Loren Rhoads, creator and editor of the magazine, has compiled some of her favorite stories from all ten issues in this sometimes shocking, occasionally gruesome, always fascinating anthology. This quirky book is filled with tales from ordinary people -- who just happen to have eccentric, peculiar interests. Ranging from the outrageous (attending a Black Mass, fishing bodies out of San Francisco Bay, making fake snuff films) to the more "mundane" (visiting a torture museum, tracking real vampires through San Francisco), this curiously enjoyable collection of stories, complete with illustrations and informative asides, will entertain and haunt readers long after the final page is turned.

    Featuring more than 600 color illustrations, this is a treasure trove of fun and fascination for the entire family.

    Crofton Croker, and W.B. Yeats, along with tantalizing trivia, facts, firsthand accounts, and speculations about mermaids in popular culture.Some facts about the fluid and the fair from the book:Many people believe today that early explorer sightings of mermaids were manatees. (Scurvy + many days away from your lady = a blubbery creature looking supple and bodacious.)Blackbeard, the fierce and terrible pirate, was afraid of his crew being lured into a watery grave by mermaids, so he ordered his ships to avoid certain areas reputed to have a high number of mermaid sightings.Since 2009, the town of Kiryat Yam, Israel has offered a prize of $1 million dollars to anyone who can prove the mermaid off their coast is real. The prize remains unclaimed.

    Troy Taylor, long a chronicler of the strangest hauntings the Prairie State has to offer, has taken a long, eerie look at the goings-on around here and has come up with more strange stuff than any one state should legally be able to have.With notepad and camera in hand, Troy has traveled the back roads, main roads, and all roads in between in search of the odd and the offbeat. He's tracked down impossible-to-believe tales, only to discover an odd grain of truth that gives the story just enough credibility to make one feel a little . . . uncomfortable. Whether it's a man-eating Piasa Bird, an abandoned insane asylum, mystery airships, or the haunted tomb of a certain famous Abe, Troy has researched and chronicled the story and presents it here for you, fellow admirers of the weird.Turn the pages and visit the hell of Hell Hollow and learn the legend of the Devil's Bake Oven. Find out about the Macomb Fire Starter, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, and the Curse of Kaskaskia. Go off the beaten path and look for kangaroos and albino squirrels on the loose. Walk down Ghost Hollow Road, see the World's Largest Catsup Bottle, touch Lincoln's lucky nose, gawk at the miniature houses on the prairie, and gaze in puzzlement at the double-deck outhouse and the Leaning Tower of Niles. Read all about the Devil Baby of Hull House, visit the grave of the Chesterville Witch, and meet, if you dare, the demon butcher of Palos Park.A brand-new entry in the best-selling Weird U.S. series, Weird Illinois is packed with all the info about our state that your history teacher never taught you. So join Troy on his great adventure. It's a journey you'll never forget.

    Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history. From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:•The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776 •The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith •The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age •The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey•The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression Here, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe.

    From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading.

    You probably know of the infamous Jersey Devil, but have you heard of the Matawan Man Eater or the Hoboken Monkey-Man? Maybe you'd like to cruise down haunted Annie's Road in Totowa, or take a stroll through Vineland's bizarre Palace of Depression? These are just some of the offbeat and odd, the mysterious and unexplainable, the spooky sights and local legends that don't appear on any tourist map. You'll only find them here, along with an amazing assortment of roadside oddities, abandoned asylums, natural phenomena and unforgettable people along the highways and byways of the Garden State. From Caldwell's Mystery Thread and the Dancing Jesus of Whippoorwill Road to the campaign to save Middletown's Evil Clown, you'll laugh, gasp and marvel at the everyday weirdness that is New Jersey.

    This book examines oddities and raises questions about facts always taken for granted.

    . . How to spot and identify demons and other subversive spirits . . . And what to do next.Demons, fairies, and fallen angels are everywhere. They lurk at crossroads, crouch behind doors, hide in trees, slip into beds, wait in caves, hover at weddings and childbirths, disguise themselves as friends, relatives-even disguise themselves as you. They are powerful; they are protean; they are enchanting. And, to the uninformed, they are often invisible. This illustrated guide-the first of its kind-reveals the remarkable permutations of the demon and fairy species worldwide. Packed with lore about each demon, detailing its origins, the culture surrounding it, and its reputed antics and exploits, A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits is a fascinating exploration of global mythologies. Perfect for the armchair traveler and the intrepid, seasoned demon-spotter alike, this complete guide to subversive spirits offers a behind-the-scenes look at the devilish mishaps, impish irritations, and demonic devastations that punctuate our lives.

    From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers, new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

    In nineteenth-century New England another sort of vampire was relentlessly ravishing the populace, or so it was believed by many rural communities suffering the plague of tuberculosis. Indeed, as this fascinating book shows, the vampire of folk superstition figures significantly in the attempt of early Americans to reasonably explain and vanquish the dreaded affliction then known as consumption. In gripping narrative detail, folklorist Michael E. Bell reconstructs a distant world, where on March 17, 1892, three corpses were exhumed from a Rhode Island cemetery. One of them, Mercy Brown, who had succumbed to consumption, appeared to have turned over in her grave. Mercy's family cut out her heart, which still held clots of blood, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her ailing brother. To Mercy's community she had become a vampire living a spectral existence and consuming the vitality of her siblings. From documents written as early as 1790 to a recent conversation with a descendant of Mercy Brown, Bell investigates twenty cases in which the vampiric dead were exhumed to save the ailing living. He also explores a widespread folk tradition that has survived generations, as ordinary people today strive to battle extraordinary diseases like Ebola or AIDS with a deeply rooted belief in their power to heal themselves. "Bell's absorbing account is ... a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs."—Boston Globe "Filled with ghostly tales, glowing corpses, rearranged bones, visits to hidden graveyards.... This is a marvelous book."—Providence Journal

    Unsurpassed in its sheer scope and depth, it employs an extensive range of historical documentation and folklore from throughout Europe to powerfully portray the horror associated with belief in werewolves.Summers adopts a comprehensive theological and philosophical approach, cataloging a series of literary connections between witch and wolf. Drawing upon the work of anthropologists, totemists, and rationalists, he examines the supernatural practice of shapeshifting, notes the finer distinctions between werewolfery and lycanthropy, and explores the differences of opinion on exactly how ordinary humans are transformed into creatures of "unbridled cruelty, bestial ferocity, and ravening hunger." The author's Gothic style, rich in fascinating examples and anecdotes, offers compelling fare for lovers of esoteric lore. Even the most skeptical of readers can appreciate the evocative ways in which The Werewolf in Lore and Legend conveys the dread of those for whom these monsters were not mere superstition but terrifying reality.

    In these pages you will meet extraordinary beings from Hindu and Navajo religions, Scandinavian tales, Russian folklore, Lithuanian stories, Irish oral history, American tall tales, and Aztec myth. Just some of the monstrous entourage:• Baku, a benevolent Japanese monster with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the legs of a tiger, who helps people by devouring their nightmares.• Kurma, the giant tortoise of Hindu myth, whose upper shell forms the heavens and lower part the earth.• Missipissy, the feared fish serpent of North America's Great Lakes region.This illustrated encyclopedia not only identifies and describes individual beasts in their cultural context but also groups them together across cultures and discusses common mythological strands and conceits.

    The subject is important not only in the history of cartography, art, and zoological illustration, but also in the history of the geography of the marvelous and Western conceptions of the ocean. Moreover, the sea monsters depicted on maps can supply important insights into the sources, influences, and methods of the cartographers who drew or painted them. In this wonderfully illustrated book the book author analyses the more important examples of sea monsters on maps produced in Europe, beginning with the earliest mappaemundi on which they appear in the tenth century and continuing to the end of the sixteenth century. The book will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.