Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart 3D Audio.

For full exposure, listen with headphones. In October of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I spoke by Zoom with author Colin Dickie.

He is the author of Ghost Land about American Haunted Houses and teaches

at National University. I spoke with him about his latest book, The Unidentified, Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and our

obsession with the unexplained. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals.

My name is Colin Dickie.

I am the author of The Unidentified Mythical Monsters,

Alien Encounters, and our obsession with the unexplained.

So how did you come to write this book?

Like what interest led you to doing the research and then writing?

I think I've always been interested in the way in which a set of beliefs or ideas, which you could maybe call sort of like fringe beliefs, you know, for lack of a better term.

Stuff that's not taken seriously by by mainstream science or journalism or religion or

kind of you know the usual kind of authorities and and thus get sort of shunted to the side in terms of you know superstition and that kind of stuff

But but I found that that those kind of beliefs often really whether or not one believes that they're true or not they have a pretty

enormous effect on culture and the way you know the world works and you know they have sort of material

effects and I've found that it seems necessary to talk

about these things again not necessarily in terms of are they real or all

that are they you know fake although you, that's an interesting question, but more so like what do these beliefs do in the world and how do they affect the world around us, you know, even for those of us who don't necessarily believe in these things.

And I, you know, my previous book, Ghost Land in American history and Haunted Places was

similarly based around this question of, you know, I think whether or not you believe that ghosts exists,

it's sort of undeniable that the sort of language of ghosts and haunted places are things that sort of

drive American culture and sort of say a great deal about our history.

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