In Search of Weird America

Some years back Jim Brandon's 1978 paperback classic of the exotic, strange, and paranormal, Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States, was brought to our attention in the seemingly random anticlimax of a library used book sale. There was something unnervingly familiar about the piercing look of the Native American Indian shaman on the front cover, his eyes looking through you with a transcendent hypnotic gaze, reminiscent either of Jim Morrison's psychic alter ego, Chief Broom in Kesey's Cuckoo Nest, or that famous television commercial in the 1960s campaigning for the American environment, a shamanic archetype that evoked something deep in the collective unconscious, recalling archaic folklore, ancient tribes, and lost lands when the aroma of fresh tobacco and cannabis in mystic rites wafted over geomantic earth mounds in Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland, and the Carolinas. That lost pre-modern and pre-Columbian era when ancient Egypt and Atlantis were rumored to have exchanged the seeds of civilization and culture, guided by a paradigmatic pre-modern knowledge beyond reason or science in the conventional sense.

It was only some time after the appearance of Weird America that a mysterious visitor to the Farkhurst Bookshop made an inquiry about Brandon's other exotic book of the paranormal, The Rebirth of Pan, that this trail began to get interesting in a sequence of events that were both unexpected and mysterious in that eerie gothic way that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. There seemed to be some special aura or karma attached to this book, like a talisman in a game of mystical Chess, as if it had picked up some telluric energy or vibes from the topics and subject matter inside the cover. This was BEFORE The X-Files era of the Paranormal Revival in American culture and at the time I knew only bits and pieces of these legends and the mysterious lore behind them. But it seemed like something was happening here...so it was a fit beginning for such archaeological inquiries into the world of the strange and highly weird. As we seem still to be in that unusual subterranean cultural Renaissance of weirdness and high strangeness with its psychovertical trances and transformations, ecstatic visions and preternatural apparitions, the symbolic range here serves as an iconic totem of the spirit of the age....

"Ride the wild highway..."
http://farkhurst.blogspot.com/

Update: Jim Brandon and Weird America on Cryptomundo.com: Beyond Mothman: I-35W Blues

Update: Minnesota Mothman on Cryptomundo.com