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No. 40 

' Stones fall onto your kitchen floor, as if they had come through the ceiling. Somebody, or something, starts banging on the wall. Things disappear, and reappear somewhere else. Before long, you realize it can't be an earthquake, or Concorde, or mice. It must be something else - something entirely inexplicable and very frightening indeed.' 

Guy Lyon Playfair (This House is Haunted - An Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist, 1980)

No. 39 

' We maintain secrecy not by stamping things 'Classified' and wearing lapel badges but through inconspicuousness. The President, of course, knows what we're doing, though I'm not sure he thinks we do. Or that he even remembers us. Unavoidably we're known to at least two Cabinet members, several members of the Senate, the House, the Pentagon. I could wish that somehow even that weren't necessary but of course they're the people who get us our funds.' 

Jack Finney (Time and Again, 1970)

No. 38 

' The river gives me life. Its waters sustain me. While it flows, I live. I feed not on flesh and water, but memories and emotions. I was once human; now I am legend. The humankind have a name for me and my kind. They call us the Sidhe, the fairy folk. Sometimes they whisper, Fairy woman, bean sidhe, banshee.' 
I am the banshee. ' 

Michael Scott (The Legend of the Banshee, in Irish Ghosts and Hauntings, 1994)

No. 37   

' There still lingers, in those pockets of the mind where shadows are turned into demons and where things go bump in the night, a flutter of the heart when the clock strikes twelve and a yearning for fire lit hearths where children listen to ghost stories on long, cold winter nights . . . This is the true heritage of a people who existed before Rome brought its version of 'civilisation' to Britain and will continue long after the twentieth century is forgotten. The ghost story is not just a part of history. It is history!' 

Bob Meredith (The Haunted Cotswolds, 1999)

' with electricity . . . every time you rub resin against wool you invariably produce a recognized phenomenon; but with spiritualism you do not always get results, and so it cannot be regarded as a natural phenomenon.'

No. 35 

'I cannot but think that it would be a great step if mankind could familiarise themselves with the idea that they are spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh; but that the dissolution of the connection between soul and body, though it changes the external condition of the former, leaves its moral state unaltered. What a man has made himself he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself.'

 Catherine Crowe (The Night Side of Nature, 1848)

No. 34 

' When I was growing up in Ireland between the wars, the supernatural was still a force, at least in the countryside. People might no longer really believe in leprechauns or banshees, but they would not have been greatly astonished to encounter them, and they certainly accepted  that there were forces unknown to science, apparently directed by 'powers' capable of benevolent or malevolent actions.' 

Brian Inglis (Natural and Supernatural - A History of the Paranormal, 1992)
 

No. 33 

'Without doubt, Britain has the reputation of being the most haunted country in the world, one estimate putting its ghostly sites at ten thousand, and there are good reasons why this island has such a large phantom population. Not having being conquered for the last nine centuries, nor having had an outside culture suddenly imposed upon it, it has preserved much of its folk traditions, including memories of hauntings.'

Marc Alexander (Haunted Houses You May Visit, 1982)

No. 32 

'I remember one day how that clerk with wrinkled face, blinking eyes and grizzly beard, who never seemed, apart from his work, to have interests other than his pipe, surprised me by telling me that the previous midnight he waked in his sleep, and some self of him was striding to and fro in the moonlight in an avenue mighty with gigantic images; and that dream self he had surprised had seemed to himself unearthly in wisdom and power.'

George Russell (Quoted in Colin Wilson - Mysteries, 1978)

No. 31  

'Seven spirits are there, from the underworld
Sent by the prescient dead
To warn men against ill: they fly by night
Like winged phantoms, and fill hearts with fright
When they pass overhead.'

John Cotton (The Seven Whistlers - An Old Worcestershire Delusion  Quoted in J. A. Brooks - Ghosts and Witches of The Cotswolds, 1986)

No. 30 

'If we could take a material man and dissolve away his physical constituent without interfering with the sense-data by means of which we perceive him, we should be left with, exactly, an apparition.'

G.N.M. Tyrrell (Apparitions, 1953)

No. 29 

'Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath?.'

Aldous Huxley (Forward to F.W.H. Myers Human Personality and its Survival after Bodily Death, 
1961 (1903) )

No. 28  

'Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in flesh.'

Sheridan Le Fanu (Uncle Silas, 1864 )

No. 27 

'This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and seas with monsters.'

John Keel (The Mothman Prophecies, 2002 (1976) )

No. 26 

'The general character of the phenomena is nearly always the same, and it appears incredible that such coincidental happenings could possibly have taken place in all ages and in all parts of the world, had there not been some genuine manifestations behind these reports.'

H. Carrington (The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries, 1953)

No. 25  

'Then it was springtime in the cloudy Himalayas. Nine hundred feet below my cave rhododendrons blossomed. I climbed barren mountain-tops. Long tramps led me to desolate valleys studded with translucent lakes . . . Solitude, solitude! . . . Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?'

Alexandra David-Neel (Magic and Mystery in Tibet, 1932)

No. 24  

'There are many ways of opening the doors of perception. Not all of them enable you to control what comes through the open doors, or to get them shut again.'

Guy Lyon Playfair (The Indefinite Boundary, 1976)

No. 23  

'Whatever else, indeed, a "ghost" may be, it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in nature.'

F.W.H. Myers (Quoted in A. Mackenzie - Hauntings and Apparitions, 1982)

No. 22  

'On more than one occasion I witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting on it, rise several inches from the ground. On another occasion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such a manner that its four feet were visible to us. It then rose about three inches, remained suspended for about ten seconds, and then slowly descended.'

Sir William Crookes (Quoted in Brian Inglis - The Paranormal - An Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, 1986)

No. 21  

'I am the fifth dimension. I am the eighth wonder of the world, I can split the atom.'

Gef, the talking mongoose (Quoted in H. Carrington & N. Fodor The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries, 1953)

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