Ok, so this strange thing happened last Sunday afternoon, as I took a break and tried to put some order in the stacks of books that are slowly evicting me from my bedroom.

As I dug in a box filed with hardbacks, out of it came The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World.
Written by Theresa Cheung, and presented by the cover tagline as “the ultimate a-z of spirits, mysteries and the paranormal.”
And no kidding.

And I have no idea of how this thing came to be here.

Granted, I once dated a lady that was very much into this sort of things.
Did it drop out of her handbag as she left my house?
Highly unlikely: we’re talking about a hardback that weights close to two kilograms and is the size of a shoebox.
And I don’t think it sneaked in one summer night as I slept with my windows open*.

Anyway – it’s a big, fat, fun book.
From a quick browse through it, it seems to focus primarily on Western traditions.
And it comes at the right time – I’m writing a story in which one of the support characters is a “spiritist”, and she talks at length about the paranormal.
This reference will be just right to ground her babbling into something more solid than hearsay.

And who knows, I might find something interesting in the (ouch!) 850 pages of the Encyclopedia to suggest stories and posts and articles and what not.
And there’s practical exercises in there, too!

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* Do I have a better theory? Of course I have a better theory, but I won’t mention it here as it’s too mundane, and I don’t want to spoil the fun – we are in October Country, after all…