Tag Archives: weirdness

When a Blanket Is as Weird as Bigfoot

A traditional Hudson’s Bay blanket in “Queen Anne” colors.

Encounters with the paranormal — the Other, as some say — can change people, Some have a “UFO” encounter and are never the same, often psychologically damaged. Some encounter Bigfoot or other cryptids and are sort of afraid of the dark ever after.

On the other hand, one Bigfoot experiencer whom I interviewed had created a sort of shrine to his encounter in his home: photos, drawings, newspaper clippings, etc. It struck me as a kind of “material religion” thing.

This experience of mine is much less awesome. It involves bedding — wool blankets. Just fabric, no critters. But it was still weird.

I got this Hudson’s Bay “point blanket” from my mother in the 1990s. The “points,” the thin black lines, identified the blanket’s size when folded on a shelf in the trading post or the Hudson’s Bay Co.’s later department stores.

It not only spoke of tradition, but it was damn fine blanket that went on the bed every October — until October 2024.

That year I went to the bathroom cupboard where sheets and blankets are stored. There sat a zippered plastic blanket-storage bag. I could see the off-white wool of the folded blanket within.

I pulled it down, unzipped it, and took out a off-white heavy wool blanket. It was not my Hudson’s Bay blanket though, but another one — creamy-white with two thin blue stripes up the middle. I had never seen it before, that I could recollect.

The Hudson’s Bay blanket was gone. I have never found it. The replacement blanket is on the bed now, although the time to take it off is rapidly approaching.

The “other” blanket. Where did it come from?

This is the second winter with the “replacement” blanket, which is a fine blanket, but not the right one. The house wights, or whoever, have not chosen to switch them back.

But do I blame the house wights? They go mainly for shiny objects, although there was that one episode involving a book. This feels different. It feels like life was a train running down one track, and someone switched it onto another parallel track. I look around, and it all seems the same: Same wife, same house, same dog, same Jeep, and so on and on.

(Maybe in the Hudson’s Bay blanket timeline, the house burned in a forest fire or some other bad thing happened. But how would I know?)

So a little bit like the UFO experiencers, I am shaken at some level. It’s like something told me, “You’re not really in control as much as you think you are.” And what do you do with that?

Are the House Wights Studying the Renaissance?

Most of my stories about how the “critters,” the house wights, the Borrowers (to borrow a term), or whatever they are like shiny objects.

There was the still-missed Norwegian salad-serving fork. Corkscrews vanished a couple of time. Another big serving fork disappeared and then reappeared, lying in plain view in an empty dish rack. Two rings of keys vanished from a spot on top of a filing cabinet. One later reappeared elsewhere (and there might be a naturalistic explanation, I admit), while the second was gone for good.

A few months ago they branched out into books. It was a one-time thing as far as a I can tell. (Well no, what happened to that Allan Kardec book?) There is a kind of a switcheroo in this one.

So I was musing about the history of the Tarot, and I wanted to look for something in Joscelyn Godwin‘s The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, but I could not find it on the shelf where it was supposed to be.

The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance recounts the almost untold story of how the rediscovery of the pagan, mythological imagination during the Renaissance brought a profound transformation to European culture. This highly illustrated book, available for the first time in paperback, shows that the pagan imagination existed sidebyside often uneasily with the official symbols, doctrines, and art of the Church

I looked and looked. No book. No problem, I’ld order a used copy from the Big River. In due time, it arrived. I opened it and left it on my desk. Shortly after, it disappeared, leaving only the wrappings.

I ordered a third copy, and in a few days it arrived, as seen the photo. Meanwhile, the original book “re-appeared” — I put that in quotes because because it is quite possible that this was nothing paranormal but just me mis-remembering where I had put it. Every little weirdness does not bear the fingerprints of The Other. Sometimes I outsmart myself.

But somewhere there is a copy of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, and I would like to know who is reading it.

Bigfoot on the High Wire?

Sabina, magician and dancer (Paranormal Cirque photo).

Everything is paranormal these days. Even Stormy Daniels, the porn actress whom Donald Trump made famous, also bills herself as a paranomal investigator and medium. (“How to arouse a ghost”?)

Driving past a shopping mall parking lot last week, I saw an assortment of new-looking trailers and motorhomes and circus tents. The paranormal circus was in town, specially, the  R-rated “Paranormal Cirque”  touring unit of the Cirque Italia.

Under this Clown Castle, the black and red big top tent, Acrobats of the Air, Illusionists, freaks, mysterious creatures and all the elements that make one think of a “normal” Circus but that of normal has very little!

A new show with breathtaking implications always poised between fun and the most uninhibited fear that will transport you to a dark world inhabited by creatures with incredible circus art abilities.

A crazy yet fun fusion between Circus, theatre, and cabaret in perfect harmony with the evolution of a show that brings you back to when we dream … and when we had nightmares and fantasies. Scare

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, encompass, amuse and surprise are the ingredients for a mixture of emotions impossible to forget. This is truly a Paranormal experience like no other.

Mothman would be a great act, but he probably does not want to leave the East Coast.

A Quick Video Introduction to Fairy Studies

Early in the twentieth century, the famous physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), “the father of nuclear physics,”  is supposed to have remarked snarkily that all science was either physics or “stamp-collecting.”1

By “stamp-collecting,” I have always assumed he meant collecting and classifying, in that a geologist of his time might have been mainly occupied with classifying rocks and minerals or an entymologist concerned with classifying insects. (These disciplines — and others — now include much more.)

“Stamp-collecting” likewise describes a lot of paranormal studies. The famed Charles Fort (1874–1932 was the master of it.((His life almost parallels Rutherford’s. Interesting.)) “As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds” (Wikipedia). The sheer size of his collections had an effect, however.

Fort is acknowledged by religious scholars such as Jeffrey J. Kripal and Joseph P. Laycock as a pioneering theorist of the paranormal who helped define “paranormal” as a discursive category and provided insight into its importance in human experience. Although Fort is consistently critical of the scientific study of abnormal phenomena, he remains relevant today for those who engage in such studies

Back in the the early 1690s — contemporanous with the Salem witch trials — the Rev. Robert Kirk((A minister in the then-large Scottish Episcopal Church)) was not afraid to theorize, producing a handwritten book on fairies that latter became The Secret Commonwealth. Maybe his MA at Edinburgh University prepared him.

His attempt to fit the fairies into a Great Chain of Being might not appeal to everyone, but at least it gave him a theoretical lens through which to consider them.

Kirk proposed that the reason that the fairies appeared to humanity was to convince us that an invisible realm exists, and that it’s not entirely out of reach. Their occasional interactions with humans served as both a “caution and warning” that we are not alone in the world, and that unseen, intelligent forces occasionally meddled in our affairs. Maybe these forces are still at work. (video transcript)

Then it was mostly a lot of “stamp collecting” until astronomer Jacques Vallée wrote Passport to Magonia, in which he rejected the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs and replaced it with something more multidimensional. Until the work of Jeffrey Kripal, I would rank Kirk’s and Vallée’s books as the most important when it comes to fairy studies, more even than Evans-Wentz’ The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

We still have people who are solely Bigfoot-hunters or UFO researchers or ghost-hunters or whatever, but thanks to Vallée, it is more and more common to see all of these as part of something bigger: “the phenomenon.”((Some BIgfoot researchers still seek a flesh-and-blood “wood ape,” which might be less psychologically threatening than an interdimensional big hairy critter.))

(Video from Think Anomalous. I saw it first at Hecate Demeter.)

  1. Variations on the saying include “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting” and “Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.” [↩]

Geocaching for Weirdness – 2

Bunny in a swing.

Part 1 is here.

Using the Randonautica app near home is impossible for me, due to the lack of reliable ceullar data service, but I kept reading posts on the Facebook page and on r/randonauts at Reddit.

Then two days ago I had some free time in Pueblo while M. was at an appointment, so I set an intention — a synchronicity related to one of my projects — and requested an “attractor” point.

It sent me to a street address a couple of miles from my location — in a neighborhood near where my mother and stepfather once lived, so I had a sense of it.

There hanging from a tree out front was this cast image of a rabbit, sitting in a little swing. Since one current project is using my scout cameras to try to get more small rodent photos, I called that a “hit.”1

So what Randonautica really can be is a divination tool, like Tarot cards or the license plate of the car stopped in front of yours. Developers, users, and YouTubers toss the word “quantum” around in a way that would make a physicist cringe.((I am not a physicist either.)) They might as well say “spooky.” With Tarot, you hold an intention or a question in your mind while shuffling or cutting the cards; with Randonautica, you do it will waiting for the random-number generator to produce your destination.

One other thing: I thought people might stop saying that X has “gone viral” in these days of COVID-19, but I have seen it said about Randonautica. So many people have downloaded it and tried to use it that its server has just been overwhelmed with requests at times, leading to the apperance of failure and complaints of “I just get a white screen! It’s not working!”

But by analogy with other activities — geocaching included — most of those new users will probably satisfy their curiosity and move before too long.

  1. If I get some good ones, they will be at the other blog. Right now I have just a series of rock squirrel videos. [↩]

Geocaching for Weirdness & Other Psychogeography

Randonauts app screenshot

A screenshot of the Randonautica app

Wednesday was the first nice day in a while, so M. and I went hiking on some national forest land near home. We were on a “social trail,” one that is not signed and listed on the forest maps, but we saw maybe four other people there anyway. I stopped partway up to repair a geocache container — not a cache that I own, but one that has been more or less abandoned by its owners. I feel affection for it because it was the first one that I ever found, so I check on it now and then.

What keeps a lot of geocachers going is not the sheer numbers of caches that they find, but the places that the sport (or hobby) takes them.((Geocaching is a “sport” in that it has rules, and you can be competitive about numbers and categories if you want to be. On the other hand, since I most often do it alone, perhaps it is more a “hobby” or a “pursuit.”)) What they often mention is how caching takes them to unexpcted places that they never knew existed.

For me those include a deserted lakeside resort in central North Dakota where an artesian well gushes water from a big rusty pipe, a tiny cemetary in Taos, New Mexico, a cavalryman’s grave on a Wyoming hillside, or an abandoned bridge on the Dismal RIver in Nebraska’s Sand Hills.((You can also find tiny magnetic containers stuck to benches in city parks, but after a while, they are not so special anymore.))

In a recent episode titled “Force the Hand of Chance: A How-To Guide to Psychogeography”  on the Strange Familiars podcast, co-host Alison Renner mentions how recent conditions have meant she and her husband, Timothy, have been exploring the seen and unseen environment of their hometown more these days.  When she remarked about walking down an alley that she had never entered before, it reminded me of geocaching.

But insead of using a GPS receiver, the Renners were following a route on a cell phone app called Randonautica, advertised as “The world’s first quantumly generated Choose Your Own Adventure reality game. Explore the world you never knew existed.”1

Randonautica app puts the user in the Director’s Chair of an adventure story yet to be written. By using the app, the user can break from their mundane day-to-day and take a journey of randomness into the world around them.

Where the mind goes, the universe follows. The Randonautica app is built with mind-machine interfacing technology which allows the user to drive their trip simply by thinking.

A user in Cambodia wrote on Reddit, “Set my intent to’find a portal to another world’…found an arch that led me to a wealthy gated community. Compared to the poverty that most people here live in, it is certainly another world for them.”

Randonauts Facebook profile graphic

Randonauts Facebook profile graphic

Part of the Strange Familiars podcast episode is the Renners trying out the Randonautica app and experiencing at least one strong synchronicity. Timothy Renner also utilzes it in an episode called “Synchronicity Storm on Toad Road,” although it is mentioned only briefly.

I had wanted to try it four days ago, but the app needs a cellular data connection, and I live in what amounts to a cell-service dead zone.

We had things to buy today, so we went to a nearby town and gave it a try. I tried generic requests, such as “anomaly.” The first hit sent us on about a 2.5-mile drive out of town to a certain road — only I knew that that road led into a gravel-mining operation owned by a local paving company, where we would probably not be welcomed to park and explore. If there is an “anomaly” there, it will have to wait.

Our second run took us a newish subdivision out in the desert. It was amazing that Apple Maps knew the roads, since they were just bulldozed dirt, completely unimproved. It looked like we were to drive to the end of one road, park, and climb a small nearby mesa, only this was the sort of place where strange vehicles acting strangely are regarded with acute suspicion. So I canceled that quest too.

But I want to go back, maybe try a more specific request than just “void” or “anomaly,” and most of all, I would rather do it mostly on foot. I want to see if Randonautica leads me to sites of low-to-moderate strangeness.

Even geocachers experience strangeness.If you join and go to the discussion forums, you will find occasional multi-year threads with titles like “Weird or What?” “Help me plant some weird California caches,” “Weird Findings in the Woods,” “Animals are acting weird,” “Weird Adventure,” “What’s that Weird Noise?” and so on.

But what if you don’t want to walk around looking at a screen?

Maybe you think that the Randonautica approach is too impersonal. Maybe you want to really make contact with the genius locii. So take a look at Sarah Kate Istra Winter’s book The City is a Labyrinth: A Walking Guide for Urban Animists.

She writes,

All by itself, the act of walking puts you in a liminal state — neither here nor there but in between. This makes it especially suitable for spiritual and mystical purposes, where we are already seeking to draw back the veil between the worlds for a momeny and interact with the gods and spirits . . . . Going out on intentional walks as a means of discovering and honoring the spirits of place in a city can take myriad forms.

She has much to say about whom you might encounter and how to interact with them — all in a compact book that will fit into your hip pocket. And if you sit on it, it won’t butt-dial anyone.

Continued in Part 2 here.

  1. There is a forum on Reddit, of course: r/randonauts, and a Facebook group. [↩]

Neoshaman Barbie Number 2

Neoshaman Barbie 1 with her drum.

There have never been any little girls in my house, so consequently no Barbie dolls, but they cost only about $2–$4 in the thrift stores. So I decided last year to make a neoshamanic Barbie, because I like the idea of “theme” Barbies (like “New Mexico Barbie“) and because the very thought of her reminded me of a certain author and teacher who is “widely acknowledged as a major link between the ancient world of shamanism and modern societies thirst for profound personal healing and a deeper understanding of the pathway to enlightenment.”

I made one and on a warmish day in January placed her way up behind the house in some boulders that I call Ringtail Rocks. She has her magickal assignment, she is hidden by rocks, and I will never disturb her.

Neoshaman Barbie 2 with her necklace of power and her spirit animal.

But there was one more Barbie left, so today, now that the last snow has melted and the trail is dry, she went to a different cluster of boulders with a similar assignment, along with her spirit animal.

These are part of a series of “installations” that I have started. You can tell that I was not a studio-art major, because I cannot produce 3,000 words of art-prose about what I made.

But since producing prose (and editing other people’s prose) is what I do all day, these and the other installations are just thigs that Iet bubble up, and I don’t have to produce a lot of discourse about them. I am not even completely clear on their magickal purpose

A geocacher would spot this as a “suspicious pile of rocks,” but there are no geocaches in the area either.

You can see a couple more on Instagram, because Instagram is no place for long writing.

Now I have this box of skulls and beads and wire and you know, all the usual stuff, and when the weather warms up, I have more un-formed, inchoate subconsciously directed ideas.

“Weird things in the woods” pretty well covers it.

Other Barbie-related posts:

October 29, 2003, “Barbie, the Hot Pagan Witch.”

January 26, 2005: “Inanna Descends to the Underworld (Barbie version).” The link is dead though, and the Wayback Machine did not help.

March 5, 2005, “Some Pagan Publishing Gossip.”

April 27, 2006, “Pagan-Studies Barbie.”

“Goblins, Goat-Gods, and Gates”: Weird Studies does “Hellier”

I wrote about my encounter with 2019’s take-off[[It doesn’t seem right for say “went viral” right now, don’t you think?))paranormal web series hit Hellier in this post, “Don’t Follow the Lights across the Moor, said the Monk.”

Now my favorite podcasters, J. F. Martel and Phil Ford of Weird Studies, have produced the episode on Hellier and related things — with them, there will always be related things. Usually they send me to the library website with a bunch of interlibrary-loan requests.

It is called “Goblins, Goat-Gods, and Gates.” And you see will that there is a references list.

The podcasters write:

On the night before this episode of Weird Studies was released, a bunch of folks on the Internet performed a collective magickal working. Prompted by the paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk, they watched the final episode of the documentary series Hellier at the same time — 10:48 PM EST — in order to see what would happen. Listeners who are familiar with this series, of which Newkirk is both a protagonist and a producer, will recall that the last episode features an elaborate attempt at gate opening involving no less than Pan, the Ancient Greek god of nature. If we weren’t so cautious (and humble) in our imaginings, we at Weird Studies might consider the possibility that this episode is a retrocausal effect of that operation. In it, we discuss the show that took the weirdosphere by storm last year, touching on topics such as subterranean humanoids, the existence of “Ascended Masters,” Aleister Crowley’s secret cipher, the Great God Pan, and the potential dangers of opening gates to other worlds … or of leaving them closed.

No, I haven’t listened to it yet. Weird Studies episodes are saved for long drives, and M. and I are going to the city tomorrow.

The Spirits in the Archives

Snagged off Twitter this morning:

It’s all true. One of these days, one of my favorite archivists might have a tale to share.

And for my librarian friends: if you work at a college or university and have to teach first-year students how to use the library, can you explain that they will be working with spirits?

New Pagan, Paranormal Podcasts Added to the Blogroll

The trees have eyes.

You can buy this artwork in various forms at Strange Familiars’  Patreon site.

Readers, I have reworked the blogroll (right-hand column) to create a new “Podcast” category.

If you are looking at a single post, the blogroll might not display for you. In that case, click the main blog title or the banner photo at the top to switch to the main page.

I had few podcasts mixed in the blogs, but I am listening to more now, and I decided that they deserved their own category.

For instance, I mentioned Strange Familiars recently in my post, “Don’t Follow the Lights across the Moor, said the Monk.” Apparently that episode — with host Timothy Renner interviewing Br. Richard Hendrick about fairies, ghosts, and poltergeists — was their highest-rated ever.

Weird Studies is another solid favorite. Co-host Phil Ford is a musicologist at Indiana University. Who knew you could do such strange and edgy stuff under the roof of the School of Music? About every other time that I listen to Phil and his co-host, J. F. Martel, I have to visit the library.

Some of these podcasts are easily downloaded from their home sites, plus you can get them on Google Play, Apple Podcast, and usually various other podcast sites. I use Apple gear, but I don’t like Apple Podcast very much and prefer to download individual episodes to iTunes.