Paranormal Dispatch from the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum! 25 September, 2026
--By Maddie Kosloski of the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum
You can feel fall in the air. The grapevines are turning color, the temperature is dropping (a little--this is still California), and Halloween is at the paranormal museum!
Speaking of the paranormal, here are my top five picks for paranormal news of the week:
1) Loch Ness spotted from space? Julie Fraser, planning a trip to Inverness, opened Google Earth to look at the Clan Fraser cemetery on the east shore of Loch Ness and found three elongated objects on the water. She said they looked like a little family of Nessies, or whales with an arc to their backs, and that a nearby pleasure boat showed a wake while they did not. The Official Loch Ness Sightings Register said it would look. Fourteen in-person reports and two webcam sightings are already logged for 2026; hers would be a third digital one if accepted. Satellite pixels are a long way from a head at twenty feet. I still pin the
screenshot to the bulletin board. Guests who have stared at our reservoir photograph understand the temptation.
2) Record-setting Witch Hat photo attempt. Salem, Massachusetts, is asking residents and visitors to wear witch hats at Derby Wharf on October 17 for a drone photograph during the city’s 400th anniversary. Organizers hope for thousands. Special-edition hats will be sold, with proceeds meant for HAWC, which supports survivors of domestic violence. Destination Salem has not asked Guinness to certify a record. The point is the picture.
3) A ranking this week named the ten best ghost tours in America by combining Tripadvisor ratings, the share of five-star reviews, and review volume into a “Ghost Experience Score.” Salem took four of the ten slots, including first and second. The top walk, History and Hauntings of Salem, sits near 9,500 reviews and a 4.9 average. The scores measure how well a tour is liked, not whether anyone on it met a ghost.
4) Hard Mountain Dew opened a $1 million Bigfoot Bounty through November 30. Adults twenty-one and older may submit at least four of seven approved types of evidence: deep footprints, large handprints, thermal film of a fast figure, hair with unknown markers, audio, environmental debris, or a photograph that appears to catch the creature in the frame. Researcher Bryce Johnson helped write the standards. One hundred runners-up get about the price of a twelve-pack.
5) In the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest, a 1974 Bigfoot trap still stands open and empty on the Collings Mountain trail, its door bolted open since 1980. The North American Wildlife Research Team built the ten-by-ten crate after a miner reported eighteen-inch tracks in his garden. They baited it for six years and caught bears.
Love the mildly spooky and unusual? You 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.
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