Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters: Now Available!

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From the famed Devils of Loudon to the workings of John Dee, and from Lurancy Vennum to Swedenborg, "Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters" is a fine collection of strange lore related to spirits, hauntings, strange legal cases, and spiritual dabbling. It is a skeptical work, and relates these cases in their historical context with great accuracy, with the writer attempting at times to debunk the tales being told and their prior explanations, which of course tended towards the superstitious. It mixes this with a semi-rationalized endorsement of investigations into the supermundane, by various methods, especially within the realm of psychology and the application of hypnotism, telepathy, and so forth, within a scientific context. It is a truly valuable collection of paranormal tales for the folklore lover.

147 pages.

Greek and Roman Ghost Stories: Now Available!

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This little volume is a compilation of (as the title suggests!) ghostly tales from ancient Greece and Rome. Some of them are from historians, others are from plays and fictional material- and it is interesting to note the major similarity of tales in both. In one extremely interesting passage, Nero himself ends up doing manual labor to try and calm terrified workers who swore they heard the dead around them and that the ground was welling up with the blood of the deceased.

60 pages.

An Essay on Demonology, Ghosts, and Apparitions: Now Available!

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This nice literary edition predominantly describes medical quackery, the persecutions of Salem (and attempts at the same from latter time periods well into the 18th century!) and some interesting supernatural tales involving those who believed themselves demonically troubled or bewitched. I decided to edit this particular work partly as a cautionary tale for occultists not to be too incredulous, and as an amusing look at times of persecution and charlatan medicine which roughly equate to the 2020s. The more things change the more they remain the same!

132 pages.

The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland: Now Available!

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This text is a fine compilation of folklore from Scotland- most of which involves cryptids and ghosts. A few other tales are compiled here, as well as rituals and superstitions related to marriage, courting, employment, and other such topics. It roughly traces the evolution of ghost stories from the early period with its technically tangible spirits, to the more modern period where ghouls and poltergeists became more "ghost-like" and could not be hacked apart with a claymore.

157 pages.

Dreams and Premonitions: Now Available!

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This little work is one of the better additions to the corpus of Theosophical literature by LW Rogers, one of its most relevant members and leadership figures. It is notable for the sheer number of anecdotes about premonitions in dreams, especially the well known case of Abe Lincoln dreaming of his own impending death. As interesting for its historical content (the quake of Messina, etc) as for its spiritual content, it importantly contains a bit of advice for those seeking to remember and thus interpret their premonitions.

90 pages.

Apparitions, Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses: Now Available!

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"Apparitions-" is a wonderful compilation of folklore that was actually written from the perspective of one who wished to expose spook stories as frauds and interesting bugbears. This is actually important; the work is then also a cautionary message for those who accept the spiritual, not to accept it all at face value but to utilize their reasoning abilities to determine if any particular tale is true. I do this for occult and cryptozoological topics myself; I accept for example the existence of extra terrestrial life but find very few sightings of flying saucers to have any legitimacy.

Some of these tales are actually hilarious also, such as a prank involving the use of phosphor to  create ghostly messages to frighten house guests or the time a man with a red rain cloak was mistaken for a specter, scaring an entire village in the process.

176 pages.

Materialized Apparitions: Now Available!

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This work is quite interesting and refers to various experiences and experiments performed by the author with regards to seances at the time for some years running. The main focal point is none other than the now infamous Anna Fay, was eventually outed as a fraud by Harry Houdini, among others- indeed not that many years after this work sought to use her as evidence of a spirit world.

Nonetheless it is of value- all the content connected just with the theoretical side of spirituality remains intact even to this day in a theoretical sense- although it is generally considered bunk because of its association with the same mediumship circles this work refers to. A fine bit of work exemplifying the spiritualism movement and of great interest for its description- accidentally- of very refined parlor magic.

82 pages.

Ghostly Phenomena: Now Available!

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This is a rather strange little book and contains a compilation of tales about ghosts and encounters of the same, starting with the authors' own recollections, then tales related to him, and finally some of his opinions on various spiritual phenomena. The author, Elliott O'Donnell, has been generally considered a fraud because of his unwillingness to produce these third parties for scrutiny but I doubt it, personally, based on his open refutation of things like mediumship and automatic writing which could have made him far more cash than simply inventing spook stories. Embellishment aside, I have to assume some of his experiences were genuine.

The work also includes some passages about haunted trees and ghostly mariners, which involve some secondary works which the reader may find useful.

108 pages,

The Life After Death: Now Available!

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Yet another early work with no individual entry!

This tract is quite interesting and revolves- you guessed it- around the concept of the afterlife, that which happens after one is dead. To the theosophists a fusion of eastern and western lore is the answer; especially a sort of eastern-ized conceptualization of purgatory. Having expounded upon the form of the spirit world, Leadbeater also prescribes why Theosophists must help the departed and how.

56 pages.

Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Witchcraft, and Miracles: Now Available!

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This work is something I do not necessarily agree with in an occult sense but, for historical reasons and because of its (extremely) interesting take on the Salem Witch Trials, it is certainly worthy of inclusion in the ever-expanding library of releases here.

Written by Putnam in the middle of the 1800s, it is notable in that it makes the claim (though not directly) of a new spirit age having dawned on the world in which spirits have begun to communicate with mankind in a manner not unlike the telegraph- predating theosophical claims of a similar nature by many decades. The author himself claims to have established the veracity of mediums and spiritualism personally, and remarks at length upon the different stages or categories of mesmerism and its abilities.

62 pages.

Funeral Customs: Now Available!

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This extremely interesting work is sadly little-known despite its scope; several thousand years of human history and a dozen or so cultures, with all funerary rites they're associated with- from the memento mori and then-modern practices back through embalming, interring, or burning corpses.

The greatest part of this work is its general mention of the slow (or occasionally mono-generational) process of change over time as applied to funeral customs. Nowhere is this as intrinsic as with the black death and the necessity of abandoning more elaborate and single-member graves and services in favor of mass burial, water burial, and expedited blessings.

238 pages.

General Update Time!

I have completed the editing of "Lore of the Unicorn" and it will be available today and of course posted about here. This is just the first of several more folklore-and-cryptid style works I wish to release in a fairly short span of time. Those two herbals have not been forgotten; I think I'll bend to pressure and pay someone a flat fee and put their name on the works in exchange for not having to draw up the illustrations there personally; it means it might take a year or so for the works to pay themselves off (they're not top tier works, popularity-wise) but it's worth it to have them done and to expand the herbal category.

Which brings me to the goal of creating a new category sometime this summer for a new style of work which doesn't currently fit in any other category; folklore and cryptozoology. This will likely be the last category created for this year, although I could plow away at some works on ghosts and psychic lore and craft that one as well. I haven't decided yet!

Good times ahead!

The Magic of the Middle Ages: Now Available!

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This work is Rydberg's finest- an academic compilation of subjects ranging from a treatment of the burning times, and of religious philosophy (dualism, specifically) to short passages on some cryptids of note, to various meanderings through the high ritual magick and alchemy of the era spoken of. Clearly hostile to Catholic lore, Rydberg manages to choke back his disdain of that church long enough to give it a fair shake at explaining its constant pogroms through especially the era of King James.

Its third section is a strange sort of quasi-fictional tale involving a group of men time traveling to the dark ages and confronting a sorcerer who is under the belief that he himself conjured them, written partly in the first person.

114 pages.

How to Speak With the Dead: Now Available!

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This work is very well crafted especially for its era; the author, known as "Sciens", manages to delve into science and spiritualism here somewhat seamlessly without mindlessly accepting either the spiritual or rational explanation for phenomena he visits within the manuscript.

The majority of its content deals with the structure of a seance and the philosophy behind the basic concept of communicating with the departed- helpfully, the work clears up some misconceptions about channeling and similar topics as well, debunking the idea that, for example, those gathered need to link hands for some electrical purpose. At the end of the work both skeptics and spiritualists are fairly reamed by the author for various excesses.

93 pages.

General Update Time! New Works in Progress, etc

It hasn't quite been two weeks but I figure shaving a couple days off won't hurt anyone.

The first news to report is a new work that will be ready tomorrow; the infamous "Stanzas of Dzyan" by Blavatsky, a short treatise she claimed was translated from Tibetan occult works which loosely relates to Buddhism. I decided to edit and release this manuscript not because of any support of Blavatsky (she was a fraud!) but because of the importance of some of her works in shaping pre-modern Victorian occultism. This facet of the spiritual history of that era can't be denied; indeed her works were powerful enough to begin influencing human reality even long after her death.

The second news is that I'm editing the strange, Atlantean-style "City of the Sun" by Tomasso; added to this will be another work by Baring-Gould on ghost lore, a new Leland work on Etruscan culture, and the last three Phallic works. I've obtained a few new alchemical manuscripts also, and a slew of new material on demonology which always seems to be popular, demonology being of course the one field that virtually all cultures agree is interesting within spiritual paths.

I am also going to begin writing part II of "Sickness in Hell" next week; I will give an estimate of its length and when it will be ready at some later date. I have to return to working on "Macabre Tales" as well.