Customer Reviews

Incredible Tales of the Paranormal: Documented Accounts of Poltergeist, Levitations, Phantoms, and the Phenomena

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This has to be one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. The "incredible tales" are vivid descriptions of the paranormal phenomena produced by famous mediums of the Victorian era. Each chapter is devoted to a different medium and gives documented accounts of poltergeist, levitations, phantoms, and more. There is the Italian medium, Mirabelli,who materializes objects, transports live flowers and large pieces of furniture, and dematerializes anything - including himself! Other mediums produce full materializations of people who walk,talk, and when touched, have a pulse! Who are these phantoms and what is their connection to the medium? Why does shining a light in the eyes of the phantom cause restless movements in the medium? Macabre, and yet the authors manage to keep the tone serious and compelling. Indeed, as I read I had the eerie feeling of being one of the sitters. In the last section on psychic experiments in China we meet children with x-ray vision and others who can read through their ears. The editor, Alexander Imich, describes his own experiences with the Polish medium Matylda and there are photographs of actual seance phenomena. Read and be mesmerized!

This remarkable book is divided in seven main parts. Each one is devoted to a certain group of phenomena classified by the mediums involved or a specific part of the world where the events take place. They are as follows:

Mirabelli!! (after Carmine Mirabelli, a Brazilian medium)
Mediumship in Italy (several cases)
Indridi Indridason (an Icelandic medium)
Matylda (a Polish medium)
Teofil Modrzejewski (another Polish medium)
Physical Mediumship in Russia (several cases)
Psychic Phenomena in China (several cases)

Each of the parts above is subdivided in several chapters detailing the lives and powers of the mediums, experiments, special occasions, seances and testimonies of the witnesses involved.

In a nutshell, this book gives you a good image of many phenomena like levitation, materialization, voices, automatic writing and etc. It also gives an interesting portrait of the mediums and witnesses involved.

The only thing that left me a little disappointed was the lack of visual proof that would be nice along with such authoritative information: there's a group of photographs related to one chapter and that is all. Also, the book does not investigate the causes of the phenomena narrated and offers little contemporary comment on those cases. Basically, it only narrates the events, telling what happened and what the witnesses involved wrote about them.

Also, most of the cases narrated here happened over 100 years ago - what made me wonder about today's cases... where are they?

Still this book is a great introduction to the subject and those who read it will find it extremely interesting and compelling. I cannot imagine a better book to read for the kids, at night, on the woods, around the fire. Get it?

Just avoid reading it alone, in the house, in the night...

I can use two words to discribe this book wow wo

Well, Imich had the sad fortune to be born before there were fMRI or 256 channel EEG machinery, that can determine the xyz coordinates in the brain, (at time T), as an event happens.
Thus,his psychics were only looked at from the outside, since one could not get any closer to the phenomena.
Good as the psychics were, not one of them even thought of teaching their skill. So, when they died, their speciality disappeared.
And, they were very very good.
Appearances, disappearances and materializations: first rate.
One can speculate about the physics (external to the medium), but the raw data supplied is outstanding.
So, while there might be an other spatial or temporal physical dimension(s) that mediate some of this phenomena, looking to the inside [brain scans] is only now available as a technology, for "psychic research".