Strange Things with Chris James

In September 1860 the crew of the whaler Hope spotted a battered ship emerging from a gap between two icebergs in the Drake Passage. The Drake Passage is the body of water between South America's Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. As the Hope sailed closer to the unknown ship the crew saw what looked like seven men standing at attention on the main deck. As the hope closed, th...

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on February 21, 1997. Mel Waters was on talking about a weird opening on his land near Ellensburg, Washington. The land had been in the family for generations passed on from his dad to Mel. The locals had been using the hole as a convenient garbage dump for decades. One man had dropped his dead dog into the hole to dispose of the body. Later that week he saw his dog...

So many of our past presidents have side stepped the question when it was asked. Clinton made a huge show of saying some kid had sent him a letter asking about UFOs however, no one can find any record of this letter ever actually being written or mailed or received at the white house. President Donald Trump has said he met with officials about UFOs although he reiterated that he did not particular...

Author, investigator and artist Linda Godfrey is the author of 18 books on strange creatures, phenomena and people. She’s a frequent guest on national TV and radio shows, including Monsterquest (Seasons 1 and 4), Fox News Red Eye, Lost Tapes, Monsters and Mysteries, Sean Hannity’s America, Inside Edition, Coast to Coast AM, Wis. Public Radio, the Jenny McCarthy Show and many more. She lives in the...

I first became an EMT back in 1983. In 36 years things have changed a lot. Mostly for the better but then things also got a bit complicated. I attended class at San Jacinto College in Pasadena Texas. We had to take so many class hours and then we had to do clinical hours at different hospitals and ambulances. If you’re going to become a medic, take my advice, do the hospital hours first. Then you...

What makes a place haunted? Why would the spirit of some dead person or on occasion animal, stay on long after the body has stopped working? I hear all the usual things like unfinished business or fearing the next life. This sounds like good reasons but they don’t explain all of the hauntings out there. I have talked about ghost ships before but not ships with ghosts. So here are a few good haunti...

Like many other countries, Germany sent expeditions to the Antarctic region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which were scientific. The late 19th century expeditions to the Southern Ocean, South Georgia. South Georgia is an island in the southern Atlantic Ocean that is part of the British Overseas territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Once the Schwabenland wa...

Curses have been around for thousands of years. People get mad at each other for whatever reason and say bad things are going to happen. I was at work late one night and we had brought in a group of Gypsies who were all in the United States Illegally. One of our agents said something to one of the women who then pulled down on her eyelid while looking in his direction. She mumbled somethings under...

I was at a party the other night and was talking to Luis. He mentioned a case where a man jumped in his car to drive into town and was killed when an airplane crashed right on top of his car. This got me thinking about all the really weird things that happen that some would call a coincidence but I think maybe there is something more going on that we just don’t see or understand. Here are some rea...

If you read just about any history book on the United States you’ll see that John Wilks Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater. Ask anyone living in the US who killed Lincoln and they’ll say it was Booth. A lot of people don’t even know there is a serious question as to who did the shooting and whether or not Booth died in that Tabaco barn in Virginia. Booth was to be taken alive no matter w...

On December 20, 1968, David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16 were out on a date. David was driving the family car and he’d picked up Betty saying they were heading to see a school Christmas Show. They didn’t go to the school but wound up at a friend’s house. After that the couple went to a restaurant for dinner. So far so good. They drove out to Lake Herman Road at around 10:00. This w...

John and Stacey Edwards started their journey into mystery way back in 1997 when they shared a paradigm shifting paranormal experience together. The "Event" sent them down a road together that not too many people traveled in 1997...investigating the paranormal. Over the years John has been an independent Pro Wrestler with over 200 episodes of a Nationally Syndicated TV show. John was the lead sing...

A Japanese man was mystified when food kept disappearing from his kitchen. It was the kind of thing you’d ignore at first. He set a few cameras around his home to catch the culprit in the act. After returning from work, he played back the cameras and was amazed to discover a woman emerging from one of the back room closets. He wondered how did she get into the closet, without being seen entering t...

First legend on my list is the slender man. A lot of nay sayers tell us the slender man came into existence was on June 10, 2009, on a thread in the Something Awful Internet forum. It was a Photoshop contest to come up with something creepy. The Grossmann from Germany. He is also called The Tall Man. The first stories of this creature came out around the 16th century. What was going on in Europe i...

I was just at the coffee shop and a friend of mine told me about her weird encounter. Her and her boyfriend were driving on Mines Road heading east. They were about two blocks from the bridge that goes over the tracks. There was a strange looking thing in the median of the road. It looked to be light gray and was crouching down on all fours but it looked almost human. It also looked kind of wolf o...

The open mic, festival, and conference in Edinburg don't just happen. It takes a lot of planning. Noe Torres told me they start planning for the next conference as soon as the current conference finishes. They work on it all year long coming up with ideas on how to make it better each year. I’d say they’re getting better each year from what I’ve seen. The entire library staff takes part in the pla...

Here is a bit of UFO history. Folks keep changing the way we refer to Unknown Flying Objects. They use initials like UAP, AFO, EFO, or even just Visitors. I say we stick with UFOs since just about everyone knows what you're talking about. During World War II air crews saw lights in the sky they called Foo Fighters. On the night of August 13-14, 1956, radar operators at two military bases in the ea...

There were five men all lived in either Yuba City or nearby Marysville. They all lived with their parents, and their parents knew all of the others in the group because they wanted to know who their kids were hanging out with. The parents referred to the five collectively as the boys. The five men's favorite leisure activity was sports. Their families said that when they got together, it was usual...

A werewolf is a person who can take on the form of a wolf. Usually they run on all fours just like the animal they’re mimicking. Then there are the Wolfmen who have the attributes of wolves but walk on two legs like a human. The name werewolf come from Old English werwulf, or man-wolf. The word lycanthrope means wolf-person. We get it from ancient Greece. King Lycaon was the ruler of a Greek City...

To begin with I am not a Luddite. A Luddite is a person who is opposed to new technology or ways of working. The name is derived from Ned Ludd who worked in a factory as a stocker in 1800. The Luddites were 19th-century English textile workers who protested against newly developed labor-saving technologies, primarily between 1811 and 1816. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms intro...

Hollywood is a strange place and a lot of the folks who work there have some weird ideas. When Horace and Daeida Wilcox founded Hollywood in 1887, they hoped it would become a religious community. Prohibitionists, they banned liquor from the town and offered free land to anyone willing to build a church. When I was telling about Telly Savalas, ghost encounter, for unknown reasons I began calling h...

A huge fort was built at the entrance to Subic Bay. The fort was 350 feet long and 144 feet wide. About the area of a football field. It stood 40 feet out of the water. To keep ships from trying to enter the bay the fort sported 4 14” guns mounted inside two turrets that could rotate 360 degrees. One turret set higher than the other so it could fire over the top of the second turret. Each gun coul...

Back when I was young the ground under Galveston Island had tunnels running from the middle of the island all the way to the north end. These tunnels were built during World War II. No one bothered to close off the entrances so we would go exploring. The tunnels have collapse today. Germany had invaded Guernsey island and turned it into one massive fortress. Tunnels ran in every direction. Huge gu...

People vanish all the time. They disappear while on their own or sometime within sight of their friends. You’d think the best way to not vanish would be to stay in a group. Safety in numbers. Or maybe not. In 110 AD something like 6,000 men, all their equipment and the camp followers all marched north into Scotland. There is no record of what happened to them after that. 6,000 men is a lot of bodi...

I'll talk about some of my favorite cheesy movies. Things like the Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery. The incredibly fantastic movies Dead Alive. The Last House on the Left, the original, not the remake. The Day the fish Came Out. The funny thing is, when I was talking about this movie I never mentioned its name. If you love cheesy movies, or just enjoy them, here is my list of all time favorites....