Occult Magazine, October 1975.

For the spookiest time of the year, I thought I'd revisit an article which I referred to many years ago. In 2006, I wrote a post called "Tales of the Heebie-Jeebies," an accounting of various peculiar experiences I've had. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, here's the part that's relevant to this post:

"[T]here was a story from some book about the paranormal that haunted me as a youth. The story told of a Minnesota woman who noticed an image of a hand that appeared on her television while it was not turned on (and not even plugged in, so the story went). This occurred on Christmas Eve in 1968, and since she and her family were opening presents, a camera was at the ready and she snapped a shot of the image as it faded away. Reportedly, the hand had appeared the previous Christmas as well. This picture fascinated me. Was it real? What could it mean? I recalled the story a few years ago, and set about trying to locate the picture. I thought it might have been included in a book by Frank Edwards, though he specialized in UFO's. One day I was browsing through the occult section of Cameron’s Used Books in downtown Portland when I remembered my quest. The first thing I pulled from the shelf was an issue of Occult from October 1975. It was unusual to see a magazine on their bookshelves, as they normally reside in the enormous section of old magazines on the other side of the shop. I flipped through the pages and stopped right here:

"What the hell are the odds of that?! Also weird is that the article (by Brad Steiger, a familiar name in this field) ignores the situation of the photo and instead concentrates almost entirely on analyzing the lines on the palm of the enigmatic hand, arriving at precisely squat. Although the circumstance and authenticity of this picture may be impossible to study at this date, I confess it still gives me a chill."

I saw this story discussed online and figured I'd throw in my two cents, and my mention of this article was met with some interest. So, for the handful of kooks who dig this malarkey, I'm reprinting it here. I was gonna throw in some other scans, but frankly it's a pretty dull read, and even the ads (for psychics and tarot readings and so forth) are visually uninteresting.

First, here's the worn cover (exactly as it looked when I acquired the issue) and the introductory paragraph from the "Occult in Brief..." page:

Here's the full story:

Got that? Wait, I feel another intelligence coming through from the unconscious, a message from beyond, either directed at the late Brad Steiger, or possibly even from him!