Dartmouth, Devon – authors call for paranormal tales,
Following the success of his book Dartmouth Ghosts and Mysteries, author Ken Taylor is working with Christine Donnelly to compile a second volume of paranormal happenings in and around this popular South Devon town. The new book will feature hauntings but will also explore a wide range of other subjects such as UFOs, witchcraft, cryptozoology, ESP, earth mysteries, and mythology.
The authors are looking both to update the stories already published, and to gather new phenomena (including unreported cases from before the publication in 2006). Naturally, many people reading the original book realised they too had shared experiences, but it was already too late to capture them and bring them into the public domain, so this project is a chance to allow all that to happen. Also, of course, Dartmouth and the South Hams of Devon are major tourist resorts, and people from all around the globe will have witnessed anomalous events, which presents an opportunity to investigate the effects that different cultural backgrounds can have on perceptions of the supernatural.
Rarely has an entire town and the villages and countryside around it received such focussed attention over a period of more than ten years. Longitudinal studies such as this have the potential to uncover patterns of hauntings etc, and may not only spark new avenues of research into the mysterious occurrences, but may also suggest cyclical explanations for rare but undeniably natural incidents.
There are many weird and wondrous things in life, and they may be discussed for a few days and then the subject is dropped, or a tale may grow into an urban legend that evolves through time. Either way, what a museum is to a precious artefact, a book is to the fleeting experience – a place of safety and a treasure house for future researchers.
Ken has had books on the paranormal translated into five languages, but no longer lives in the area, so Christine who has a lifetime’s experience of the supernatural, is spearheading this new venture. For more information, and to contribute to this project, please email her (christinedolphin@talktalk.net). Details of the first book can be found online (www.wavewrights.com/pub/dartmouth).