I’ve never got around to reading Charles Fort until now. If you’re unfamiliar with him, he flourished around the turn of the 19th century, and apparently devoted his life to perusing the world’s newspapers and clipping accounts of strange events. In Wild Talents, Fort is concerned with spontaneous human combustion and a variety of poltergeist phenomena, which he attributes to – witchcraft. Not nude hags worshiping a demon goat (Fort has no use for conventional religion), but people who have mental powers that allow them set others on fire, cause their cooking utensils to leap through the air, make stones shower on their houses, etc.

Fort’s writing style, although literate, is extremely involved and circumlocutory; his cases cry out for a couple of tables – so that all the people bursting into flames could be studied together rather than scattered through hundreds of pages and mixed amidst mutilated cattle and ambulating furniture. Fort’s cases are almost all self-debunking; while Fort was famously disparaging of science, he was completely credulous when it came to newspaper accounts – even if (for example) the newspaper was in Madras and the event being described took place in Minneapolis.

In the 1950s, a lot of Fort’s material was culled and reissued by Frank Edwards; I remember running across Edward’s book Stranger than Science sometime in my grade school years and being frightened almost out of my housebreaking by it; I was particularly freaked out by accounts of spontaneous human combustion, and somehow convinced myself that if I always crawled around on my hands and knees I wouldn’t burst into flames. This was difficult to explain to my parents and peers. I was also terrified by the Moving Coffins of Barbados (Fort doesn’t mention these – at least not in this book – but Edwards did) and was afraid they would move into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Fortunately, both spontaneous combustion and coffin home invasions were set aside when I read an article in True magazine (or maybe Argosy?) about fire ants, which I expected to appear en masse over the southern horizon at any moment, devouring all in their path. I believe this was also about the time I took the back door off the hinges to keep Communists from stealing it. Ah, for the care-free days of childhood. ( )

Mass consciousness, psychosomatic illness, pictures appearing etched on walls and windows, stigmata, mysterious fires and gassings, unexplained disappearances these are the things that populate Charles Fort’s world. In the previous book I read by Fort entitled “Lo!” the author hypothesized that unexplained phenomena was explained by teleportation. In this tome he theorizes that people are capable of much more than they realize. According to Fort we all have latent psychic powers and that if we pictures things in our minds they will come true. If you think about a picture falling off a wall, it will. A person who is angry at another person can cause that person injury. Someone who goes to a lecture on food poisoning my develop symptoms of food poisoning.

Charles Fort will never tell you that his ideas are the correct ones because he wants the reader to think for themselves. His books are not for people who want mysteries explained logically or rationally. Fort’s writing is dated and most of the supernatural events he mentions can be easily explained. His books are for those who like to read about strange phenomena. If you enjoyed watching “In Search Of” or any of the ancient mysterious and UFO shows on The History Channel you will enjoy his books. ( )