The man who invented the supernatural

[Magical Realist]

"Charles Hoy Fort, a pudgy, quiet, introspective little boy with wire-rimmed glasses, was haunted.

He had not yet developed his infamous obsession with the supernatural — those annoying, mysterious parts of our natural world that pull apart the fabric of traditional belief systems. He had not discovered the things that fall from the sky, or are found beneath the earth, or observed in the heavens, that wreak havoc with how we think about traditional science.

Young Charles Fort, born in 1874 to a family of wholesale grocers in Albany, New York, should have grown up with all the comforts of the Victorian Age. Instead, Charles was haunted by worry, self-doubt, and the cruel punishments of an impatient father.

“Why do you do these bad things,” [Father asked.]

“Just for fun.” [He] struck us savagely. Blood gushed from our nose. Running up the stairs, blood all over. A dirty, groveling little beast, crazed to get even, and doing damage was the only way to get even. Rubbing our nose on the lace curtains. Making the room a horror room. Leaning over banister, letting blood drip into the lower hall to do damage. Just then we were a little beast.

Fort’s childhood made him look at the world with a unique mixture of cynicism and wonder. Some 20 years later, at the oak tables of the New York Public Library, the adult Charles Fort studiously collected accounts of rains of blood from the sky.

During my research for the recent biography Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, I found that Fort had decided that the world was a very strange place. Remarkably, he managed to capture this notion, sweeping together bits of a journalism career, an interest in fiction, an obsessive passion for research, and his fascination for the world around him. He pioneered a new sort of book that haunted the readers of the 1920s. Charles Fort “invented” the supernatural, in the sense that he redefined it for our modern sensibilities. After Fort, our view of the paranormal would never be the same....."====http://www.fatemag.com/secrets-of-charles-fort/

[Image: Charles-Fort.jpg]