Cutchin - Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal

Wrapped in a blankets comforting embrace, your head cradled by its pillow, you relax with the vulnerability only afforded in true security. If homes are castles, then bedrooms are their keeps, reinforced refuges where the owner ever shall in safety rest. Nothing penetrates this sanctum.

Half sleeping, half waking, but as yet neither fully, something catches your eye. A dark shape crouched in the corner of the room Surely just some innocuous objecta shirt draped over a chair, an oft-overlooked oscillating fanrendered threatening by the darkness, ill met by moonlight. You curse your overactive imagination. This explanation grants solace until the figure steps closer.

The keep is breached. As if a switch were flipped, unearthly blinding light penetrates the room, infusing every nerve with fear and awe comingled. Something is in the room with you . Despite never wanting to run more in your life, you cannot move. Sweat drenches your bedsheets. Insistent buzzing burrows into your brain. Panic amplifies tenfold. Mortal coils slip; you feel yourselfnot your body, but your self lift off the bed and miraculously pass through the ceiling, drawn inexorably into a beckoning night sky.

Upon retelling, you cant quite recall what message the small, glowing figure imparted, only its importance. A few memories flash clearer, but remain illogical, ineffable, impossible. They feel real realer than real, in fact yet awash in symbolism. You went somewhere, met someone (some thing ?), and returned changed.

Was it all a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was? Or merely a fit of sleep paralysis? Or did you die and return to your body? Were you abducted by aliens, spirited away by faeries, or spiritually awakened?

or all of the above?

One giant ghost story

A New York psychiatrist once asked me if Id ever heard of deceased people appearing in flying saucers, wrote paranormal researcher John Keel in 1976. He told me how a young patient, a teenaged boy, claimed to have witnessed a UFO landing and was astonished to see his late father emerge from the object. The psychiatrist knew nothing of UFOs and assumed the whole thing was nothing but a childish fantasy. Actually, however, there have been hundreds of similar reports although they are usually ignored by the hard core believers in extraterrestrial spaceships.

This is a book of contradictions. It is a book about ghosts; it is not about ghosts. It is a book about hauntings; it is not about hauntings. Most importantly, it is a book about death, but it is that neither. It is about existence.

After his 1987 book Communion became a pop-culture touchstone, author and experiencer Whitley Strieber was inundated with correspondence from readers detailing their encounters with the Visitors, presumably extraterrestrial abductors. After reading thousands of letters and compiling correlations, Whitleys wife Anne jotted at the top of a yellowed sheet of observations: This has something to do with what we call death.

Anne Striebers insight haunts Ufology and, by extension, the interconnected supernatural as a whole. Why would dead loved ones appear in alien abductions? Why does western European faerie loredescribing those short, subterranean spirits fond of kidnapping childrenso inextricably associate them with the dead? Why do certain anomalous animals (i.e. cryptids ) presage death? Forteansthose following in the footsteps of Charles Fort, pioneering researcher of the unexplainedare left wondering whether or not we are simply dealing with one giant ghost story.