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YouTube Recommendations: The Paranormal Scholar
Everyone’s done it. You’re bored, you have half an hour to spare, and you pull up YouTube, where you spend 10 minutes looking for something to watch. News? Too heavy. Late-night shows? Nothing’s funny right now. Celebrity gossip? Yeah, right… Eventually, you stumble across something you like. Something covering the odd, the weird, the paranormal. And 20 minutes later, you’re either ready to go further down the rabbit hole or you realize that those are 20 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. Recommendations is the Armchair Fortean’s attempt to provide you with enjoyable, well-curated channels that will not only hold your attention, but will leave you (sometimes) with…
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Old Family, Big Secrets–October Faction Review
Every film buff and genre fan knows that January is the month when film studios quietly dump problematic films into theatres, with minimal promotion, in a bid to make at least some of the budget back via a theatrical release. With the rise of streaming services, then, it’s not too surprising to see a film or series quietly released onto a service, adjacent to a more hyped release, in hopes of driving up the numbers for the smaller show. Now, I don’t know if they actually work that way, but it sure seems like it, as Netflix dropped The October Faction onto the platform in the shadow of its highly…
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark–Humdrum Horror
Before I begin, let me address the elephant in the room—I am not the target audience for this movie. The source material became popular long after my school days. While I was growing up, there was precious little available for mid-level horror—it went from Scholastic collections of ghost stories to Stephen King, with nothing in between. I read The Shining when I was 12, and will forever have ‘roque/stroke’ burned into my memory. I mention this for a couple of reasons—first, because I WISH I’d had horror that was tailored for my age group, and that I went into this movie without any expectations. There’s no nostalgia factor here to…
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Mandela Effect Thoughts, Part 1
Today, I caught myself thinking about the Mandela Effect. For those of you who don’t know, the Mandela Effect occurs when a large minority of people remember something happening in a certain way, only to find it slightly altered (or completely different) in the historical record. It derives its name from Nelson Mandela, who many thought had died in prison, or at least, years before his actual death in 2013. Believers in the theory feel that either the world has changed around them, or that they’ve slipped through to an alternate universe in which things are slightly different. Detractors say that it’s possible to mistakenly remember things on a large…
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Collecting the Paranormal–Beyond Strange Review
Rob and Trish MacGregor have been researching the paranormal for a long, long time. In recent years, they’ve collected both their own experiences and those of their friends, acquaintances, and readers into a series of books, the latest of which is Beyond Strange (Crossroads Press, 2017). At first glance, a new reader could be forgiven for thinking that this book is simply a collection of stories, given chapter titles like “Spying on Aliens” and “Haunting Experiences.” Most of the tales included in Beyond Strange are new, leaving out the interesting-but-now-tired stories that usually account for a large portion of volumes like these. Tomes full of unsubstantiated stories with no analysis…
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Monday Musings #4–A Brief, Hopefully Entertaining, Rant
Like so many other Armchair Forteans, I enjoy a handful of YouTube channels, and will often play something from one of the creepier ones when it’s getting towards bedtime. You know the ones I mean–the channels that narrate ‘True Scary Stories of the ______________.” At their best, these stories and their slightly ominous storytellers evoke a nice sense of uneasy dread as they spin their tales of possession, Ouija boards, black-eyed kids, stalkers, and psycho-killers. (Qu’est-ce que c’est). However, too often these channels are not at their best, because of one simple thing–story logic. Now, I hear you saying to me, “but AF, these are just spooky stories! They don’t…
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Why We Embrace Fear: Peter Laws’ The Frighteners
Remember when you were small? You’d be out with your mother or father and ask questions like “Why is the sky blue?”, or “Why does it get cold in the winter?”, as well as “How do magnets work?” and “How do they figure out the load limit on bridges?” With respectful nods to both ICP and Bill Watterson, these were real questions I had as a child, and I’m sure you did, too. Then, of course, when a pet had moved on (or your cat killed a jackrabbit), you asked “Why do things die?” Maybe your parents sat you down and had a discussion about death. Maybe they hemmed and…