Riley Mitchell's Blog

A Happy New Year!

Another New Year’s Day—how time does fly! But what is Time to one who has the consciousness of Eternity? What is a year of time to one who is conscious of having “all the time there is” at his disposal?

Another New Year’s Day—ah! dear me! How many things that on last New Year’s Day we grievously feared would happen during the coming year, but which never really happened at all! And how many things that on last New Year’s Day we never dreamed would happen during the coming ye...

With 2019 knocking on the door, I am pleased to announce that paranormalbucket.com’s Twitter account–@bucketofmystery–will be mining the rich corpus of UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, and parapsychological studies in tweets showcasing “This Day in Paranormal History.” Join me for a range of calendar-specific listings highlighting the past’s unexpected, mysterious, and (sometimes) trivial paranormal happenings starting on January 1. I hope you enjoy the journey, and let me know if you have some items...

Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits

Benjamin Radford

Rhombus Publishing Company (January 2018)

$19.95 USD (Paperback); 322 pages; 58 b&w photos and illustrations

ISBN 978-0-936455-16-7

The deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Radford (Tracking the Chupacabra) offers up a critique of ghost investigation techniques in this thought-provoking volume. Rather than simply chronicling why many standard methods adopted by contemporary paranormal investigators to search for...

Speaking with the Spirits of the Old Southwest: Conversations with Miners, Outlaws, and Pioneers Who Still Roam Ghost Towns

Dan Baldwin, Rhonda Hull, and Dwight Hull

Llewellyn Publications (May 2018)

$16.99 USD (Paperback); 288 pages; 29 b&w photos

ISBN 978-0-7387-5674-5

Baldwin (an accomplished pendulum dowser) and the Hulls (Rhonda, a psychic medium, and Dwight, a paranormal researcher/animal communicator) visit a number of Old West locations throughout Arizona in this eclectic anthology, c...

Zombies: An Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead

Philippe Charlier, Translated from the French by Richard J. Gray II

University Press of Florida (May 2017)

$18.95 USD (Paperback); 160 pages; 1 map; glossary

ISBN 978-0-8130-5457-5

From Bela Lugosi’s path-breaking 1932 film White Zombie, to George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead series, and the recent television phenomena of The Walking Dead, zombies have successfully maintained a particularly unsettling presence in popu...

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I will be appearing live tonight (8pm Eastern, 7pm Central, 6pm Mountain, and 5pm Pacific) on Courtney Mroch’s excellent Haunt Jaunts show on ParaManiaRadio!  Just in time for the holidays, I’ll be talking about The Essential Paranormal Bucket List book along with a few other topics, plus Courtney and I will see if we can stump each other during the paranormal “Fake News or Not?” game.  Listen in or join the live studio audience chat room where you...

Crystal Magic: Mineral Wisdom for Pagans and Wiccans

Sandra Kynes

Llewellyn Publications (October, 2017)

$24.99 USD (Paperback); 240 pages; Color Illustrations

ISBN 978-0-7387-5341-6

Did you know that red carnelian was used for centuries to ward off bubonic plague, that there are eight different colors of jade, or that pyrite can help serve as a magical lie detector? These are just a few of the vivid details shared by Sandra Kynes in this well-illustrated reference to all things crystal. Paga...

Sarah L.Winchester (1840 – 1922) was the wife of Winchester Repeating Rifle heir William Wirt Winchester, and upon his untimely death in 1881, was convinced the ghosts of those killed by Winchester munitions were seeking to punish the family. To combat and confuse these spirits, a superstitious, eccentric, and fabulously wealthy Winchester adopted an inventive strategy to extend her life indefinitely by endlessly changing and renovating her San Jose, California, estate. This lavish endeavor—s...

From the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (London, April, 1904, p. 217-19) where the editors relate a cautionary tale from 100 years earlier:

“For some five weeks previous to January, 1804, the inhabitants of Hammersmith, (then a suburban [English] village of scattered houses, connected by dark unfrequented lanes, bounded in places by high hedges), had been alarmed by the frequent appearances of  ‘a Ghost,’ described as dressed sometimes entirely in white, sometimes in the skin o...

Prolific author, scholar, and unidentified flying object (UFO) researcher Kevin D. Randle is a retired US Army officer who has spent more than four decades writing about UFOs and related paranormal events. Mr. Randle is considered the leading expert on the famous 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, UFO sighting and his forthcoming book, Encounter in the Desert: The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro, shines new light on another significant reported extraterrestrial encounter in the Land of Enchantment....