A Curious Compendium of Strange Events Volume One

by Phineas Strange · December 2025

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 Volume One

A Curious Compendium of Strange Events, Volume One by Phineas Strange In 1876, it rained meat over Kentucky. In 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished from Flannan Isles — breakfast on the table, light still burning, no trace ever found. In 1945, five Navy bombers disappeared on a clear day. No wreckage was ever found. These are not legends. They are documented, verified, and completely unexplained. A Curious Compendium of Strange Events collects true stories that history recorded but never bothered to explain — drawn from newspapers, eyewitness accounts, and official investigations. Fifty chapters. Real sources. No folklore, no embellishment. Just reality being genuinely, unsettlingly weird. Once you start asking questions, it's hard to stop.

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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