A Fortean in the Archives

Some of my oldest posts vanished a while ago with the disappearance of their original home, the now-defunct Charles Fort Institute blogs. For the most part they cover neglected topics and still h...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2020/09/27/the-lake-that-has-no-bottom/

China, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was the largest nation in the world – and also, by a distance, the most prosperous. Under the rule of a strong emperor, Hungli, and a well-est...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/sorcerers-and-soulstealers-hair-cutting-panics-in-old-china/

It was a Saturday, market day in Port-au-Prince, and the chance to meet friends, gossip and shop had drawn large crowds to the Haitian capital. Sophisticated, French-educated members of the urban...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/the-child-murder-that-gave-voodoo-its-bad-name/

When the Sect needs a new Invunche, the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/in-the-cave-of-the-witches/

In 1932, the entrance to a hitherto unknown tunnel was discovered in the ruins of the old Roman resort of Baiae, on the Bay of Naples. Packed with rubble, wreathed in choking gases, and heated to...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/a-visit-to-the-underworld-the-unsolved-mystery-of-the-tunnels-at-baiae/

Men and women have always dreamed of paradise – and for many, in the years before the world was fully explored, it was somewhere that might have a physical existence in some distant corner of t...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/walking-to-utopia/

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.” That aw...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/the-monster-of-glamis-2/

On September 14, 1224, a Saturday, Francis of Assisi—noted ascetic and holy man, future saint—was preparing to enter the second month of a retreat with a few close companions on Monte La Vern...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds/

Port Louis, Mauritius, August 1782. The French Indian Ocean colony—highly vulnerable to British attack at the height of the American Revolutionary War—is in a state of alert. The governor, Vi...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/the-wizard-of-mauritius/

No structure in the world is more mysterious than the Great Pyramid. But who first broke into its well-guarded interior, and when? And what did they find there? A reinvestigation of a neglected m...

https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/inside-the-great-pyramid/