The Encyclopedia of the Strange

Once upon a time, you couldn’t just pull out your phone, do a quick search for “Ghosts” or “Weird Mysteries” and get thousands of results.

You either had to catch a program on TV (when it was on, which meant always checking the TV Guide) or head to a bookstore, library, or news stand and hope to find some book or magazine that talked about such things (once you found a good magazine, you could subscribe, of course… then you’d just have to wait for it show up every month).

Back in the 1980s, for a more permanent “weird” fix than I could get from TV, my choice was the mass-market paperback books from the local bookstore (when there was one of those). A lot of those books still hold prominent places on my shelves.

One of them is The Encyclopedia of the Strange, by Daniel Cohen.

A One Stop Shop

Cohen put out a bunch of these “encyclopedias” over the years. I have a few of them and they are all pretty well read through. The Encyclopedia of the Strange is definitely one I returned to more than a few times.

It’s got a plethora of subjects it covers, breaking its “Strange” subject matter into a number of topics.

• Ancient Mysteries
• Unknown Places
• Strange People
• Weird Talents
• Natural Mysteries
• Mysteries of Magic
• Classic Mysteries

Each of those topics contained a dozen or so entries, none of which ran for more than a couple of pages–just long enough to give you a taste of the weirdness. Some were a little longer than others. All of them were utterly fascinating to 1980s me.

Now, when I picked this book up, I already had a number of other books that had some more in-depth information about one or two of these topics, but this was a book that had it all in one place. There wasn’t any narrative connecting them (it was, after all, an encyclopedia, not a novel or some conspiracy tome), but that didn’t stop not-quite-teenage me from imagining the wild connections that could exist among them.

This book was a one stop shop not only for my interest in weird stuff, but also for my imagination as a whole. It spoke of possibilities that normally weren’t talked about. Strange things in the sky! People with amazing abilities! Shadowy figures in history that showed up and vanished, leaving behind more questions than answers (and sometimes a bunch of dead bodies)!

More in Heaven and Earth…

Most of all, though, it was a reminder that there are always mysteries out there to be solved. Always new things to be discovered. Always more questions to be asked.

Cohen was a skeptic and researcher. He had a love for science, but also a way with words that could in a single sentence both point out the ridiculousness of a thing and the wonderfulness of it as well. The entries in the encyclopedia are sometimes cutting, but only because the facts are… and even then, it doesn’t come across as being done with any malice.

That kind of open-minded dedication to the truth and honesty had more than a little impact on me when it comes to the paranormal and metaphysical things in my life. I always try to remember that a story my, indeed, sound ridiculous to others but also be deadly serious to the person telling it. Instead of assuming they’re lying, I always try to assume they’re telling the truth, at least as they know it.

And that’s what a lot of the entries in this book do: they present the truth that’s been passed down, at times for hundreds of years (if not longer) and then provides a few sound checks about what can be proved and what cannot. Being short–just a few pages long at most–there’s not even time to dwell on a lot of the “why” behind the stories, just an overview of what and when, with a dash of who and a through-line of it all just being the tip of the iceberg.

The world is–and always has been–full of strange things. More than anyone could imagine. Like many before him. Cohen set out to document bunches of them in bite-sized form.

And people like me ate that up by the handful.

Time Changes All Things

Some of the mysteries in Cohen’s Encyclopedia of the Strange have been solved over the decades since it was first published. Advances in science and discoveries in various archived filled in spaces that were just conjecture and speculation. More and better observations and investigations have uncovered answers that were previously only guessed at. And, as with all things, some of the strange things have just faded from public consciousness as new weirdness has cropped up.

It seems that the Encyclopedia is out of print these days. Available on Amazon for ridiculously high prices for pristine collectors’ copies–or ridiculously low prices for tattered copies.

It would be a true shame if it weren’t quite so easy to pull up more up-to-date information about any of the things mentioned in the book. What you find may not have the same flair as Cohen’s work, but it will likely be more current. (Though, the Internet being what it is, it may very well be full of the same speculation that Cohen set straight in his work.)

At his heart, Cohen seems to have been deeply interested in the search for the truth about things. Sadly, this included a search for real answers about the death of his only daughter–and the more than 200 other people who died–just a few years after this book came out. She was one of the passengers on Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. He and his wife spent years fighting with various governments and organizations to get straight answers and some amount of justice for what happened.

Cohen himself passed away just a few years ago, in 2018.

His words live on, though. Both in more traditional science-focused books that bear his name and in the handful of books like this one that reminded us all that while time changes all things, there’s always an enduring mystery or two to spark the imagination.