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One of the benefits of doing historical research in the early 21st century is the wealth of newspaper indexes.  There is Newspaperarchive.com.  Proquest has digitized many papers.  As well, there are still the older indexes—some  published, some not.  It’s important to remember that even using these, there’s still a lot that is missed.  Nonetheless, surveys of papers today can be made much broader much easier than in the past.

And doing so, it becomes clear that the Oakland Tribune was a major disseminator of Charles Fort, at least in the Bay Area.  Again, this conclusion must be taken with a certain grain of salt: the Tribune is digitized, which makes searching it easier.  Its San Francisco competitor, The Chronicle--both were staunchly Republican papers in the first part of the twentieth century—is only indexed.  Some of the indexes are published.  Some were created by California state librarians.  And it is possible that references to Fort slipped through the index.  Be that as it may, the Tribune was important.

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Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley discovered Charles Fort in 1921.  De Ford was at a library in Oakland, where she came across Fort’s The Book of the Damned.  It had been published two years before.   She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito.  “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.

What was the attraction?

Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not.  Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena.  For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American.  Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.”  At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings.  Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.

In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself.  His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted.  She said,

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A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing.  So let me explain his connection.

As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly.  But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.

By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht.  But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith.  There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls."  By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."

But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.
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In the early 1930s, Clark Ashton Smith wrote a story called "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" about a disconcerting archeological discovery on the planet Mars.  The tale was eventually published in Weird Tales.

Robert Barlow, an anthropologist and friend of H.P. Lovecraft used the story's title as the name for his closet, where he kept his collection of Weird Tales.  Barlow, fearing that he would be outed, committed suicide in 1951.

George Hass then started using the name--The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis--to describe his home, which was given over not only to Weird Tales (kept in a wooden chest), but books on related topics, sculptures by Clark Ashton Smith, collections of oddities collected during Haas's time with the Navy.

Of course, much of this material is Fortean--in nature (unexplained) or in inspiration (challenging to scientific conventional wisdom).  There is a strong element of Romance--capital R--in the collection, hope that the objects will inspire one to think weird thoughts.

[And Forteans are collectors, if nothing else right?  Fort collected.  And the Forteans collect.]

Don Herron writes,

“Our man Haas us no George-come-lately to the field of Fortean research, having been a member of the original Fortean Society’s San Francisco branch . . . .” (5)

 Eats and meets up at Dave’s Cafe, 42nd and Broadway (5).

“To visualize events so vividly that they come to pass is George’s brand of sorcery.  When he read White Shadows in the South Seas and the other volumes dealing with the South Pacific, for example, he was compiling a large and detailed mental picture of that area.  George believes his powers of visualization took him to those lush isles by means of a Navy hitch even more surely than working and saving for a tourist cruise would have.” (13).

“A good imagination is essential in making this brand of parapsychology operate, and reading fantasy and science fiction is one thing George credits his imaginative abilities to.” (13)

 “Robert Barbour Johnson was a writer for the original Weird Tales magazine.  He penned “Far Below,” They,” Lead Soldiers,” and several other shockers.  Both he and George belonged to the San Francisco branch of the Fortean Society.  The group met in a writer’s studio to discuss UFOs and other strange phenomena."  Johnson an artist, interested in the circus, and wrote about Gold Gate Park.  For many years lived on Telegraph Hill, under the shadow of the Coit Tower, though moved away from the Bay Area.  He and Haas still correspond.   “These two men keep the Fortean spirit and the sense of the fantastic alive and very well indeed” (24).

“Another of George’s friends is a self-proclaimed ‘ultra-weird’ artist.”  Ralph Rayburn Phillips.  “Phillips often came down from Portland, Oregon, where he has lived for many years, to attend various Bay Area science-fiction conventions and Fortean meetings.  He has known the Inhabitant of the Vaults for about a quarter of a century.  A Zen Buddhist, Phillips is the author of the booklet Bulls of Zen.  His artwork has appeared in many fanzines and gallery showings over the years, and a good number of articles in Portland newspapers have been devoted to this ‘ultra-weird’ figure who draws much like Lovecraft writes” (26).

“‘Never-Throw-Anything-Away’ Haas" (29).

 “His interest in Bigfoot grew naturally from his Fortean activities.  During the 1950s George collected flying saucer reports, which led after awhile to the collection of Bigfoot reports.  His file on Bigfoot and miscellaneous outre subjects comprise on of the best Fortean reference libraries in the world” (31)

Haas says, “As a good Fortean and as a student of Buddhism, I don’t ‘believe’ in anything, accepting anything and everything, so-called natural laws included, on a temporary basis only” (33).

 Nb: Robert Payne’s The Lord Comes influenced Haas; he shared it with Clark Ashotn Smith, who credited the book with stimulating his interest in Buddhism.

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