Fortean Events page. And there will be a permannet link at the top of all the CFI blogs pages as well.

It's a page rather than a blog entry so it will always be in the same place - bookmark it or use your favourite RSS feed to see when it changes.  Once an event has happened it will be removed and new events will be added when I become aware of them.  

Each event will have the date, what it is and who organises it along with an indication of the location and a link to the parent organisation so you can get the full details. 

Any events you know of pass the details on and we'll put them up.

I hope you find it useful and please contribute - the more information it has on the more useful it will be.

A couple of days ago we looked briefly at events in Marpingen, a German village in the Saarland, during harvest-time in 1876, and saw how a group of young female visionaries claimed to have witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in some woods outside the village [right] – an account written up in vast detail by the Harvard history professor David Blackbourn in his 1994 book Marpingen. Today we're going to follow Blackbourn deeper into the local archives and look in considerably greater detail at the witnesses, at what they said they saw, at how their accounts of their experiences were shaped, and varied over time – and at what the raw data from Marpingen may imply about the gradual processes of sanitisation and consolidation that have worked to produce the much less controversial, much more uniform visions that have been formally approved by the Roman Catholic church. All this, as I noted in my first post on the subject, comes from an extensive collection of official and private documents assembled at the time, and gives us an unusually close look at what actually happened during one apparently quite typical set of Marian visions in the late 19th century – as well as offering several keys to understanding such events.

I've already mentioned, in these pages, the alarming lack of awareness Forteans show of all the progress being made in the fields of academia. Only rarely does one see purely scholarly works cited in the literature, and this considerably impoverishes us – most obviously because it limits our capacity to understand the subtle underpinnings of a wide range of phenomena.

I like going to lectures and listening to things of interest to
those of a Fortean mindset.  But I don't always know when things
are on and I sometimes hear about events after they have finished
which is most frustrating.

To try to help this get around this problem I would like to start
posting a list of forthcoming events - perhaps even have it as a
separate, static pag.  But I need your help - let me know of
things that are happening and I can add them to the list.  You
can email me any events at info@forteana.org.

To help kick off here are a few events of interest

London College of Spirituality

Cheating the Ferryman

July 9th 19.00 - 21.00

Bloomsbury Baptist Church, London, UK

Lecture by Anthony Peake

http://www.meetup.com/londonspirituality

Edinburgh Fortean Society

A History of Spirit Photography

July 13^th 20.30 - 22.30

The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, UK

Lecture by Gordon Rutter

http://www.edinburghforteansociety.org.uk

Society for Psychological Research

An Update on the
Forbidden Science

July 13^th
18.35 - 20.00

Many countries have folk-tales that feature foolish kings – monarchs whose vanity causes them to make catastrophic misjudgements or attempt impossible things. Greek mythology offers the tradition of King Midas, who lived to regret wishing for the power to turn everything he touched into gold; for we Brits, the foolish ruler is King Canute, who – at least in the common modern telling of the tale – allowed courtiers to flatter him that even the seas would obey his commands, and consequently got his feet wet in a failed attempt to turn back the tides.¹

Most of these legends are, of course, hundreds of years old, but the motif is a potent one and it still crops up from time to time. Here, for instance, is a story that has stuck firmly in my mind ever since I first read it in The Book of Lists, a best-selling compendium of all sorts of remarkable trivia, first published in 1977:

We've already brought you news of the Cottingley Fairies house and the House on Haunted Hill being for sale but here's a real biggie.  As reported by a number of news outlets the Amityville House is for sale.

Yep, that's the one.   Long Island, New York, the Lutzes, films, books, law suits, DeFeo murders etc.  Amityville, the house on the hill as the song says. 

For a mere (!)  $1.15 million it could be yours.  See if you can stay longer than the Lutzes!

So as an eccentric  Fortean billionaire you're on the way to building up a nice property portfolio - Amityville, Cottingley and the House on Haunted Hill (ok it was only a film but the real house is awsome). 

So what property is next?  And will I be able to afford it?  Or someone could buy it and donate it to the Charles Fort Institute as our headquarters - now that would be cool!