I was recently interviewed by the good folks at This Is Horror for their popular podcast. Here’s the result, published today as the first of two parts. The conversation with TIH mastermind Michael David Wilson and co-host Bob Pastorella turned out to be extremely wide-ranging. We talked about my Horror Literature through History encyclopedia plus…
Category: Paranormal
Bem’s Precognition Research and the Crisis in Contemporary Science
Recently Daryl Bem defended his famous research into precognition in a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education. More recently, as in this week, Salon published a major piece about Bem and his research that delves deeply into its implications for the whole of contemporary science —Â especially psychology and the other social sciences (or…
Defending precognition research in ‘The Chronicle of Higher Education’
Interesting: Last month The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by Tom Bartlett, their senior science editor, titled “Spoiled Science.” It’s about the way Cornell University’s renowned Food and Brand Lab has taken a credibility hit in the wake of revelations about multiple statistical anomalies that have been discovered in papers co-authored by its…
When mental illness is really demonic possession, according to a psychiatrist
The following two paragraphs are excerpted from what’s basically your everyday, run-of-the-mill article about the reality of demonic possession as distinct from mental illness. Written by a board-certified psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. For The Washington Post. Move along. Nothing to see here. For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several…
Reviews of ‘Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics’
Today I was pleased to spot a new and positive assessment of my paranormal encyclopedia from a reviewer for the American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association (RUSA): Producing a reference book about the paranormal presents a unique challenge. Various aspects of the phenomenon — under the rubric of âthe supernaturalâ — have been…
Do you believe in the paranormal?
Christopher Columbus fills the New World natives with fear and awe by predicting a lunar eclipse in 1504. Over at Thomas Ligotti Online, someone has created a discussion thread that asks whether people believe in the paranormal. This has spawned an interesting conversation. It has also prodded me to reflect on the very terms of…
Stephen King on the thing under the bed
There have been moments of insight in Stephen King’s work that legitimately qualify as sublime. This widely quoted passage from his foreword to Night Shift is one of them: At night, when I go to bed I am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out….
What is real, anyhow? Erik Davis on visionary experiences and the high weirdness of the seventies counterculture
Last night I digitally stumbled across this: High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture It’s Erik Davis’s senior thesis, written as he was pursuing his Ph.D. in religious studies at Rice University, and submitted just last fall. You’ll recall that I mentioned Erik’s study of this same high weirdness last year (and that he…
The numinous, subversive power of art in an artificial age: Talking with J. F. Martel
Now live: my interview with Canadian filmmaker J. F. Martel, author of the just-published — and thoroughly wonderful — Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which should be of interest to all Teeming Brainers since it comes with glowing blurb recommendations from the likes of Daniel Pinchbeck, Patrick Harpur, Erik Davis, and yours…
Monsters, marvels, lore, and legend: Jill Tracy on the persistence of mystery
Jill Tracy’s Diabolical Streak has been a favorite album of mine for the past decade — see the video above for one of the many reasons why — and in this 2009 interview for Tor.com, the always-mesmerizing Ms. Tracy explains some of the philosophical-aesthetic worldview that informs her lush world of musical darkness: We all…