book deals with our principal primordial fear, and that is the fear of the dark. This is the sense of fear and the sense of foreboding that we face when we are lost in the dark, beginning when the sun begins to set at dusk, continuing through the darkness of midnight and the wee hours of the morning (sometimes called the “hours of the wolf”) until the sun begins to rise at dawn, when once again we know what is happening to us. Here night is a metaphor for the “inner night” that alternates with the “inner day” that dawns upon all of us. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Spanish painter Francisco Goya titled one of his demonic etchings. The critical faculties do fall asleep and the associative and imaginative faculties sometimes wake up and “come into their own,” most directly in dreams and the dreams we call nightmares because they are so shocking or so discomforting. The present book is a collection of accounts of how we face the world of darkness and its shadows, how we confront our own fears and experiences (what is “in there”) with what we find in the world (what is “out there”). Many of the experiences reported in the pages of this book will remind its readers of half-formed dreams and half-recalled episodes of real life. Who is to say, along with the ancients, that dreams do not convey knowledge and information? The great psychologists of the twentieth century, notably Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, held strong views on man’s half-remembered, semi-dream life. Freud felt the world of dreams to be “the royal road to the unconscious.” Jung conducted dream analyses in which dreams were treated like mandalas, images to be pondered.
Here is a book of impressions and experiences — the physiological responses of the body, the emotions of the heart, and the thoughts of the mind. They beg the question: what is it that sends us into a state of apprehension, even of shock? It may be many things, but since childhood we are conditioned to worry about imaginary beings. Many children begin to play with their own imaginary companions. Other children fear the “monster under the bed.” Indeed, youngsters are introduced to imaginary beings — good fairies, bad fairies, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, et cetera — which then take the form of inscrutable figures, some of them companions or guardians, others of them scarecrow-like figures, stern and even destructive. Witness these horrible synonyms for ghosts and spirits, which I corralled from a thesaurus:
aliens, apparitions, banshees, beasts, beings, bogeymen, brownies, chimeras, demons, devils, doppelgangers, doubles, elves, entities, fairies, forerunners, ghosts ghouls, goblins, gremlins, haunts, imps, incubi, kelpies, leprechauns, manes, monsters, phantasms, phantoms, pixies, poltergeists, revenants, shades, shadows, souls, spectres, spirits, spooks, sprites, succubi, sylphs, trolls, vampires, visions, visitants, visitors, wraiths, zombies
There are many more of these where these were found, but I think forty-six synonyms are enough for now!
While checking the thesaurus, I came up with an even greater number of synonyms for fear and dread. Here are sensations, affections, and notions that overcome people from time to time in real-life situations and are recalled when they read accounts like the ones in this book:
agitation, alarm, amazing, anguish, anxiety, apprehension, astonishing, astounding, awesome, baffling, bewildering, bizarre, concern, confounding, confusing, cryptic, curious, disquieting, distress, dread, dumbfounding, elusive, enigmatic, extraordinary, fabulous, fanciful, fantastic, fear, foreboding, fright, ghastly, grotesque, hallucinatory, horror, illusory, imaginary, incomprehensible, incredible, inexplicable, marvelous, mysterious, mystifying, outlandish, panic, paradoxical, perplexing, puzzling, quaking, quivering, scare, shakes, shivers, shocked, shudder, startled, strain, strange, stress, suspense, sweats, tension, terrifying, terror, tremble, trepidation, troubled, unfathomable, unusual, upset, weird, wondrous, worry
That list consists of seventy-two descriptors, but I am sure there are many more such words.
Here in these pages there are more than one hundred “told-as-true” accounts of eerie events and weird experiences. In the main these episodes are anomalous occurrences — that is, any attempt to explain them or at least to account for the fact that they have happened in the past and will happen again in the future makes for “heavy lifting.” An experience that is anomalous may be simply unconventional, or it may be really strange, odd, peculiar, or eccentric. It may also be abnormal in the sense that such events and experiences are not easily explained, difficult to account for, and hence lead to unease and sometimes worse. I would call them supernatural states except for the fact that there is a better way to describe them, and that is to refer to them as preternatural states. They are not “super” anything, but they are beyond normal states. The Canadian psychologist Graham Reed labelled them anomalous experiences, thereby liberating them from the last pages of textbooks on psychology and psychiatry where they used to be herded together and regarded as abnormal experiences.
I cannot account for the persistence, the variety, or the intensity of these experiences. What I can attest to is that my informants — the men and women who sought me out to recall their experiences for me and for my readers — believe that these psychological and sometimes physical events occurred as they are described, factually and fully, and that they are as puzzled by these experiences as I am. There is no doubting the immense power of such encounters and the dramatic need to recall them and then relate them to sympathetic souls. A psychological event that took place thirty years ago, which lasted for thirty seconds at the most, leaves an indelible impression on the tablets of memory, on the chalkboard of the heart, and in the pit of the stomach. I wish I could account for such experiences, though I believe, by now, most of the informants have given up expecting an explanation for them. Some correspondents wish confirmation that they are not alone in experiencing such episodes; others wish to add their descriptions to the ever-widening pool of anomalous experience, what psychical researchers in the late nineteenth century called their 8220;census of hallucinations,” using the latter word in the sense of disorientation rather than illusion.
I am an author and anthologist by profession, and an editor and writer by training, who, ever since he can remember, has been fascinated by — and bewildered with — accounts of anomalous events and experiences: reports of ghosts and spirits, apparitions and spectres, the poltergeist and the entity experience, prophecies and predictions, legends and myths, strange gifts and wild talents, visions and revelations, clairvoyance and precognition, psychokinesis and extrasensory perception, psychical research and parapsychology, psychometry and precognition, alternate states of consciousness, reincarnation and past-life regression, cryptozoology, miraculous cures, occult organizations, near-death and out-of-body experiences, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, alien beings and hybrid creatures ... you name it!
Once I began in earnest to collect and publish accounts of such episodes and occurrences in this country, I was dubbed “Canada’s Mr. Mystery.” I have now published some three dozen collections of such encounters with the irrational and each one includes introductory and often explanatory notes. Since I am interested in the past as much as I am in the present, with each book I try to offer readers some historical material, largely in the form of columns reprinted from nineteenth-century newspapers and books. But in the main readers are offered new, never-before-published accounts that I have gleaned from my own explorations and investigations, inquiries and interrogations, and correspondence on paper and via email. I encourage readers of my books to communicate with me directly and to share with me, and then with future readers, accounts of their own experiences, no matter how bizarre.
The question must be asked: as a reader, should I trust that these accounts are truthful? Let me attempt to answer that question. In the past I would request each person contributing an account to one of my collections to sign a statement that affirms that the account to be published is truthful, accurate, and complete — the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No one ever refused to sign this statement, though the occasional contributor requested anonymity or subsequently developed cold feet and asked that nothing at all be published. All such requests have been honoured. Subsequently I dispensed with that statement. But I do, in my own way, keep my eyes open for what I call the “three Fs.” These are fraud, foolishness,
