Paranormal Dispatch from The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

--By Maddie Kosloski of the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

The Fortune-Teller’s Cabinet is back on the main floor this week. At its center sits the Benedetto Triumphs, a worn late-nineteenth-century Tarot once used by a traveling reader who worked the harvest fairs. Local story says she told a rancher not to move his herd on a moonless Tuesday. He did. Three calves died of a sudden fever, and the deck spent the next sixty years in a locked tin behind the feed store. I keep the tin in the case now. Come see it if you like. I only ask that visitors resist tapping the glass and then blaming the cards if the rest of the afternoon goes sideways.

Now for the paranormal news that’s been floating around this week:

1. Photographer Flavia Tasso stepped outside one evening in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands for a better Wi-Fi signal and filmed a long-legged canine with bright eyes walking a path. The clip spread quickly. Viewers reached for the word werewolf. Tasso said the animal was a native of the region, not a shapeshifter on a night out. Grainy footage and glowing eyes do a lot of work. Our hallway camera has the same problem: every moth looks purposeful if you want it to.

   
   

2. Researcher Susan Demeter gathered southern Ontario reports of wolves that preferred two feet. A late-1960s Niagara account describes a wolf-sized figure standing upright in headlights, turning toward a car, then loping into the brush. In 1965 a truck driver near Smithville told a newspaper he had seen a six- or seven-foot half-human beast. Later rumors in Burlington had people skipping night walks along the escarpment. No tracks, no specimen, plenty of unease. San Benedetto has an orchard road locals still take a little faster after dusk. Expectation is a powerful passenger.

   
   

3. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is showing “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” through early October. The rare fifteenth-century cards began as a courtly Italian game, not Egyptian secrets; occult meanings arrived later, in eighteenth-century France. The exhibit sets the complete Sola Busca deck beside Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith designs, then follows artists who treated the cards as a studio problem rather than a prophecy machine. I like that sequence. Our Benedetto Triumphs look more convincing once visitors learn the pictures had a life before anyone asked them for their romantic prospects.

   
   

4. Pinterest’s 2026 hobbies report, based on search growth rather than a public poll, finds people saving kitchen-witch projects, nature journals, and beginner tarot. “Herbal apothecary” searches rose 595 percent; “tarot cards for beginners” rose 558 percent. The platform describes analog work: jars, pressed flowers, a September card as a cosmic reset. It is not a laboratory study of hauntings, but it shows how folklore travels when it can be practiced at the sink. I recognize the impulse. I've taken a kitchen witch course myself. You can try the free course HERE.

   
   

5. In Seoul, fortune shops now offer pet tarot. Reuters described a greyhound named Khan choosing a card of a dog chasing its owner; reader Hwang Soo-kyung tied it to the animal’s anxiety over a recent litter. Sessions run about 20,000 won, and demand has grown with pet ownership. No one claims the cards speak canine. The owners say they feel heard. Folklore lasts when it gives people a way to talk about care they cannot measure. Our own GD Cat is not amused.

Readers who like these kinds of cases may enjoy the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum cozy mystery series, which draws from real museum days, names changed and endings adjusted. The books are available wherever books are sold and in the museum shop.

While you're here, try the UnTarot deck, a playful variation on the usual seventy-eight, useful when a standard spread feels too sure of itself. The shelves also hold objects that never found a tidy category. Browse. Most of it is harmless. Most.

The Fortune-Teller’s Cabinet is open whenever I am, which is most afternoons and the occasional evening I forget to lock up. I have not shuffled the Benedetto Triumphs this week. The calves, I am told, are doing fine without my help.