Weird, Strange & Unusual Quotes 

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No. 20 

'The exploits of Spring Heeled Jack are still remembered as having frightened London half out of its wits. The miscreant made night hideous by his tricks - leaping over hedges to the terror of lonely pedestrians, waylaying females, scaring children, and even rendering the drivers in charge of the mails helpless with terror.'

The News of the World, 17th November, 1872. (Quoted in Peter Haining - The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack, 1977)


No. 19 

'If you want to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.'

'William James (Quoted in The Indefinite Boundary - Guy Lyon Playfair, 1976)

No. 18 

'I am a Spirit from everywhere, Heaven, Hell the Earth; am in the air, in houses, any place at any time, have been created millions of years; that is all I will tell you.'

'The Bell Witch' (Quoted in H. Carrington & N. Fodor The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries, 1953)

No. 17 

'I have lost count of the number of times I have spent a night in 'the most haunted room', of the hundreds of haunted houses that I have visited, of the thousands of cases of alleged haunting that have come to my attention; but still there is a definite excitement in learning about a fresh haunting, for there is always the possibility that this venture into the unknown may bring a never-to-be-forgotten experience, or better still, that this may be the spontaneous phenomenon that will prove for all time the objective reality of such activity.'

Peter Underwood (A Host of Hauntings, 1973)

No. 16  

'As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who was not there.
He was not there again today,
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.'

Mike Jackson (Quoted in Ghost and Ghoul - T C Lethbridge, 1961)

No. 15 

'Nothing that is submitted in this book is believable. It is manifestly absurd to ask a hearing for a Jinn, for the Talking Mongoose or for the Bell Witch, invisible but solid and - murderous! Yet facts are more stubborn than beliefs. Only our growing knowledge of the latent powers of the human mind may in time fit them into the general framework of science.'

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

No. 14 

'Poltergeist phenomena are generally supposed by the sceptical to be the work of artful and mischievous children . . . But in many cases which seem to have been carefully observed and reported the physical effects are of a nature quite incompatible with child agency. A child may produce strange noises or throw an occasional stone, but the movement of heavy furniture, or the flinging of missiles which enter a room from outside when the child is in the room and actually under observation cannot be explained in that way.'

Herbert Thurston (Ghosts and Poltergeists, 1953)

No. 13 

'Everything that relates, whether closely or more distantly, to psychic phenomena and to the action of psychic forces in general, should be studied just like any other science. There is nothing miraculous or supernatural in them, nothing that should engender or keep alive superstition.'

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

No. 12 

'Men are apt to reject reports of  very improbable occurrences. Persons of good judgment think it safer to distrust the alleged observer of such an event than to believe him. The result is that events which are merely very extraordinary acquire the reputation of never having occurred at all. Thus the highly improbable is made to appear impossible.'

G. Wald (Quoted in The Indefinite Boundary - Guy Lyon Playfair, 1976)

No. 11 

'My expression is that there are things, beings, and events that conform strikingly to regularized generalizations, but that also there are outrageous, silly, fiendish, bizarre, idiotic, monstrous things, beings, and events that illustrate just as strikingly universal imbecility, crime, or unformulability, or fantasy.'

Charles Fort (Wild Talents, 1932)

No. 10 

'UFO abductions are physically real events. But they are dramas materialised into three-dimensional space for us by the Phenonomenon. They are dreams that the Phenomenon made come to life in very frightening vividness . . . Once someone has entered into physical contact with the Phenomenon the link may become permanent, and reactivate periodically.'

D. Scott Rogo (Quoted in The Mammoth Book of UFOs - Lynn Picknett, 2001)

No. 9  

'I often wonder what the other side of the picture of haunting is in Ghost Land? Is it the dead alone that can disturb the living, or can the living similarly disturb the dead?

Nandor Fodor (Introduction to True Ghost Stories - Marchioness Townsend & Maude Ffoulkes 1936)

No. 8    

'Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the 'triviality of everydayness', if he is to do anything worthwhile.'

Colin Wilson (The Occult, 1971)

No. 7    

'. . . we are the subjects, and so is everything around us, of all manner of subtle and inexplicable influences, and if our ancestors attached too much importance to these ill-understood arcana of the night side of nature, we have attached too little.'

Catherine Crowe (The Night Side of Nature, 1848)

No. 6     

'One often hears of a  horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.'

W. B. Yeats (Preface to Lady Gregory's Complete Irish Mythology, 1904)

No. 5    

'I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right - that there is a ghost-world - but that it is our existence - that when spirits die they become human beings.'

Charles Fort (Wild Talents, 1932)

No. 4  

'We must stop asking: Can these things be? And begin asking: Why are these things?'

John Keel (Operation Trojan Horse, 1970)

No. 3     

'. . . hauntings do not just happen. It is not merely by chance that you are there when the ghost walks. A physical presence is needed not only to see the apparition but perhaps to cause it to appear.'

Antony D. Hippisley Coxe (Haunted Britain, 1973)

No. 2    

'It is my belief, arrived at after a long period of cautious consideration, that we must be surrounded by forces as yet unrecognised: That these forces cannot be weighed, registered or measured by instruments currently available to us, although it seems probable that we are affected by them, voluntarily or otherwise.'

Frank Edwards (Strange People, 1961)

No. 1     

'Beneath the tides of sleep and time
  Strange fish are moving!'

Thomas Wolfe

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