Cold comfort

In Ghostwatch [ FT403:20] I was struck by the nominative resonance between Iceland’s acclaimed physical medium Indridi Indridason (1883-1912), and the mysterious informant Indrid Cold in John Keel’s seminal fortean text The Mothman Prophecies. A quick online search showed I am not the first to make this association. Christopher Josiffe speculated likewise on Twitter in 2019. Was Indridason the inspiration (unconscious or otherwise) for the Cold ‘character’? Others suggest the medium himself lives on, and somehow tried to intervene in the events leading up to the Point Pleasant Bridge collapse; or perhaps he was an alien the whole time, his ET technology accounting for his miraculous powers.

Top results on the first page also include the statement “I will not make decisions based on messages from Indrid Cold” translated into both Hebrew and Czech. At that point my browser, Firefox, crashed. With its flames clearly extinguished by the Cold, I was able to haul myself out of this icy sinkhole before it consumed any more of my afternoon.

• The US state dept has recently ‘archived’ a wide range of material on its website, possibly due to nothing more sinister than the change of administration, and the link to the extraordinary Wuhan Fact Sheet [ FT403:7] has died. However, it is still available in the archive and can be found here: https://2017-2021.state.gov/ fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhaninstitute-of-virology/index.html Ryan Shirlow

Leeds, West Yorkshire