Image via Designwallah/Flickr

Rosemary Altea is an internationally known psychic. She’s been on Larry King. She’s been on Oprah. That’s top-shelf guestery for any psychic these days; Sylvia Brown territory.

This is from Altea’s “About” page at RosemaryAltea.com:

In the 1970′s, in her mid-thirties with a ten-year-old daughter, Rosemary was abandoned by her husband. Near rock bottom, Rosemary began to nurture her spiritual gifts.

Rosemary says it was her spirit guide, Grey Eagle, who advised her to publish her first book,The Eagle and the Rose, in the United States and then afterwards in other countries. The Eagle and the Rose became a huge bestseller. “Americans are very open and enthusiastic,” Rosemary says. The essence of her message is that there is life after death, and that we are all spiritual beings who come to earth to learn.

Recently, Rosemary’s gifts apparently failed her. Grey Eagle (didn’t Native Americans always use British spellings for their evocative names?) was asleep at the wheel. From the Bennington Banner (VT):

Denise M. Hall, 51, of East Arlington, was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of filing a false tax return, after taking between $120,000 and $200,000 from her employer, Rosemary Altea of Dorset, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Darrow.

Hall was employed by Altea, a nationally known self-proclaimed psychic and “spiritual medium” who has appeared on “Oprah” and “Larry King Live,” between 2001 and 2008 as an office manager and bookkeeper.

At this time, no explanation for this rather epic and expensive failure of Ms. Altea’s ‘gift’ has been given. We’re sure she’ll divine the existence of this post soon and provide some sort of response.

Psychic powers may exist. This story just casts doubt on whether or not they exist within the personage of Dorothy Altea.

Or maybe, just maybe, Denise M. Hall had some psychic mojo of her own?

Seriously dude, I love spirals.

… a new beginning. This blog is the second life of AnomalyReport.com, a Tumblr I began sometime back with the intention of collecting real ghost stories.

I grew tired of the Tumblr for a number of reasons: people can’t write, so the editing process was often tedious and exhausting; some stories were clearly bullshit, in spite of admonitions to tell what really happened (I know, amazing, right?); I have a lot of other blogging to do, some of it for pay; something about the blog just didn’t fit with Tumblr’s blogging-meets-social networking vibe at all.

So tonight I realized I needed to just go ahead and do something I’ve been playing around with for quite some time – write a paranormal blog covering anything weird – any “anomaly” – that pops up in the news.

There are a lot of blogs like this out there. A lot of web sites. The Web loves spooky stories, tales of UFOs and Bigfoot. How will this one stand out?

For one thing, I’ll still collect stories from people to post here. That’s not all that new, I give you that. For another, I’m not the most rock-ribbed believer in the world. I’m not a Joe Nickell-style skeptic. I don’t approach every single story assuming it’s bullshit. But I am, by trade, an investigative journalist. That means that I fully intend to occasionally pick a story apart at the seams and see what’s really going on inside it.

I’m also not the most serious guy in the world. This is important, to me. In my perusal of phenomenae-inspired media I’ve noted a distinct lack of humor, especially from bloggers and writers. I hope I can change that.

I’ve learned in another arena that there are drawbacks to a blog being too narrow-focused. Therefore, while this blog will certainly focus mostly on news stories and sometimes spooky or strange tales from history, it will also cover paranormal-themed television. There’ll be media criticism related to paranormal subjects, maybe even reviews of various supernaturally-inspired shows, with an emphasis on supernatural “reality” (a potential oxymoron from hell, I know) television.

And really, I’ll cover other weird stuff as I see fit too, even if it doesn’t at first seem somehow “paranormal” in nature.

So stay tuned while I get my shit together and get the URL pointed this way.