'Ghost' spotted at Selby Town Hall
A mysterious man dressed in old-fashioned clothes has reportedly been seen stalking the rooms of Selby Town Hall - and for once it is not the mayor. The ghostly figure was seen by a member of the town council's staff who was locking up the town hall, a former Methodist chapel, last Tuesday afternoon...

2012: A new beginning?
The Great Seal of the United States, printed on the American dollar bill, has a 13-level pyramid.


"We call it a butterfly diagram, because sunspots make a pattern in this plot that looks like the wings of a butterfly," said Dr. David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center in a NASA article about the effects that solar dynamics could have on Earth's magnetism. Because of all the twists and turns, "the impact of the field reversal on the heliosphere is complicated," he said...

Man gives $150,000 to psychic, then suspects fraud
A man in Portland, Oregon says he's now bankrupt after giving cash, a Hummer, and lots of trust to a local psychic. In all, he says his payments totaled $150k and now he's bankrupt, and that he wants to warn others not to fall for such things. So just to be clear: don't give $150,000 in cash and autos to a psychic in exchange for removal-of-demon services...

Zombie Beatles coming to a theater near you?
On the heels of lighthearted historical literary "mash-ups" Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter being optioned for motion picture adaptations, word comes that the film rights to Paul Is Undead, a novel that re-imagines pioneering rock group The Beatles as zombies, have also been sold.

Studios seem to be viewing this mash-up trend as such a sure thing that Paul Is Undead was sold more than a month before the book even hits shelves (on June 22). If ever there was a time for me to finish writing my great American novel -- Gandhi vs. Bigfoot -- this is it...

Ghosts of Wyoming: A haunted past and present
Reading Alyson Hagy's new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, is a bit like poring over a stranger's photo album, some pictures grayed and dusty, the images gone faint, others recent and still vivid. Each deft vignette contains its own bounded narrative, but taken together, Ghosts tells a story larger than the sum of its parts...

All of us are born psychic
Sitting on the number 31 bus on the way to a party, a youthful Fay Weldon was struck by a premonition: that she was about to meet the man she "was going to marry". That evening, back in 1960, she locked eyes with the jazz musician Ron Weldon and he went on to become her second husband and the father of her three sons...