Strange Guests

by Brad Steiger

Anomalist Books • 5150 Broadway #108 • San Antonio, TX 78209

2006, 166 pages, $12.00 • ISBN: 1-933665-17-3

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Brad Steiger is the master storyteller extraordinaire when it comes to true tales of the supernatural and of unexplained occurrences. This prolific and highly acclaimed author truly has no real equal in this branch of the literary field. Strange Guests is a genuine early Steiger classic about legendary poltergeist cases like the Bell Witch, Slawensick Castle, and many other haunting tales that should definitely send innumerable chills and shivers up and down your spine!

Originally published forty years ago, and with an introduction by Ivan T. Sanderson, we learn in Brad’s updated Afterword many fascinating behind-the-scenes details of how this book came to be written, and the very significant and supportive role that the noted zoologist and Fortean Ivan Sanderson played in its production. Sanderson’s original introduction is also included, along with a new foreward by noted author and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. Coleman recalled how Sanderson had years ago told him that out of all things psychic, the energetic poltergeist phenomenon stood the best chance of being proven to be real.

Even after all of the years that have passed, the theories and data presented in this intriguing book remain as thought-provoking, insightful, and relevant as when it first rolled off the presses in 1966. It covers the theories and data very thoroughly, from psychoanalyst Dr. Nandor Fodor’s conception of the poltergeist as a “bundle of projected repressions” in the form of powerful and uncontrolled bursts of psychic “energy,” to a large collection of blood-chilling accounts from all over the world, of violent and disturbing assaults on helpless victims of the invisible fury known as the poltergeist. It may even be that the famous Salem witchcraft hysteria initially came about as a result of a poltergeist outbreak reported by young girls who feared that they had been bewitched. Most often these manifestations are associated with the presence of a teenager, more often a female than a male, and often around the age of puberty.

Untapped psychokinetic potentials of young minds? Or are they the powerful intrusions of evil or mischievous “spirits” forcing themselves upon vulnerable and usually young and immature victims, as family, friends and the curious gather around to helplessly watch?

Read and ponder for yourself this deep, complex and most challenging mystery as only Brad Steiger could have presented it.

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Suddenly Psychic: A Skeptic’s Journey

by Maureen Caudill

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. • 1125 Stoney Ridge Road • Charlottesville, VA 22902

2007, 272 pages, $16.95 • ISBN: 1-57174-501-7

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

The author, Maureen Caudill, has degrees in physics from the UCONN and Cornell, has more than twenty years experience as a computer scientist, and at the time of her incredible and transformational psychic change she was a senior scientist and project manager for a major Department of Defense contractor, engaged in research and development in artificial intelligence and computer systems that mimic the human brain. Previously, Caudill had been convinced of the reality of the physical only, and felt certain that the claims made by psychics were mostly hoaxes, while near death experiences were sincere but delusional claims made by persons whose biochemical and electrochemical brain processes were shutting down. Her mindset was a very skeptical one.

But then Caudill became interested in Buddhist philosophy (though turned off by the reincarnation stuff) and began trying meditation. She found that the Gateway Experience CDs of The Monroe Institute seemed to help, and later she signed up for a week long retreat at the Monroe Institute campus in Faber, Virginia.

Though she nearly got cold feet before attending and dreaded that she would end up spending a week surrounded by a bunch of crazies who belonged in the lunatic fringe, quite the opposite transpired! She experienced a wide variety of extraordinary first-hand psychic experiences that week! She aced a couple of remote viewing exercises, she performed a successful psychic healing at a distance, she had precognitive flashes, and she even received apparent “messages” from her best friend’s deceased mother! In six days she had gone from “Psychic Zero to Psychic” in one proverbial quantum leap.

Now convinced of the reality of psychic phenomena, Caudill had to try and understand this new world that had unexpectedly opened up for her. After all, her own experiences had contradicted several fundamental laws of physics which she had previously held to be the absolute truth. Her faith in conventional science had been shaken to its very core. She certainly couldn’t dismiss the experiences as hoaxes anymore. They were now her experiences!

Caudill explains about human brainwaves, altered states of consciousness, and how the Institute’s Hemi-Sync CDs or tapes can alter consciousness through what are called binaural beats. She strives to describe what it feels like to be suddenly psychic and explores several scientific theories that may help to explain psychic phenomena. She insists that she’s still very much a scientist and continues to traverse the terrains and study the latest findings in such fields as psychology, neurobiology, cosmology and quantum physics.

Join Maureen Caudill as she journeys into extraordinary psychic realms while still seeking to explain everything rationally and scientifically.