Saturday, October 6, 2012

Welcome, friend...

Every story begins with a story.

Some weeks back, a young author friend approached me and asked if I was interested in collaborating on a website or blog dedicated to stories and accounts of a paranormal or purely strange nature.  I had to mull it over for a while- not that my friend Misty isn't a fine writer of short story fiction, or that a new writing project wouldn't be a good tonic to crack loose a years long writer's block on my part.  It needed to be something different, as well as something meaningful.  Fifteen years later, I still keep my old primary research site afloat - The Avalon Foundation.  And while such articles that end up there may be on the clinical or technical side to some, I had no intention of trying to improve on all that, or even emulate the recipe.

The years have carried me to shores not easy to describe, as far as paranormal, UFO, psi, and Fortean research go.  I was burning out some serious neurons trying to figure out how I could be of help to Misty's intentions with this project.  Paranormal stories, Forteana, UFO speculation, all flood the blogosphere.  Every town, village, and trailer park in the US has at least a couple of ghost hunting groups, all with their own websites and venues of sharing.  Yet how could we do something different?

The answer lay outside of ourselves.  And the result is this blog - a virtual campfire at the edge of a great forest at midnight, a forest extending past the edge of the world.  In the wavering amber circle of firelight are to be told stories...

What you, the reader, will experience here is not a set of clinical reports on this or that haunt, or this or that UFO encounter, though it may include those topics, and much more.  The important thing here is the Story.

So what you WILL read here are stories of people, telling about their strangest moments and experiences.  Often times, the truly strange does not fall neatly into categories of "ghosts" or UFOs or psychic encounters.  The truly strange flits around the edges of convenient boxes.  It crosses boundaries, and carries always a signature of the "unnameable" as HP Lovecraft called it.

Some of the stories here have been transcribed by us, but hopefully most of them will be in the first-hand original words of the people who experienced their moment at the edge of Forever.  We ask only that those who tell their stories do so with sincerity, and the realization that nobody here around the campfire - neither we or any reader - will judge the teller or their tale.  No judgement or re-interpretations here.  No analysis, no pigeonholing into paradigms.

We want to hear about your strangest event, your strangest encounter, your strangest moment... please e-mail us at campfiretell88@gmail.com


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