EDITORIAL
RIP GUY LYON PLAYFAIR
As we were readying this issue to go to press, we received sad news of the passing of Guy Lyon Playfair, just a few days after his 83rd birthday. Guy will be well known to readers of FT over the years – as a contributor to the magazine, for his decades of work with the Society for Psychical Research and as the author of books such as This House is Haunted and If
This Be Magic. For many people, he will perhaps be best remembered for his investigation, with Maurice Grosse, into the celebrated Enfield Poltergeist case of the late 1970s. A couple of years ago, this was the subject of a well-received television drama, about which Guy had this to say to FT at the time: “It was quite an honour to be portrayed by award-winning Matthew Macfadyen, whom I envy for his ability to seduce Keira Knightley twice – in Pride and Prejudice and again in Anna
Karenina. How true to life he was as me is not for me to say. I suspect not very, but most of The Enfield Haunting didn’t have much to do with reality as I recall it either, except the red E-type Jaguar which was absolutely authentic.”
Guy died in his sleep in hospital on Sunday, 8 April; coincidentally, this was just a few hours before Radio 4 broadcast an episode of The Reunion dedicated to the Enfield case, bringing together some of the original witnesses and reporters of the phenomenon – a coincidence that would have appealed to Guy as a collector of synchronicities. As Alan Murdie pointed out to us in an email, this was also the Sunday when the Church commemorates the risen Jesus’s appearance to the Apostle Thomas (he of doubting fame); Thomas was also called Thomas Didymus, which means ‘the twin’. Twins, and the unusual abilities attributed to them, were another of Guy’s abiding interests. In 2002, he published a book-length study of the phenomenon of Twin Telepathy, and the following year wrote a major article on the subject for FT (“The Twin Thing”, FT171:34-40). We will publish a full obituary for Guy in our next issue.
MR FORT GOES TO BLOOMSBURY
On a more cheerful note, residents of London’s Bloomsbury will be seeing Charles Fort (beautifully illustrated by Ross Becker, below) on the cover of the Spring edition of their neighbourhood’ s Journal. It’s a publication that usually focuses on the area’s fashionable restaurants and watering holes, expensive clothes emporia and notable (living) locals; and while Bloomsbury’s literary heritage inevitably gets a look-in in the form of Virginia Woolf and her set, we hope that Journal readers are intrigued to discover that, between 1920 and 1928, the forefather of this very magazine once walked Bloomsbury’s streets and squares and conducted years of research in the Reading Room of the British Museum. If you should find yourself in this part of London, you can pick up a free copy from many of the shops and cafés in the area. And while you’re there, do go and admire the plaque at 39 Marchmont Street that commemorates Fort’s years at the address (see FT327:2 for the story behind it). For our readers who can’t make it to Bloomsbury, you can find the feature online at http://bloomsbury.journal-ldn.com.
ERRATA
FT365:9: James Wright pointed out a particularly wince-inducing typo in the Sideline ‘SWAN ATROCITY’: “signets” should of course have been “cygnets”.
FT364:60: Eric Hoffman noted an error in the review of UFO Contact at Pascagoula; the original, privately printed edition was published in 1983, not 1973, as claimed in the review. “As the incident occurred in October of 1973, that would have to be one rushed-to-press volume!”
FT365:67: Tom Ruffles spotted a mistake in this issue’s “Building a Fortean Library” entry: Kulagina’s first name is given as Nelil, whereas it should be Ninel (Lenin Нине́ль backwards), or in the original.