WYRD FICTIONS 004 – 006

A selection of cuttings, correspondence and research notes designed as hypersigilised world building for my Keelian godform project. Truth or otherwise is subjective, though perhaps when it comes to the Wyrd Fictions banner the clue as to the overall authenticity of the quoted entries below is in the name. Not that such a distinction matters when twisting language space towards real world desire, of course, so it should be an interesting experiment either way. This selection has an important funeral notice, bone snorting grave robbers, and a cursed film.

     CARNEGIE, Joshua, (Corstorphine, Edinburgh).
     Suddenly but peacefully at home after a short illness, on July 22.
    Professor Joshua Carnegie, PhD's in both psychology and anthropology, previously a visiting lecturer at Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities, author of numerous academic papers on the esoteric nature of dreams as well as a now out of print book of the same title, passed away quietly on Friday. His groundbreaking work on the collective unconscious in the 1970's is thought to have been a direct inspiration on many of the New Age movements active in the UK around the turn of the Millennium. He spent much of his later life collecting folk tales and urban legends, leading to a number of self published pamphlets discussing the possible links between different regional variations. These are now out of print. After suffering a stroke and subsequent blindness in early 2015 he convalesced at home where he was cared for by his wife, Margaret, and Daughter Meghan, who were present when he passed away. His eldest son Daniel was at sea with Her Majesty's Navy at that time, while his youngest Paul is at an archaeological dig in Kenya. Both are hoping to return in time for the ceremony.
     Funeral will be held on Wednesday, August 10th 2016 at Warriston Crematorium, for an 11:15 am service in Cloister Chapel, to which all family and friends are invited. Family flowers only, no press admitted. [4]

     Gregg kirke 
     (July 10th 1815 - February 13th 1848)
     Glasgow, Scotland.
    Body snatcher and suspected cannibal. Best known for snorting the ground up bones of years old corpses, of which he disinterred for personal use alongside the fresher ones that he would sell to lay surgeons in the area for an income. While the Anatomy Act had been passed in 1832, providing a method for licenced medical professionals and students under tutelage to have access to donated cadavers for dissection, the demand greatly outweighed the supply for the first few decades, and as a result body snatching continued almost unaltered during those years.
     Kirke claimed to be of noble birth, though if that were true then he had fallen upon hard times long before his eventual comeuppance. Also rumoured to have associations with the far more infamous Burke and Hare, though would have had to have been in his early teens if that was the case, Burke having been executed some twenty years earlier in 1829. It is said that he claimed that Hare was the one who first showed him the stimulant power of human remains, though this is unproven.
     Died evading the law after a failed attempt at grave robbing in the newly opened Eastern section of Glasgow's Southern Necropolis. Drowned in the River Clyde while swimming across it to evade police. In an unusual move, Kirke's understandably bloated corpse was delivered into the hands of a local surgeon and dissected at length. A later pamphlet bemoaned this fate, claiming that to desecrate his body in such a way without trial nor conviction was as heinous a crime as the disinternment of a corpse to do the same, and ungodly in any case. [5]

     ... But then, James Forester was a man obsessed. 
    Made rich first in oil and then in tech, the big, gregarious Texan's only major vice was cinema. Transgressive, erotic, historic, but always rare, his collection was large enough to dominate the entire climate controlled basement space of his luxury Oklahoma ranch near Red River. 
     The hunt for those sometimes long lost movies seemed to dominate much of his later life, to the point that he had a group of ex-journalists and professional investigators on permanent retainer, chasing down rumours of either private collections being carved up or lost consignments of film stock found in the wild. He was even implicated in thefts from national archives here or there, but this darker aspect of his character was never proven. 
     With more than a few of these contacts stationed in Europe in the 2000's it is no surprise that when news began to circulate of a rumoured lost print of the 1920 morality tale, Kurfürstendamm, being found in an attic in Berlin that he would offer the very highest bid. Soon Forester, his business partner Ray Cheung, and a gaggle of their equally elite friends all sat in the welcoming shadows of his full sized home cinema, champagne in hand, to watch Richard Oswald's cautionary tale about the Devil himself arising from Hell to find out why so many damned souls originated from the Berlin district that shared the movie's name.
     No one is sure that actually occurred on that unusually warm Halloween eve, but when the local fire department and sheriff's deputies arrived at around 2am the whole compound was ablaze. Both James and Ray were missing, and the majority of their guests as well as house staff would be later found in the charred debris. 
     Interestingly, the famed vault had survived unscathed. The priceless rows of cinema history have now been catalogued and archived as the Forester-Cheung memorial collection, currently held within the Packard Campus building of the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The copy of Kurfürstendamm that the guests had arrived to view was never recovered, nor was there any film in what remained of the projector. It is now yet again considered to be lost media.
   Foul play was initially suspected, but when that could not be proven it was downgraded to an electrical accident, though perhaps the still working climate control in his basement brings that assumption in to question. As does the innate flammability, though ultimate safety, of those carefully stored rolls of film.
     But Forester was far from the only tragic millionaire with a taste for ... [6]

[4] Uncredited Author, Edinburgh Evening News, Friday July 29 2016.
[5] Roger Kain, Historical Whose Who of the Strange, Redaction Limited, 2014, Page 285.
[6] Jody Wong, Rare Film; A Millionaire's Obsession, The Guardian, Wednesday October 15th 2013.