4Ever Paranormal

On November 11, 1975, two Colorado Air National Guard A-7 Corsair II aircraft collided during what should have been a routine night training mission. The official investigation concluded the accident resulted from a tragic sequence of misidentification and confusion in the darkness. But one detail in the Air Force report has continued to raise questions for researcher Katie Paige. The report…

The Word Is New. The Lie Isn’t On the night of February 8, 1855, something walked across Devon, England, for a hundred miles. It crossed rooftops without breaking stride. Haystacks and stone walls fourteen feet high did nothing to slow it, and the snow on top stayed untouched. Even the River Exe couldn’t stop it, a two-mile stretch crossed as if the water wasn’t there. By morning, cloven…

What Hynek Actually Meant by “High Strangeness” I was halfway through writing the Spottsville Monster episode of 4Ever Paranormal when I caught myself doing something I should have known better than to do. I’d gotten to the part where the neighbor, alone in that abandoned barn, heard something tell him not to be afraid. It won’t hurt him, and the creature never opens its mouth. It was exactly…

Some stories stay with you because they’re scary. Others stay with you because nobody can agree on what actually happened. The Rosenheim Poltergeist is one of those cases. A law office in Germany became the center of an investigation involving electricians, utility engineers, telephone technicians, physicists, and paranormal researchers, all trying to explain the same bizarre events. We walk…

The Fourth Horseman Was Never About Fear Mary Neal was pinned eight feet underwater, her kayak wedged against rock at the base of a Chilean waterfall, and she wasn’t afraid. She was an orthopedic spine surgeon, not someone prone to panic, and she’d gone into that river a skeptic of anything resembling an afterlife. The current held her legs bent backward at the knee. Her heart stopped. By most…

Like every book I’ve written, it started with a question that refused to leave me alone. In this case, it was a simple one. How did Lucifer become Satan? The more I dug into the oldest sources, the more I realized the answer wasn’t nearly as straightforward as I’d always been told. This book takes a fresh look at one of history’s most misunderstood figures by separating tradition from the…

Frankenstein Wasn’t a Nightmare, It Was a Lab Report In 1803, a crowd in London paid to watch a dead man’s face move. His name was George Forster, hanged that morning for murder. A scientist named Giovanni Aldini wired electricity into his corpse, and the jaw clenched, one eye opened, and a hand curled into a fist. People in the room didn’t laugh. Some of them thought they were watching a man…

This week we look at the strange history of Hales Bar Dam in Tennessee. Long before the dam was built, river travelers feared a dangerous stretch of water known as The Suck. Over time, stories of sacred waters, warnings attributed to Cherokee war chief Dragging Canoe, construction problems, and eventual failure all became part of the dam’s legend. We also examine reports of flooded cemeteries,…

The Mystery Was Manufactured I spent this past weekend at NC Crypticon, working a booth where I was selling books and talking up our 4Ever Paranormal podcast. Between signing books, answering questions about cryptids, and talking about folklore, the conversation kept drifting back to the same stretch of ocean. Different people. Different ages. The same mystery. The same question kept finding me…

The Lost Gospel That Turns History’s Worst Villain Into Its Most Loyal Disciple Almost everyone has betrayed someone else at some point, whether they’d call it that or not. Sometimes it’s telling a friend a truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s ending a relationship someone else wasn’t ready to let go of. Sometimes it’s reporting a coworker’s mistake before it became someone else’s…

Four friends went into the Maine wilderness for a camping and canoe trip in 1976. What happened on Eagle Lake that night would eventually become one of the most famous UFO abduction stories in America. But this episode isn’t just about UFOs. It’s about memory. We follow the events of the Allagash case from the original sighting through the missing time claims, the disturbing dreams that…

What Jack Parsons Summoned at Devil’s Gate Dam Jack Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is the NASA-affiliated research center that built the technology behind America’s rocket program and, decades later, the Mars rovers. Parsons was one of the men who made that program possible in the first place. He was not a fringe figure. He was one of the architects of American…

A Cocaine Plane, REO Speedwagon, and a Tiny Town Called Varnamtown I go down some pretty wild rabbit holes while researching books and articles. While researching North Carolina’s mysterious Seneca Guns, I ended up in Varnamtown, a fishing village with fewer residents than many apartment complexes. I was looking for answers about unexplained booms. While getting to them I found myself reading…

Most people already have a picture in their mind when they hear the word witch. Pointed hats, black cats, broomsticks, pentagrams, and Satan worship. But how much of that comes from history, and how much came from movies? This week we explore some of the most common misconceptions about witchcraft and examine where those ideas came from. Join us as we discuss Satan, Wicca, the Bible, pentagrams,…

I don’t spend much time looking backward, but one story about rain brought my grandmother back to me. When Kateryna Fedotova tagged me in her rain-writing challenge, I expected to enjoy reading her story and then move on with my day. Instead, I found myself thinking about someone I haven’t thought about in a very long time. The truth is, I don’t spend much time looking backward. The difficult…

What One Papal Bull Reveals About Where Our Superstitions Actually Come From You knock on wood without thinking about it. You toss salt over your shoulder if you spill it, or you know someone who does. You’ve watched a friend refuse to walk under a ladder, not because they believe in curses exactly, but because, why take the chance. None of this feels like belief. It feels like habit. That’s…

Most people think they know exactly what Baphomet is. A goat’s head. Horns. Satan. But what if that image isn’t nearly as old as most people believe? In this episode, Bill and Deb follow the strange history of Baphomet from the Knights Templar and accusations of heresy to nineteenth-century occult symbolism and the rise of modern Satanism. Along the way they explore the mysterious origins of…