These Haunted Hinterlands

Spooky Season is creeping up on us and this got me thinking about these haunted hinterlands where I make my home.

This is the Mississinewa I have come to know.

Let your imagination take flight. A preternatural mist clings to the water like a shroud, while the Mississinewa Reservoir lies in eerie silence, a seemingly serene body of water nestled within the rolling hills of Indiana. Can you see it? Can you feel it? Believe me when I say that beneath its placid surface, a dark history swirls, obscured by both time and treachery. The reservoir, a haven for those seeking solace or recreation, hides secrets that would chill even the bravest of souls.

The origins of the Mississinewa Reservoir are as shadowy as the legends that haunt its waters. In the early 1960s, the government’s decision to dam the Mississinewa River resulted in the creation of a large artificial lake, designed, they said, to control flooding and provide a source of water for the region. But were there more sinister machinations behind the government’s actions? Because that area, submerged for more than half the year, was home to strange magicks and supernatural creatures, many of which still linger.

The result of the government’s dam project saw an entire community  drowned beneath unnatural design, including homes, roads, and even old cemeteries, whose resting inhabitants were swallowed by the reservoir’s depths.

From its inception, whispers of the reservoir’s cursed nature began to circulate. Locals spoke of strange occurrences: ghostly apparitions drifting across the water, inexplicable chill winds, and the unnerving feeling of being watched. Tales of these ghostly encounters grew into a tapestry of urban legends that have persisted over the decades.

And what of doomed Somerset? The remnants of that fractured community now lay buried beneath the water. Some claim that on certain nights, when the moon is full and the water is particularly still, the outlines of streets and buildings can be glimpsed beneath the surface. Legend has it that the spirits of those who once lived there now roam the submerged streets, eternally trapped in a ghostly reflection of their former lives.

This was, after all, once the land of the Miami Indians, the last reservation in the State. It was these people who shared tales of ‘little people’, the Paissa, who shepherded the deceased into the afterlife, and channeled the energy of the river toward those ends. The dam itself was constructed atop seven sacred wellsprings, just southeast of their sacred Seven Pillars, disrupting the spiritual flow of the river’s course. This was surely no coincidence.

Another prominent legend tells of the ‘Lady of the Lake’, a spectral figure said to wander the shores of the reservoir. According to the story, she was a young woman whose tragic death occurred when her car veered off the road and plunged into the depths of the newly formed lake. Her spirit, restless and seeking justice, is believed to appear on misty nights, her mournful cries echoing across the water. Witnesses who have glimpsed her report an unsettling chill and an inexplicable sense of sorrow, as though the very essence of grief had become an enduring presence.

The darker side of these legends hints at more sinister forces. Stories circulate about individuals who, drawn by curiosity, have ventured too close to the reservoir’s depths only to disappear without a trace. Whispers suggest that the ancient and malevolent spirits of the land—angry at the intrusion and desecration of their sacred grounds—are responsible for these disappearances, dragging the unwary into the abyss.

Wary travelers have reported sightings of large, unsettling creatures that bear striking resemblance to the Sasquatch, of strange craft in the skies overhead, packs of wolves that are not part of the natural ecosystem, giant birds and snakes, and strange lights and chanting deep within the woods.

The Mississinewa Reservoir stands as a testament to the uneasy coexistence between the natural world and the supernatural. Its waters, though beautiful and inviting, conceal a history marked by loss and sorrow, and its depths are rumored to hold more than just water. For those who dare to probe its secrets, the reservoir offers an unsettling glimpse into the unknown, where every ripple and shadow may conceal a fragment of the dark legends that define its haunted legacy.

In the end, the Mississinewa Reservoir is more than just a body of water; it is a gateway to the enigmatic and the otherworldly, a place where history and myth intertwine beneath the surface, waiting for the brave—or the foolhardy—to unravel its cryptic mysteries.

My Thoughts on Evan J. Peterson’s Better Living Through Alchemy

When I caught wind of Better Living Through Alchemy, I reached out to its publisher, Broken Eye Books, and requested a review copy, which they very graciously supplied. There was a bit of buzz circulating, and the book had a decent pedigree of authors who had supplied blurbs for the book (including Nick Mamatas and Ann VanderMeer). I knew going in that it would be a socially conscious, modern-world take on a genre that tends to be mired in mid-20th Century sensibilities. I was hoping for something refreshing and original. I was not disappointed.

In Better Living Through Alchemy, Evan J. Peterson introduces us to Kelly Mun, a private detective with a unique gift — clairolfaction, or a psychic sense of smell. Right out of the gate, I loved this rather underused psychic device. It added an interesting twist to the character’s mediumship.

Mun is a fascinating character, damaged, which is part of the trope, but her relationship with her cousin Critter (who is another interesting divergence) adds real depth.

The heart of the story lies in the characters, but the plot is ripped right out of the underbelly. In this slight re-imagining of Seattle as a seedy occult-infused den of venality, we find a new street drug, bizarre and deadly, weaving through the cultural hellscape. Mun and Critter are on the case, hired by a mysterious and duplicitous businesswoman.

Peterson maintains the Noir roots of the occult detective yarn while bringing it kicking and screaming into the modern age. It has a freshness that a lot of urban fantasy lacks, chiefly in that the author is not taking themselves too seriously. The story is grim and weird and, oddly, has a roleplaying game narrative quality to it, that is ultimately a good thing.

Better Living Through Alchemy is not for everybody, but I dug it. If you loved Mamatas’ Love is the Law, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t read Love is the Law, rectify that.

I’ve really tried to not put any spoilers in this review, because an occult detective story works best when the twists and turns hit you unexpectedly. Well, this book has them aplenty, especially considering it’s a rather short novel at roughly 150 pages. It’s a quick read, lightning paced, and a great way to spend an evening.

You can purchase Evan J. Peterson’s Better Living Through Alchemy right HERE. I recommend it, especially if you’re a little weird like the rest of us.

My Thoughts on Donald Tyson’s Incantations and Enchantments

I have been a fan of Donald Tyson’s work since 1988 when I first read New Magus: Ritual Magic as a Personal Process. That book was a real turning point in my practice. When I reached out to Llewellyn, inquiring if they had any review copies they might send my way, I jumped at the chance to read Tyson’s latest — Incantations and Enchantments: The Power of the Voice and the Breath in Magic.

Here’s what the publisher had to say:

Vocalize the Spiritual Energy of Breath for Potent Magic

Cultures around the world and throughout history recognize the human breath as the seat of spirit. The chi of the Chinese, the ruach of the Hebrews, the pneuma of the Greeks, and the spiritus of the Romans refer to the same thing―the invisible energy that permeates the breath. Now, with this book’s in-depth study, you can maximize the potential of this energy in your magic.

Esteemed magician Donald Tyson presents an advanced look at how to compose your own incantations, use words and names of power, control the living breath, and more. He shows you the inherent potency of vibrating words and vowels, providing numerous examples from historical texts and occult practice.

Tyson presents a wide variety of spells for healing, love, and protection. He also shares enchantments for herbs, potions, wands, and even people. From binding the wind through knot magic to using alliteration and repetition, this book balances scholarship and practical workings so you can maximize the potential of breath and voice in your practice.

Tyson has a tremendously comfortable narrative style and it really shines here. Dissecting the importance of voice and breath can be a tedious subject, but in Tyson’s capable hands, the reader is transported and what he shares is approachable. Tyson is simply a gifted author and it really shows in this work. He writes in a way that pulls novices in and educates them without talking down to them, but at the same time, is able to address more seasoned occultists in a way that they are refreshed and given something new to chew on.

My copy of Incantations and Enchantments was an uncorrected proof, but it seems well put together. I can’t imagine them changing anything in formatting or structure. The book is refined and elegant in design. No flash. We’re here to study, and the element of the book I most appreciate is the careful care given to the instruction of the techniques, by slowly rolling out the history and then offering advise and direction.

I can’t imagine a better book for the beginner.

Is there anything more important than breath in magic? Think about it, taking a breath is the first thing we do when we enter the world and it’s the last thing we do before we leave it.

Tyson weaves a wonderful thread through the use of the spoken word, of the mastery of breathing techniques and how they elevate our practice, and, more importantly, see us through to successful magical execution.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you. It’s worth the price of admission for the bibliography alone. I believe you will find tremendous value in Incantations and Enchantments.

Happy reading.

Occultober is coming

Vampirella: Dead Flowers — The Collected Edition

I am thrilled to share that Vampirella: Dead Flowers, the Dynamite mini-series I co-wrote with Sara Frazetta, will be available in a Collected Edition on September 17th.

Brilliantly illustrated by Alberto Locatelli, Dead Flowers re-imagines Vampirella as a gothic horror story set in upstate New York in 1969.

You can preorder from Amazon here: BRING ME DEAD FLOWERS or let your local comic book shop know you’re hungry for some classy Vampirella action.

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The Ghost of Little Pipe Creek Cemetery

This year marks the 50th anniversary of my first steps into the paranormal world.

I was raised in a lowland fen on the banks of Turkey Creek two miles northwest of Converse, surrounded by ash and pine, and fields of corn, beans, hay, and straw. My folks, and most of my relatives, were born in Arkansas, and they reared me on Ozark ghost stories and legends.

My origin story begins, more or less, at the age of eight. It was 1974. I remember the impact of seeing a double bill at the Marionaire Drive-In Theatre — The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Exorcist. I was terrified by both, but ultimately captivated and it set me firmly on the path already paved by my favorite TV show — Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I was dead set on becoming a monster hunter like my hero. I collected UFO magazines and comics, and prowled the adult stacks in the Converse Public Library for books with an esoteric edge — stuff like Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, Sybil Leek’s Complete Book of Witchcraft, Charles Berlitz’ The Bermuda Triangle, and Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today.

I carried around Carl Cohen’s Scholastic book, Earth’s Hidden Mysteries, like it was an instruction manual.

My friends and I formed The Monster Club, based on The Secret Hide-Out by John Peterson. We prowled Converse on our bikes, sneaking into abandoned houses and scouring the many local bone-yards, and we made exhaustive lists of all manner of ghosts and beasties, culled from novels, comics, tv, movies, and folklore and myth. We all had the bug, but I was even more consumed.

My most prized possession, still to this day, had belonged to my great-grandmother. One evening, staying with my paternal grandparents, I was digging through a steamer trunk full of my great-grandmother’s things they had stored in a spare upstairs bedroom. Inside was a treasure trove of books on astrology, herbology, and hex signs. But the one item that most caught my imagination, that I could not resist, was a mid-forties edition of Manly Palmer Hall’s Unseen Forces.

Unseen Forces became my bible, of sorts.

The pamphlet revealed to me a world filled with elementals, nature spirits, thought-forms, ghosts, spectres, and the ‘Dweller on the Threshold’. Everything leading up to my discovery of this book was kindling. Unseen Forces was the spark. The fire came after…

We lived, you see, just a quarter mile from one of Miami County’s most famous paranormal hot spots — Little Pipe Creek Cemetery. The small cemetery used to be surrounded by a fence, with a wide gate in the northwest corner of the lot. Legend held that when people came to visit at night, the gate would open of its own accord for those of the more gentle persuasion — but when a young man would enter, the gate would open, only to swiftly slam shut, striking them.

Eight year old me couldn’t resist the temptation of living so close to such a place…

Late at night, after my parents were fast asleep, I would scamper up the gravel road to the top of the hill, enter the cemetery, and climb up into the crook of the old shade tree in the center of my favorite boneyard.

And there, over the course of several weeks, I watched and waited and called out for a spirit to appear. And when one eventually did — a mist-like female form that drifted out of the southeast corner of the lot — my obsession with the paranormal and occult was cemented.

I’ve shared this story many times, but what I don’t speak of often is of how my mother, after a falling out with hers, moved us from the farm into the nearby town of Converse, population 1200 (give or take). Considering I went to school and bought my comics there, you wouldn’t think there wouldn’t be much of an adjustment.

Well, you’d be wrong. I hated it. I hated the house we moved into. I hated being away from Turkey Creek and Little Pipe Cemetery. Luckily, moving out was just four years away… but, I adjusted over time. Still, I resented being taken away from the farm. I loved it in the country, but our new home did have a peculiar charm to it.

It was (is) haunted.

I thought maybe it was because of all the renovations required to make the dump livable, but there was plenty of activity in that house. Mostly of the residual kind, but on occasion, intelligent presences manifested over the years. Night terrors and sleep walking, things I had “grown out of” returned. There were phantom smells, footsteps, and knocks. And little secret rooms hidden in the walls which I made use of.

Of course this was a time, these young teenage years, when I was experimenting more readily with magic, so I was attracting a certain amount of activity through these studies. I certainly felt something with sinister intent. Overactive imagination? Maybe…

Later, when I discovered an old map of the town, prior to its name change to Converse, should I have been surprised to discover that our house was built on the site of a former church and cemetery? Our neighbor had a skeleton in their basement, dug up while doing some excavating, and when you looked out across our yards you could see the roll of the lawn give up the telltale sign that graves had once littered the landscape.

Ready for the real kicker? When the cemetery was moved, the bodies, or at least most of them, came to populate a new boneyard. Care to guess what this new cemetery was called? Little Pipe Creek. The cemetery I grew up with and obsessed over was constructed to give a new home to the bodies moved from the house my family had relocated to.

Symmetry and synchronicity…

As for the house, the intelligent hauntings have seemingly long since passed, though residual activity still occurs there on occasion. It seemed to be rekindled when my father was struggling with cancer from the hospital bed we’d set up in the living room. After he passed, things quieted down again, or so my mother says.

Still, sometimes when I visit, when I walk into the rooms I called my own as a teen, I get the sense still there is something there, watching me, wishing I would lie down to sleep there as I had once done. Maybe someday I will again, just for old time’s sake. Old ghosts can be like old friends, even the ones who mean us harm.

And Little Pipe Creek? I still swing by there on occasion. It’s changed a lot. The old shade tree is gone, taken away much like the gate and fence, and the tombstones that littered the place have seen far better days, but I believe the ghosts remain, if not in the proverbial flesh, then in my wildest imaginings.

The Ghost of Little Pipe Creek was the thing that showed me that what I wanted to be true, that what I believed to be true, was a reality. It was the fire that was set alight and that still burns fifty years later.

Lammas Night

Blessed First Harvest, my friends.

It is Lammas Night, Lughnasadh, or Lùnastal in the Scots tongue.

I invite you to gather around the sacred fire. Close your eyes. Feel its heat on your skin. Smell the burning ash and elm I have lit, and the astral bounty laid out to celebrate this hallowed night.

I thank you for your presence and I ask only that you bow your head and say a prayer to whatever gods you favor, and ask for a fruitful season ahead.

There is magic all around us.

In the coming months I plan to share my thoughts and experiences with the strange and unusual. We’ll examine the tarot, meditation, preternatural communications, investigation, and more as we slide into rhe spooky season.

50 years ago, I took my first steps into the esoteric, in the summer of 1974.

Let’s celebrate that adventure in a style befitting an occult detective.

My Review of Magic at the Crossroads

Growing up with grandparents reared in the Ozarks, a common phrase heard was “Speak of the Devil and in walks the imp”. They were Campbellites and Baptists, hill folk and migrant workers. As dirt poor as you get, and they were infused with the sort of folklore, backwoods herbalism, and superstition that, when blended with “the good book”, well, the devil tends to come up a lot.

The image of the devil and the witch has always been intricately linked. In Kate Freuler’s fascinating new work, Magic at the Crossroads: The Devil in Modern Witchcraft, she examines this diabolical history and exposes modern trends toward rehabilitating Old Scratch.

While I am not always in agreement, Freuler admirably takes us on a magical journey past the many and varied masks the archetypal adversary has been forced to wear, and presents a fascinating assemblage of rituals designed to embrace the rebel spirit and embolden the witch in the here and now.

It’s no secret that, through indoctrination, we all have preconceived notions of the devil. Freuler is able to untangle the various threads and misconceptions and present the Lightbringer in a new light — that of the liberator, the defiant one, who chose, in Milton’s words, to rule in Hell rather to serve in Heaven. 

This is the lesson one takes from Freuler’s diabolical work — the devil at the crossroads, looking to make a deal is symbolic of the passionate need for self-empowerment, the encouragement to wrest control from our perceived overseers, and to acknowledge the importance of pleasure and self-awareness.

I found Magic at the Crossroads: The Devil in Modern Witchcraft very entertaining and thought-provoking. I have always been drawn to the dark side of magic and enjoyed the symbolism of the devil in literature and cinema, but more than that, as Freuler so eloquently unveils, there’s a little devil in all of us and its important to let him out to play now and then.

As Anton LaVey once said, “There is a beast in man that should be exercised, not exorcised.”

Something is Coming…

Those of you who have been around this site from the beginning have seen reinvention and change expressed here, as trade dress and focus has ebbed and flowed over the past fifteen years or so. I guess it is the Pisces in me. I try to be fluid and creative.

I keep hearing that blogs are dead. Well, for me, patreon really wasn’t working out and I never really clicked with substack, so we’re going to try and make this blog happen again.

When? Well, I suppose there are clues to be had.

See you soon.

Freelance Artist for Hire

In addition to being an author and paranormal investigator, I am also a freelance artist whose work has been published by publishers such as Dynamite Comics, Occult Detective Magazine, Bordermen Games, and near countless covers for authors, including Steven L. Shrewsbury, Michael West, Christine Morgan, and others.

My rates are quite reasonable and negotiable. Contact me at bob@occultdetective.com to discuss your project.