Paranormal News from the Paranormal Museum! 20 March, 2026

--By Maddie Kosloski of The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

I’ve been knee-deep in exhibit cleanup this week (turns out dust bunnies have cousins that look suspiciously like ectoplasm), so I’m keeping this one short and sweet. Just a handful of strange stories that crossed my desk lately—because apparently the world refuses to run out of weird.

1) Nessie might get all the headlines, but England’s got a whole underwater menagerie. Think knuckers (basically water dragons lurking in Sussex ponds that are supposedly bottomless), grindylows (those creepy goblin things that yank kids into mires up north), and Jenny Greenteeth (green-skinned hag who drowns folks who get too close to the riverbank). There’s even a mermaid pool in the Peak District that supposedly grants eternal life if you’re lucky on Easter midnight. Makes our local haunted grape press seem downright tame.

2) Can the mind heal terminal disease? Mitch Horowitz digs into rare spontaneous remissions and old cases from a psychiatrist who had patients do intense meditation instead of chemo. Results were mixed—some tumors shrank or vanished—but it’s rare enough that no one’s calling it a cure. Still, it makes you wonder about the weird ways belief and focus might nudge things along. I’ve seen stranger in this museum.

3) On the Tarot front, there’s a new novel out called Pixie by Jill Dawson about Pamela Colman Smith—the woman who illustrated the classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck. I’m a sucker for anything that pulls back the curtain on those old cards, especially since we have a first edition of the deck at the paranormal museum. Our own UnTarot deck draws from similar spooky roots. (Side note: if you haven’t tried the UnTarot yet, it’s got that same eerie, storytelling vibe but with a twist.)

4) Big news in cryptid land: a new documentary claims the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film—the one everyone points to—was a straight-up hoax. Fresh footage shows what looks like a dress rehearsal with a skinnier suit. Ouch for the believers...

5) ...But the writer Sharon Hill makes a good point: even if the film’s fake, the idea of Bigfoot isn’t going anywhere. It’s too baked into the culture. A friend of mine swears Bigfoot is a nature spirit anyway, not some flesh-and-blood ape-man. I like that version better—less messy, more mysterious.

All this paranormal buzz has me wondering what strange tales are unfolding in your neck of the woods. If you can’t get enough of cozy mysteries where the ghosts are quirky sidekicks and the real danger comes from very human suspects, the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum series might be right up your alley. And if you’re in the mood for full-length mysteries inspired by museum life, the series has plenty of chills and chuckles.

We’d love to see you at the San Benedetto Paranormal Museum down the street—browse the books, maybe pick up a protective charm or two. Can’t make it? Stop by our online shop!

Stay spooky,

Maddie Kosloski

Curator, San Benedetto Paranormal Museum