by Nandor Fodor
1964, Paperback Library
Fodor has a psychoanalytical approach to the supernatural so we get a lot of gestalt/collective unconscious/Jungian kind of digressions, with very few actual claims of the paranormal. He actually had the reputation as a skeptic at the time, in that he thought hoaxes were a possibility in some cases.
A hairband disappears. Only a ghost could have taken it, one doesn't simply lose a hairband, you buy one for life.
A dog barks at something he can't see, proof positive of ghosts.
A 70 pound table slides around during a séance in the dark. This was impossible to move by corporeal means - it was on a carpet.
His wife has a dream Hitler shaves off his moustache. The next day he sees an ad in the paper for the Great Dictator. Nobody has previously connected Charlie Chaplin and Hitler's moustaches. Coincidence?
He goes over the deeply stupid case of Gef, the magical talking mongoose, which was made into a movie with Simon Pegg as Fodor and a serial sexual predator as the voice of Gef.
One of the dumber aspects of Spiritualism is the use of spirit guides, the ghosts of dead racial stereotypes which aid in seances. Fodor marvels of the case of a reader who transfigures herself into a "Chinaman" and wonders if she had the skills and facial elasticity to make the change herself, when you know she just squinted and stuck her front teeth out.
A woman claims to be molested by a ghost. It stops for a while when she stuffs a giant iron cross in her undies, but it gets too uncomfortable. For a while she was able to guess where the ghost was and grab and yank off his ghost dick, but that lost effectiveness. The ghost starts coming around the backdoor until she shouted "abnormal!" enough that he swings around to the front. They seek the assistance of a medium and her spirit guide Minnehaha, the fictional woman from the Longfellow poem, and her spirit tribe, which presumably includes Tonto and Billy Jack.
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