The Library of Paranormal Experience

Strangeness, art, and other odd stuff The Library of a Former Bookseller: https://www.tumblr.com/archivist-dragonfly

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New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Oji, 1857

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858)

One of the most evocative Japanese woodblock prints of all time and a Hiroshige masterwork, this incredible image depicts the legend of foxes gathering around a tree near Oji Inari Shrine on New Year's Eve. There, they would change into clothes before paying a visit to the shrine, where they would receive directions for the coming year from the Shinto deity Inari. In Japanese folklore, foxes are considered magical creatures with special abilities, including shape-shifting, and were often mischievous pranksters. Here, the foxes meet at the base of the tree, breathing out magical foxfires, the red orange flames flickering around them. Dozens of foxes can be seen approaching in the distance, the fields dotted with orange flames beneath a sky filled with twinkling stars. A fantastic Hiroshige design, considered one of the best of the series, with fine bokashi shading in the night sky.

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The Library will be temporarily closed for the rest of the year. Your archivist-crow needs some time to recharge and look for new shiny things. Now seems as good a time as any. I leave you with foxes at the changing tree, and I wish you all the best for the new year.

Until next time, the archivist-crow

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Odds and Ends:

MYSTERY AT CANOE LAKE: TOM THOMSON

In December 1917, a rash of rueful letters were exchanged between George Thomson, brother of the famous landscape painter, Tom Thomson, and J. S. Fraser, proprietor of Mowat Lodge in Canada's Algonquin Park, where Tom was staying when he had mysteriously died the previous summer. He had gone there to capture the vibrant colors with his palette. In his letters to Fraser, George expressed outrage that Fraser had given evidence of Tom committing suicide. Fraser denied this. Actually, the coroner had called Tom's death an accidental death by drowning, even though no water was found in Tom's lungs and the coroner never saw the body.

A talented artist, Tom Thomson was forty years old, in perfect health, and a successful career. He set off trout fishing, and two hours later his canoe was seen overturned in Canoe Lake. But the canoe was thought to have drifted away from the main dock, and so was ignored. Two days later, Algonquin Park ranger Mark Robinson began to search for his friend. When Robinson rescued Tom's canoe and righted it, he discovered that the fishing equipment, paddles, and an axe were not there.

A week later Tom's body was spotted in the water. There was a four-inch gash across his temple, and fishing line was neatly wrapped around his left ankle seventeen times. Ordered to leave the body alone until the coroner arrived, Robinson waited for two days, but then insisted on removing it from the water and burying it in the local cemetery. In the middle of the night, a stranger showed up and began to dig up the grave, working by lantern light and claiming to be under instructions from the family. The next day a soldered-shut steel coffin was shipped out by train. Robinson reported the irregularity of the affair and was told to leave it alone. Up at the gravesite, only a very small hole had been dug. Possibly the body had never been removed. Tom Thomson's small cabin contained forty new sketches.

Painting: “The Canoe” (1912) by Tom Thomson

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009

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IKIRYOH

In Japanese folklore the ikiryoh is the name used to describe an entity that is thought to be created by the evil thoughts and feelings of a person. When it is energized by hatred the ikiryoh becomes so powerful it can leave the person harbouring hateful thoughts and enter and possess the person who is the object of the hatred. Once inside it can kill the victim slowly by draining away the person's energy. The ikiryoh is thought to be extremely difficult to exorcise and there are numerous rites to drive it away, including the reading of Buddhist scriptures.

Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts & Hauntings by Theresa Cheung (HarperElement, 2013)

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The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

RIGMAROLE, a town in the south of the land of Oz.

Like Flutterbudget Center to the north-west, Rigmarole is one of the defensive settlements of Oz. Citizens who prove unable to talk clearly and to the point are sent to Rigmarole, where they live with others of their kind. They all address each other in long, complex speeches in which a great number of words are used but very little is said. They are quite incapable of answering a simple question without rattling off a long discourse.

(L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, Chicago, 1910)

Text from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, updated and expanded edition by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Harcourt Brace & Company, 2000)

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Random quote:

“It is not down on any map. True places never are.”

—Herman Melville, American writer and poet (1819–1891)

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Halloween c. 1910

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SILKY

Female ghost who is believed to wear rustling silk clothing and according to lore performs domestic chores in the house after the family have gone to bed. Although silkies can be helpful they are also said to be perverse at times and a house that is left tidy by the owners may be disarrayed. Silkies are particularly found in the borderland between Scotland and England and are said to terrify lazy servants and people who do not do their work. The most famous of these ghosts was the Silky of Black Heddon, who is referred to in William Henderson's Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties (1879).

Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts & Hauntings by Theresa Cheung (HarperElement, 2013)

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On this day:

WHEELS OF FIRE

On December 20, 1893, an enormous sky wheel burst into flames over Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Numerous witnesses watched the brilliantly luminous wheel, the size of a table, rolling toward the eastern horizon. The sound of its passage could be heard until it stopped to hover in place for about fifteen minutes before silently vanishing. Seldom are fire wheels seen in the air; most reports say they appear on, or in rare instances under, water. The wheel size varies from quite large to over a mile in diameter. The form they take can also change, either during the same episode or over a series of unrelated events. Hundreds of different sightings have been reported.

On December 20, 1927, the vessel SS Arracan reported sighting phosphorescent clusters of light on the surface of the Andaman Sea. In the beginning the luminosity was shapeless and random, but then it formed itself into a number of separate wheels with rotating spokes. Each complete turn lasted thirty seconds, and the fiery wheels would change their spin from clockwise to counter-clockwise, and then to clockwise again, changing direction every five minutes.

In 1961, near a Polish resort on the Baltic Sea, several vacationers, upon hearing the sound of rushing waters, watched as a "round hill" of water was "pushed up from beneath" the sea, 100 yards out. A "belt of steady white light segmented by a number of convex dark streaks" hovered for about a minute a few meters in the air, when a second glow of light from beneath caused it to move upward at a 45-degree angle and off to the north. The object was revealed to include a dark circular perimeter; a wide, bright ring near the center; and three triangular spokes.

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009

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The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

RAMPART JUNCTION, Iowa, in the United States, on the Chicago-Los Angeles line.

Built on the banks of a small river, Rampart Junction is a typical American rural town, with a dusty main street and wooden, flaking houses. The main store, Honegger Hardware, closes at four o'clock sharp. Travellers arriving in Rampart Junction will see an old man, deep in an ancient chair, tilted back against the station platform wall, his dark face full of lizard folds and stitches, his eyes in a perpetual squint, his ash-white hair blowing in the summer wind. For over twenty years, this man has been sitting on the station platform, waiting for someone to arrive. Throughout his life, he has accumulated a deep hatred, risen from minor things, small inconveniences that have angered him beyond endurance. To purge his wrath, he has decided to wait for a complete stranger to arrive in town, for someone to get off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who does not know anyone in Rampart Junction. When the traveller arrives, the old man will follow him, get into conversation with him and then kill him. This fate is similar to the one experienced by a certain Arab fisherman who discovered a brass bottle in the sea, and to that of Mr. Juan Dahlmann, in the south of Argentina. Travellers are advised to depart before the end of the proposed ritual.

(Anonymous, The Arabian Nights, 14th-16th cen. AD; Jorge Luis Borges, "El Sur," in Ficciones (2nd edition), Buenos Aires, 1956; Ray Bradbury, "The Town Where No One Got Off," in A Medicine for Melancholy, New York, 1959)

Text from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, updated and expanded edition by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Harcourt Brace & Company, 2000)

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'The Angels' Kitchen ' by Eugene Grasset, 1893.

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'Papering the Tree' illustration for the New Yorker, published December 21, 1992 by Edward Gorey.

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Beth Gibbons, Portishead

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PATIENCE WORTH

Famous case of automatic writing. Patience Worth was an alleged spirit who manifested in 1913 through a St Louis housewife called Pearl Curran.

On 8 July 1913, during an Ouija board session, the pointer spelled out a message: 'Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth is my name.'

In the séances that followed Patience Worth spoke in archaic dialogue and revealed herself to be an English woman, born in Dorset in 1649. A spinster, she emigrated to the American colonies late in life and was killed in an Indian massacre. Worth then began to dictate a total of a million words over the next five years. Her works, which included poems, plays and six novels, were published and enjoyed great success. Her first novel, The Sorry Tale, a 300,000-word epic about the life of Christ took two years to dictate via the Ouija board.

For seven years Curran used the Ouija board and after that she simply recited the words as if they were dictated to her in automatic speech. In 1922, when Curran became pregnant at the age of 39, the relationship between Curran and Worth began to decline, occurring less and less frequently. Curran died in 1937 when public interest in her had declined.

There is considerable debate among researchers as to the real identity of Patience Worth. The novels and writings have been investigated and found to be accurate in historical detail and well constructed, although doubt has been cast over the authenticity of the English used. Some say that even though Curran was uneducated she merely channelled material from the depths of her subconscious. Others think that Worth was indeed a discarnate entity who, centuries after her death, found a way to express her literary talent.

Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts & Hauntings by Theresa Cheung (HarperElement, 2013)

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On this day:

ICELAND'S INDRIDI INDRIDASON

On December 19, 1905, in Iceland, medium Indridi Indridason was being experimented on by the spirits he channeled. Witnesses from the Ghost Society watched the young man fly out of the control cabinet, his left arm missing from his body. The empty sleeve was searched a number of times, but the arm could not be found. It eventually rematerialized, but occasionally would vanish again. Impartial observers, distinguished scientists, and noted skeptics investigated Indridason, but fraud was never found.

Indridason attended his first séance after moving to the city of Reykjavik and became the conduit for table-tilting. The son of a farmer, he had received no formal schooling, but spoke in different languages when in a trance and channeling spirits. Occasionally as many as twenty-six different "communicators" emerged during a séance, often talking at once. Academic researchers, learning of Indridason's talent, began to monitor and develop it. Indridason reported that he could see his astral body linked to his physical body by means of an invisible cord. He could levitate objects and even himself; sometimes he would fall uncontrollably and noisily to the floor, causing his neighbors to complain.

As his skill grew, spirits began to materialize in front of witnesses. The first of these was a ghost named Jensen, dressed in luminous white and solid enough to be touched. Jensen told the group about a fire in Copenhagen, which was later verified by arriving sailors. In 1908, a boastful spirit showed up, his voice distinctly some distance away from Indridason. He shook furniture, cast a brilliant light, and used musical instruments. A trumpet appeared, levitating up to the ceiling while it played and was accompanied by a fifty-pound music box. In 1909, Indridason contracted typhoid fever and tuberculosis. After four years of mediumship, the phenomena ceased. A few years later he died at the age of twenty-nine.

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009