Ghosts of story, myth, or anywhere else....
The latest contribution to The Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer is an ostensibly non-fiction article, from the June 1929 issue of Ghost Stories. In How a Spirit Corrected the Standard Dictionary, Palmer relates how the ghost of Henry Ward Beecher sent a message to his friend Isaac Funk, during a seance. Funk was co-founder of [ ]
I ve posted the next story in my Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer project. In The Red Curse of the Mummy, Ted Orchards joins a family friend, Professor Beames, on an expedition to the Valley of the Kings. The object: to unearth the tomb of the Pharoah Amenophis. But something out there seems to have other [ ]
It’s been a while since I’ve done a Budget of Book Reviews! So for this post, I’ll be discussing three anthologies that I’ve recently read: translations of non-Anglophone uncanny stories. Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction edited by Margrét Helgadóttir Solaris Books, 2023 The term “Finnish Weird” used to be a thing some [ ]
I ve been keeping a sort of commonplace book for a while now. It s almost entirely for my online reading, a place to keep quotes from blog posts and articles that strike a chord with me, along with links to the entire article. The very first quote that I entered was not an online quote, but [ ]
I ve just posted the next story in my series The Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer, over at Dark Tales Sleuth. In Seven Gray Wolves, Frank Meadock runs a small sheep ranch in a remote area of Montana. It s a dangerous life, both for Frank s family and for his flock. But Frank s beloved collie Duke stands [ ]
Here are a couple of short folktales from Max Leopold Wagner s 1927 paper Algunas Apuntaciones Sobre el Folklore Mexicano. As usual, I ve posted my translations to Ephemera. The Innocent Little Old Lady (La viejecita inocente): Shades of Jack and the Giant Beanstalk! A little old lady climbs a cabbage stalk all the way to heaven, [ ]
The next entry in my Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer series is the first of two (possibly three) stories about Max Brandt, “ghost layer.” A Sleeper Bewitched: Mr. Crane has been asleep for a month. No one knows why; no one can wake him up. And there’s a strange, disembodied hand hovering over his bed. Mrs. Crane [ ]
Announcing a new literary excavation project: ghost stories, articles, and an occult investigator mini-series! (A version of this article also posted at Dark Tales Sleuth.) Stuart Palmer (1905-1968) was a prolific writer, active in the crime fiction community from the 1930s into the 1960s. He was a well-regarded practitioner of the detective story, even serving [ ]
Not too long ago, I translated/retold a Mexican fairy tale called “Ya mero la besa un pobre” (A Poor Man Nearly Kissed Her). As I mentioned when I introduced the translation, Ya mero la besa un pobre is a Mexican saying similar in meaning to the English expression So close, and yet so far…. You [ ]
After a decade, I m adding another tale to my Hummingbird Folklore series. Yesterday, I caught one of the last days of an excellent exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California: Good Fire: Tending Native Lands. The exhibit explored cultural burning, i.e. the traditional controlled burn practices of the Native Communities of Northern California, and discussed [ ]