"I am a pioneer of a new kind of writing that instead of heroes and villains will have floods and bugs and stars and earthquakes for its characters and motifs." -Charles Fort

For those who claim to understand.

Little-known and amazingly true fact: Claiming status as a "Fortean" can keep you out of war as a conscientious objector.

VAMPIRES: They're Not Just For Romanian Peasants Anymore

Normally The Galloway Chronicles does not traffic in such lowbrow occult fare as "vampires" or "cryptozoology," preferring to keep our privileged knowledge of these phenomena to ourselves. But, in a rare move, we are asking for our readers' help in identifying the grotesque creature who appears briefly and mysteriously at the end of this obscure video.

Even at the level of unquestionable adept-itude our editors have achieved, some aspects of the occult do continue to puzzle us here at The Galloway Chronicles. For instance: why does this video feel like it's running at 33rpm? We are out of ether here at the Chronicles offices, so we're sure it's not us. Qui sabe?

Kindly submitted to us by M. Silva, our agent-on-remote.

"The Unbearable Strangeness of Being"

A wonderful missive from the venerable Michael Prescott:

Anyone who spends much time laboring in the vineyards of psi, even an armchair investigator like myself, becomes aware of the vast number - the truly extraordinary number - of claims that have been made throughout history, and continue to be made today, of miraculous, bizarre, unexplainable phenomena. Every kind of strangeness has been reported by apparently sober witnesses. There is a whole field of study, Forteana, which involves collecting such reports, which easily run into the tens of thousands.

To me, the existence of this mass of material is a bit unsettling. It suggests three basic possibilities, none of which is very palatable. The first possibility is that these weird claims are true, in which case reality is bafflingly and perhaps frighteningly strange. The second possibility is that these claims are false, in which case there is a great horde of otherwise normal people who believe things that are, in fact, crazy. This, too, is rather bewildering and scary; it means the human race is largely insane; psychosis is rampant; we are surrounded by nuts, and may be nuts ourselves. Then there is the third possibility, the one I personally find most likely - namely, that some of these things are true, and some are not, and a great many occupy a wide swath of gray area, an ambiguous borderland where the labels "true" and "false" are not easily applied. And this is, in some ways, the most disturbing prospect of all, because it suggests that we can never be quite sure what is real and what isn't. We can make educated guesses, we can say that one case seems valid and another seems bogus, but we can't really know and we could be quite wrong.

Click here to read the rest of Prescott's essay, "The Unbearable Strangeness of Being."

The Dark Side of the Moon

A mystery illness has lately felled most of the Chronicles staff. We are down, but not out. Posting goes on.

A curious link for our faithful readership: Numbers Stations

"The odor of sanctity"

Perhaps most poignant in the remarkable account of [the St. Etienne] apparition -- which spanned from 1664 until 1718 and will become known as "Laus" (pronounced lou, after the valley in which the visions occurred) -- are accounts describing the huge and perhaps unprecedented manifestations of delicious heavenly aromas known to mystical theologians as the "odor of sanctity."

The aroma, often recounted as a cross between lilies and roses -- but yet more delightful -- lasted for weeks at a time and covered large outdoor areas.

Noted one official, a judge named François Grimaud: "During the Easter Season of 1666, I smelled a very sweet fragrance for around seven minutes; I had never smelled anything like it in my life, and it gave me such deep satisfaction that I was enraptured." The odor continued beyond the seer's death and is still in evidence. According to one account, it was so powerful in the spring of 1690 that the Laus church was pervaded with the fragrance and "all the pilgrims attested to it."...

..."Strange as it may seem," noted Walsh, "[Benoîte, who witnessed the apparitions --] her most bitter enemies were priests. Some of these went so far as to cast her in prison; but, after fourteen days spent in fervent prayer and without tasting food, Benoîte was released, her persecutors then declaring their doubts unfounded."

One reason they may have released her: her cell filled with the odor of a heavenly perfume.

Via Pewsitter.com