A Curious Compendium of Strange Events

by Phineas Strange · January 2026

Hey there, Thanks for finding your way here. This all started when I was eleven years old and stumbled onto the books of Frank Edwards — an Indianapolis radio broadcaster who spent his life collecting the strange, the documented, and the unexplained. He didn’t dress it up. He just laid it out and let reality speak for itself. I’ve never really gotten over him. As I got older, a different obsession took hold — the whys of true crime. What made killers do what they did. How they thought about their victims. Capote’s In Cold Blood, Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, and Rule’s A Stranger Beside Me led my list. The best true crime, I came to believe, isn’t really about the killer at all — it’s about everyone else caught in the wreckage. I didn’t start writing until I was 69. Since then I’ve completed twelve novels under another name, six volumes of A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, and I’m currently working on Stone Walls & Steeples — a true crime series moving through New England, one state at a time. You’ll see those books appearing here over the next few months. I grew up in the Midwest, lived overseas for twelve years, and have spent the better half of my life here in New England — where I raised my family, walked the same streets where some of these stories happened, and became quietly obsessed with everything this region keeps to itself. I don’t write heroes. I write events, people, and the strange things that happen when the world doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to. If you’re the kind of person who pulls the thread, even when you probably shouldn’t — welcome. You’re in the right place. — Phineas Strange

— Phineas Strange

About A Curious Compendium of Strange Events

A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, Volume Four by Phineas Strange A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, Volume Four continues the ongoing collection of documented events that history recorded but never fully settled. Curated by Phineas Strange, this fourth volume presents another carefully selected group of accounts drawn from different eras, cultures, and corners of the historical record. Each chapter offers a focused, atmospheric narrative grounded in contemporary reporting, eyewitness testimony, archival sources, medical and legal records, and other verifiable documentation. Within these pages are unsettling incidents, improbable survivals, disturbing coincidences, baffling crimes, curious beliefs, and events that resisted explanation long enough to be quietly set aside. Written in the tradition of Frank Edwards and other chroniclers of the unexplained, this volume approaches its subjects with curiosity rather than certainty, preserving the original reports while allowing their unresolved nature to speak for itself. Most of the accounts presented here are firmly rooted in historical sources. One, included deliberately, belongs to the older realm of myth and legend—placed not as deception, but as contrast, reminding us how easily certain stories persist alongside recorded history, and how thin the boundary between them can be. These are not urban legends or modern internet inventions. With one noted exception, each story is anchored in traceable sources and presented with care, restraint, and narrative clarity. The emphasis is not on proving theories, but on preserving accounts that remain unresolved despite earnest attempts to explain them. Ideal for readers who enjoy strange history, unexplained phenomena, odd events, historical mysteries, uncanny coincidences, and real-world cases that linger at the edges of certainty, Volume Four can be read on its own or as part of the growing Phineas Strange Compendium. A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, V

Phineas Strange

Phineas Strange and Michael McDonald are both pen names for the same New England author. Phineas Strange has a lifelong fascination with the unexplained, the true, and the weird. He writes A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, which explores documented supernatural phenomena with the eye of a skeptic and the heart of a true believer, and Stone Walls & Steeples, a true crime series that brings forgotten New England victims back into the light — one region, one era, one state at a time. Michael McDonald and Karen McDonald write post-apocalyptic fiction set within the October Fall World — four standalone series, twelve books in total. The author grew up in the Midwest, met his New England born wife while she was in college and they transplanted to New England. They also lived overseas for twelve years — which explains a lot.

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