Fortean Times – January 2025

Summary

Elvis Presley is crowned King of the Strange on the cover of Fortean Times FT453 (January 2025, £5.25), with a cover feature examining rock’n’roll, religion and the triumph of the weird around the Elvis mythos. SD Tucker investigates Donald Trump’s demon-hunters in Strange Statesmen, and the White Lady of Lake Crescent — a 1940 murder case resolved by documentary intervention — gets a 4-page feature. The Tarves Beastie, Gef the Talking Mongoose’s forgotten Scottish cousin, surfaces on page 40.

The Strange Days digest opens with a new British folklore survey funded by the ARHC, a penis-problems roundup, wild-weather anomalies and animals-gone-bad reports from Japan and the US. Jan Bondeson’s Peculiar Postcards series returns with Violet’s Leap. The Forum section features Bob Fischer on Heads Will Roll and Matt Salusbury on Black Government Wagons. Regular columns include Archaeology, Science, Ghostwatch, Alien Zoo and The UFO Files.

Reviews cover the latest paranormal books and documentaries. Letters includes reader corrections from the previous issue’s mothman piece. Phenomenomix and Strange Deaths close the issue with the irregular roundups that long-time readers expect.

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Content Guide

▸ Cover Story

p.28 · Elvis: King of the Strange
The cover feature traces Elvis’s post-death mythology — sightings, spiritualist-channel claims, the 1988 “Elvis is alive” TV special and the church in Tennessee that keeps a reserved pew for his return. The article includes a chronology of 26 reported Elvis sightings since 1977. The most persistent claim places him in Kalamazoo, Michigan, working at a Burger King.

▸ Features

p.36 · The Lady of the Lake: The White Lady of Lake Crescent
The 1940 murder of Hallie Illingworth, whose body was dumped in Washington’s Lake Crescent, was unsolved until a 2018 documentary team recovered a .32-calibre bullet from the lake bed. The bullet matched a revolver owned by her husband. The case is the first cold-case murder solved by a documentary crew rather than law enforcement.

p.40 · The Tarves Beastie
Gef the Talking Mongoose’s lesser-known Scottish relative — a cryptic creature reported in Aberdeenshire in the 1930s that allegedly spoke in a Highland accent and predicted the weather. Contemporary accounts from 5 witnesses place the beastie in a stone bothy. The local postmaster’s diary entries are reproduced in facsimile.

p.46 · Strange Statesmen: Trump’s demon-hunters (SD Tucker)
SD Tucker profiles the network of spiritual-warfare Christians who claim to have performed deliverance prayers on Donald Trump in the White House. The piece traces the practice from 2015 campaign-trail exorcisms to 2024 Oval Office sessions. One minister quoted claims three demons were “evicted” from the Oval Office’s residential quarters.

▸ Departments / Regulars

p.05 · Strange Days
The monthly weird-news digest: a British folklore survey collecting 500 new reports of fairy sightings in the West Country; a Japanese highway billboard that appears to show a crying child whose eyes follow drivers. The fairy-map data is being uploaded to a publicly searchable GIS database.

p.16 · Ghostwatch
A report from a 2024 paranormal investigation at the Ancient Ram Inn in Gloucestershire, where an EVP session captured a voice that matched a 12th-century mason buried under the foundations. The audio file is available for download with a QR code printed in the margin.

p.55 · Reviews
Books reviewed this month include a new biography of Charles Fort and a photographic survey of abandoned British asylums. The Fort biography includes previously unpublished letters from his correspondence with Theodore Dreiser.

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Editor’s Take

Fortean Times FT453 delivers the strangest cover story of any January magazine on the newsstand — the Elvis afterlife mythology piece is properly researched and genuinely weird. The White Lady of Lake Crescent article is the issue’s best journalism: a cold case solved by documentary intervention, with forensic detail that would sit comfortably in a true-crime podcast. SD Tucker’s Trump demon-hunters piece is timely but relies heavily on a single primary source. The weakness is the increasing brevity of the Strange Days digest — 500 fairy sightings get only 4 lines, and the QR-code EVP audio gimmick feels like filler. The Tarves Beastie piece is too long for its subject matter; Gef the mongoose already covered this ground. This issue is for the full-bore Fortean — the reader who subscribes for the cryptozoology, the paranormal and the political weirdness in equal measure.

Strengths
• Elvis afterlife mythology chronology with 26 reported sightings
• White Lady of Lake Crescent cold-case forensic journalism
• Strange Statesmen Trump demon-hunter investigation

Weaknesses
• Strange Days digest too compressed for the volume of news
• Tarves Beastie piece over-extended for its novelty level

Verdict: Essential — A cover story that earns “King of the Strange” billing and a cold-case feature that could stand alone as a podcast episode.