Like the new background?

I've decided to change the blog a bit. You may not have noticed that I widened the center a tad to make for easier reading and larger photos. I've also added my Twitter feed on the righthand column. The biggest change, of course, is that I've replaced the templates bookshelf background with a photo of Civil War soldiers shooting down a pterodactyl!

I've written a few posts on the mythological Thunderbird and the various soldiers and frontiersmen who claimed to have bagged one. My hard drive contains a small collection of these photos and I might make a tiled background of them when I get the time. I certainly would have to include this charming photo of a Globster!

Ectoplasm! or, "I sneeze dead people"

This unfortunate woman is Mary Marshall, who had the poor manners to let spirits of the dead dribble out of her nostrils like mucous during flu season. She was part of a family of Canadian spiritualists who during the early 1900s held seances in their home.

That gunky stuff was known as ectoplasm, a paranormal Goo From Beyond. Ectoplasm appeared in seances and spiritualist photographs around the turn of the century. This Goo From Beyond is, of course, a parlor trick. This photo seems to show tissue paper with photos cut from magazines.

Ectoplasm would issue from the bodily orifices of the medium during the seance. It normally came from the nose or mouth, but could also come out the ears, eyes, nipples, and, as the photo below suggests, regions further to the South.

Ectoplasm has an aversion to light and thus only appears in the darkened rooms of the seance. This is convenient in that it keeps observers from getting to close a look, although these flash photos must have turned at least a few people into skeptics.

Spiritualism really kicked off in the United States due to the appalling loss of life during the Civil War. For more on that, check out my article Spiritualism during the American Civil War. It still exists as a movement today, although ectoplasm has fallen out of favor. A pity. I really like to see people sneeze up spirits.

Top photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Bottom photo from the fun Fortean blog Who Forted?, which has a lengthy quote from a Spiritualist "explaining" ectoplasm.

Indie Life: Free photos for your book cover!

Welcome to the second month of the Indie Life bloghop, where we indie authors talk about the trials and rewards of going independent in the tough world of publishing.

As I mentioned in my previous post asking How can I help you? I want to do what I can to help my fellow indies. I just realized that in addition to hosting guest posts and announcing reader news, there's another thing I can do.

As many of you know, I travel a lot. In fact, one of my day jobs is as a travel blogger for Gadling. I've accumulated thousands of photos from more than two dozen countries and while I've published many of them, many more are just sitting on my hard drive. Let's put them to work.


Some subjects include:

Castles
Medieval weapons and armor
Medieval manuscripts
African markets
Mosques
Churches
Hyenas
Scottish countryside
Old English buildings
military hardware
graveyards
graffiti art
Rome
Iraq
Ghost towns
The Orkney Islands
. . .and much more

I've even done some rather silly experiments with horror photography and haunted graveyards.  

If you're looking for a photo for your book, I'd be happy to help. All photos were taken in the highest resolution and can be used for print as well as ebooks. All I ask in return is credit and a copy of the book.

I'm in Estonia this week adding to my photo collection so I may be a bit slow in replying to email at the moment.

Guest blogging about Spiritualism in the American Civil War over at Black Gate

I'm guest blogging today over at the Black Gate blog about Spiritualism in the American Civil War. It's a nice chunky article so head on over, settle down with a cup of coffee, and learn what freakiness our ancestors got up to.

Black Gate will be publishing my historical fantasy novella, The Quintessence of Absence, next month. It will be free online so you'll have a chance to sample some of my writing.

This is my second guest post for them. A little while back I blogged about Byzantine and Early Modern Greek Magic. I'll be doing more posts for them in the future, so stay tuned!

Another photo of cowboys with a pterodactyl

While this blog is mostly dedicated to Civil War and Old West history, my most popular post is the one I did on the Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome. It's about the enduring mystery over an alleged photo of a giant lizardy bird shot down by some cowboys near Tombstone and reported in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph. Check out the link for more. It includes some fun shots of various cowboys and Civil War soldiers who have downed pterodactyl-like critters.

Now another photo has emerged on the Internet. It's the best quality I've seen so far but with all the Photoshopping going on these days, excuse me if it doesn't turn me into a True Believer. I found this on Reddit from a thread that links to my Thunderbird article. Thanks buddy, hope this post gets you some traffic back! All is connected on the Internet.

More on the Civil War pterodactyl photograph

Earlier this week I did a post debunking the Civil War pterodactyl photograph that's been making the rounds on the Internet. A five-minute check of its origins story found many obvious lies.

Now the ultracool conspiracy blog Guerrilla Explorer dug deeper to find out more. Guerrilla Explorer loves a good mystery, but also happens to have a brain so he isn't taken in by surface appearances. He did what I didn't, which was to look not at the story, but at the source. That turns out to be Haxan Films, the same folks that brought us The Blair Witch Project, one of my favorite horror flicks. Read more at the link above. He also has some more info about other living pterodactyl tales that supplements my post on the famous Thunderbird photo.

I still think this would make a good short story. . .

Civil War soldiers shoot down a pterodactyl???

This photo has been making the rounds for some time, and I have to say it warms my heart. Giant monsters in the Civil War? Yeah, I'm there!

It appears to show a group of Union soldiers proudly displaying a pterodactyl they've shot down. It's similar to a couple of other photos that I published in my post about the Thunderbird photo. As with those photos, I didn't ask permission to republish this. If it's really as old as it appears, then it's in the public domain. It could simply be an old fake. If it's a modern fake, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creators could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

This image first appeared on Freakylinks, a cryptozoology page. Hit the link for a larger format of this photo plus an article about it. The author claims to have found this image stuck like a bookmark in a book titled Search for the Outer Space Gods by Jonathan Ferody, published by Harpsong Press in 1977. Searches on Amazon, ABE, and Google produced no such title or author. There is a Harpsong Press, but it wasn't established until 2003 and only published one book.

The author also states he contacted various professionals who said it looked real, including "Professor M. Nance Darbrow from the University of Florida Paleontology Department" and "Dr. Christian Barscuz, Anthropology Department, University of Arizona." At this point my bullshit detector went off the scale. I studied at the University of Arizona Anthropology department in the late 1990s and remember no such professor, even though Dr. Barscuz was supposedly there in 1998. An Internet search failed to bring up either of these two researchers at any university.

What's interesting is that this story was picked up by many other websites who simply repeated the information without spending five minutes to check, which all the time I devoted to this. Life is short, after all.

But I'm not one of those grumpy skeptics. I love the fact that some Civil War reenactors got together with a B-movie castoff and made this photo. Maybe I should make some of my own for my next book cover? At least my Civil War horror books are clearly labeled as fiction!

Deja-vu Blogfest: The Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome

Today I'm participating in the Deja-vu blogfest, where bloggers are reposting their favorite old post. I first published this one back in 2009 on my blog Grizzled Old Traveler. It's a travel blog that I don't update anymore now that I blog professionally for Gadling. There are still some good posts on there, though. This is my favorite. My second favorite is Ten Reasons the Moon Landing Conspiracy theory is Stupid.

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer about a book she's writing on legendary beasts. One of my favorites is the Thunderbird, a giant dinosaur-like winged creature that haunts the American Southwest, and the conversation turned to the strange role I've played in the story of this mysterious creature.


Let me say at the outset that I don't think the Thunderbird is real. With all the aviation, birdwatchers, and development in the United States in the past century, no giant flying monster could have remained undetected. My skepticism, however, makes this story all the more interesting.

The Thunderbird is part of Native American religious belief, but that creature is like a giant bird with feathers. The more modern Thunderbird is always described as reptilian, which makes some cryptozoologoists (people who study unknown animals) think it's a pterosaur. Supposedly there was an article in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph, about two cowboys shooting a creature with leathery wings like a bat and a head like an alligator. They dragged it back to town and nailed it up to a barn, its wingspan covering the barn's entire length. I haven't seen this article myself, but I know that frontier journalism often played with the truth. Mark Twain got started on fiction while working on his brother's newspaper in the Nevada Territory!

Some photos have turned up over the years. The most famous one shows a giant Thunderbird nailed to a barn with some cowboys standing nearby. I can't show it to you because it doesn't seem to exist, at least not anymore. Many investigators claim to have seen it or even owned a copy, but nobody has one now

This is where it gets weird. I remember seeing that photo. My memory is of a fairly clear black and white image of a Thunderbird nailed to the roof of a barn, its wingspan almost equal to the barn's length. Men in old western costume are lined up on the roof and in front of the barn. I remember it looked like a rather poor cut-and-paste job. It was common for frontier people to pose next to and on a barn after a barn raising, so perhaps someone added the Thunderbird to a real photo. I even remember where I saw it, in a paranormal magazine at Bookman's, a used bookstore I used to work at in Tucson, Arizona. For some reason I didn't buy the magazine.

This must be a false memory. If the picture existed in a paranormal magazine, it would have been located by dedicated cryptozoologists by now. My experience is just like other people's, in that I have a very clear memory of the event and I no longer have the photo. Some people claim to have seen it in the possession of someone else. Others had a copy and lost it. In my case, I saw it in a magazine I didn't buy. I have unwittingly become part of an urban legend.

Weird, huh? What's going on here? Paranormal investigator Jerome Clark theorizes that the idea of the image is evocative enough to implant a false memory. Perhaps I read about the photo and created the memory? I wonder if ten years from now my writer friend will be writing another book on monsters and will be pulling her hair out trying to find that image of the Thunderbird she remembers seeing.

Oh, and not all memories of this photo are alike. This article includes the memory of a different image of the Thunderbird, and other reports say the creature was nailed to the wall of the barn, not the roof.

While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure these are. If they are really as old as they appear to be, then they are in the public domain. They could simply be old fakes. If they are modern fakes, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

The horror photography of Amanda Norman

Dark Road Nowhere by Amanda Norman

Horror photography enjoys a growing acceptance among fans of all things frightful. While most of us think of books and movies when we think of horror, talented photographer Amanda Norman sees terror through the lens of her camera.

Graveyards, Gothic architecture, forests in winter, even beaches become places of eerie light and shadow. Most of these aren't straight-up horror in the style that Hollywood embraces. The shots have disturbing subtly, more like The Seventh Seal than Seven. Occasionally she goes for fanged punks growling at the camera, and these aren't nearly as effective as her main body of work. She's at her best when she's being contemplative and melancholy.

Some of these would work great as book covers, although as tiny Amazon thumbnails they'd be all but blacked out. That's one thing I don't like about ebooks or shopping online in general. It's like what happened when album labels went from being on big record sleeves to being on CD jewel boxes. A shame, because the image below fits perfectly with a dark fantasy novel I'm writing.

I have a feeling we'll be hearing more from Amanda Norman. Art of this quality could take her places.

Three by Amanda Norman