Writing – research – Nazis – psychic-04

For the final glimpse into the book PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN by Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder (1970) this copy 1976, we’ll look at the Nazis and Hitler.

It’s already been mentioned (in psychic-01 here that Hitler was a believer in the occult. A good number of authors have mined this subject, among them Dennis Wheatley, Daniel Easterman, James Twining, Graham Masterton and James Herbert.

According to this book, Czechs said the Nazi movement was deeply involved with the black arts. Hitler was born in Braunau Inn in Austria, a town long famous for the large number of mediums it produced (including Willy Schneider, who had the same wet nurse as Hitler!)

Apparently, Hitler was trained in mediumship by Prof Haushofer of the University of Munich. (See The Morning of the Magicians).

One man who fought Nazism was Stefan Ossowiecki (1877-1944). He was a telepathist, clairvoyant, and could resort to astral projection. He helped the underground during the war, giving information on lost and imprisoned people. Holding a scrap of clothing, he was able to reveal where victims had been executed, and where they were buried.

Documented accounts speak of him locating specific bodies in mass graves layered with the dead.

On the day of Warsaw Uprising, he was killed by the Nazis; his body was never found, as he predicted.

***

From time to time, Tana Standish crossed paths with Nazis – bearing in mind that she was active in the 1970s and 1980s.

One nasty Nazi was Dr Wolf Schneider, who was born in 1920. He was responsible for torturing Tana in Czechoslovakia in 1975 (The Prague Papers). He didn’t employ black magic, just plain evil shock electric shock treatment. He was later recruited by Spetsnaz officer Aksakov in The Tehran Text mission.

Tana was not versed in astral projection, though she was learning to harness remote viewing - which is another subject worthy of comment in a later blog. Aided by recourse to bio-feedback, she used this in a haunting and poignant scene in The Tehran Text.

Tana Standish can be found in The Prague Papers and TheTehran Text.

FFB - The Stalking

Robert Faulcon’s six-part series of Night Hunter occult novels begins with The Stalking (1983). The author is actually Robert Holdstock, an award winning writer of fantasy, his most famous novel being Mythago Wood. He wrote a number of series novels under different pennames.

 

The Prologue begins with an encounter between Ellen Bancroft and David Marchant in a London street. Both worked for the Ennean Institute of Paranormal Research, though Ellen had mysteriously gone missing for some weeks. She doesn’t want to speak to him and a short while later Marchant is gruesomely murdered by some invisible force that Ellen has been evading. That’s the explosive beginning.

Then we’re into the story about Dan Brady and his family, wife Alison, son Dominick and daughter Marianna. They’ve moved into a new Berkshire home, Brook’s Corner. Dan works for the Ministry of Defence, studying thought transference. Their children begin having bad dreams and seeing people who aren’t there… An idyllic pre-Christmas family evening is ripped apart as robed intruders break in, ransacking the home, abusing his wife and kidnapping her and the two children, leaving Dan for dead with broken bones and a crushed throat. (Not for the squeamish, perhaps...)

However, Dan survives and is hospitalised for three months. Eventually, he meets up with Ellen who has become an expert on the occult forces responsible for the theft of his family.

Holdstock likes to play with time, and in chapter 15 we revisit the attack on Ellen and the death of Marchant; so the earlier 14 chapters happened before the Pplogue.

Ellen experienced a similar loss of family and now explains that both she and Dan are prey to psychic attack by someone who knows them. ‘In its commonest form, psychic attack is simply the willing, from some distance, of debilitating and distracting effects upon the victim: headaches, dizziness, lack of concentration, depression, hallucination and physiological changes that result in death.’(p111)

Their plan is to create a defensive fortress at Brook’s Corner in the hope of trapping the psychic entity and thus finding a link to its manipulator. The suspense is well done, the tension building towards the confrontation. Fans of horror, satanic action and witchcraft should enjoy this – providing you can get hold of a copy!

Naturally, not everything goes to plan, but Dan Brady survives and learns that his family is still alive, somewhere in the north. The scene is set for his search for them and for vengeance; he has become the Night Hunter.  

The other books in the series are:

#2 – The Talisman (1983)

#3 – The Ghost Dance (1983)
#4 – The Shrine (1984)
#5 – The Hexing (1984)
#6 – The Labyrinth (1987)

… and I’ll be reading them too.

Robert Holdstock died 2009, aged 61.