Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

FARRAGOS OF FORTEANA

A new year, and time for a bit of fortean heresy.

Charles Fort founded the modern discipline of forteana with his heroic work in newspaper and periodical archives in the early 20th century. He gathered, in British and American libraries, snippets of the apparently impossible from around the world. I have spent much of the last five years in the same archives – digitised now – researching folklore and ‘the unexplained’. When I go back and reread Fort with a more personal knowledge of the sources I have the impression that he was too trusting. This might seem an unfair criticism of the ultimate trust-no-one thinkfor-yourself author. However, browsing through newspapers published between 1830 and

1930, you see how frequently later-contradicted rumours and made-up stories appeared in print. The nature of these rumours or inventions was that they easily got caught up in the clipping system, whereby a story taken from, say, a small circulation Nebraska newspaper was reported in one of the large Chicago dailies and then appeared, latterly, in publications in Argentina, Australia and India. The locals might have got the joke or relished a sly dig at a parish personality, or were perhaps just better placed to judge the truth of what they read on the basis of what they had already heard. That capacity disappeared once the story was uprooted and published in other states and distant countries. Fort had worked as a journalist and knew how penny-a-liners and even established newspaper writers made things up, particularly when there was a deadline looming.

I’ll give, as an example, a story that recently crossed my desk, which might have interested Fort had he encountered it: “Saw the Devil at Mt Vesuvius” (a gem found by Kay Massingill). This enjoyable farrago appeared in 1908 in a Washington State paper. The author describes in striking detail how a ship’s crew watched, from the sea, a 16ft (5m) monster throw a man into the crater of Mount Vesuvius: a man that some of them knew as a corrupt ship-owner from Liverpool. The story would have fooled me had I not read the same tale about five or six times before in sources going back centuries. An old yarn had been wheeled out and polished up into new copy for a West Coast paper. A new generation of forteans is much more critical. I still haven’t read Martin Shough and Wim Van Utrecht’s Redemption of the Damned: Vol. 1: Aerial Phenomena, A Centennial Re-evaluation of Charles Fort’s ‘Book of the Damned’, but I am looking forward to the experience. I am also especially interested to know what this kind of useful scepticism would do to 19th-century Bigfoot reports...

Simon Young’s Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies is out now from Gibson Square.

A SHIP’S CREW WATCHED A 16FT MONSTER THROW A MAN INTO THE CRATER OF MOUNT VESUVIUS