Famous Authors And Their Strangeness: Bram Stoker is the father of the modern vampire, and he's most famous for Dracula, but he was also a compulsive conspiracy theorist. He was absolutely convinced Queen Elizabeth I was both an impostor and a man. Stoker wrote Famous Impostors to detail his beliefs, and it starts with a reference to some mysterious secret mentioned in various historical accounts of Elizabeth's rule. Stoker says the secret is the real Elizabeth died in childhood. When her governess was confronted with the task of telling her father, King Henry VIII, she decided to substitute in a new child. She found the only appropriately aged one in the vicinity: a young boy. Rumors still circulate today.
Famous Authors And Their Strangeness: Writer T.S. Eliot gave himself such a bizarre makeover his friends, including Virginia Woolf and poet Osbert Sitwell, wrote about his odd habit of coloring his face green. Sitwell was astonished the notoriously private Eliot would go so far out of his way to color his face such a weird hue, when most of the time he wanted the exact opposite of attention. When in his presence, Woolf felt uncomfortable enough she needed to ask others if they saw the same green face she saw. Around the same time as the green makeup, Eliot insisted on being called "Captain Eliot." Some of his friends suggested he wanted to make himself look as unhappy and tormented as a writer "should" be, others say it was likely to give himself a sort of supernatural aura appropriate to a poet.
Famous Authors And Their Strangeness: Ray Bradbury's one of the most famous authors in science fiction, so you'd expect him to be fascinated with everything cutting-edge, but he was a technophobe. Technology actually made him irrationally angry. He feared cars to the point he ironically got over his fear of flying in order to use cars less. As for computers and the internet, his famous novel Fahrenheit 451 wasn't available for e-book until 2011, one year before his death.
Famous Authors And Their Strangeness: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle certainly was an intelligent man, just as his most famous character Sherlock Holmes, but he was also obsessed with the occult and spiritualism to an insane degree. He was likely primed to accept the idea of spiritualism as a legit science by his father, who was fond of sketching fairies. Mostly, his desire to believe in the spiritualism movement came from loss. Doyle lost at least eleven close family members (including his son and his brother) to the horrors of World War I. Doyle became so immersed in the ideas of the occult he ultimately alienated friends because of it. His most famous friend was Harry Houdini, who didn't believe any of it. Doyle attempted to sway his opinions by inviting him to a seance and contacting his mother, but when Houdini's non-English-speaking mother was suddenly able to communicate in English, Houdini ended the friendship. To the day he died, Doyle continued to believe Houdini actually had supernatural powers.
Famous Authors And Their Strangeness: Oddly, Charles Dickens found his entertainment at the Paris morgue. Dickens wrote extensively about what's called the "attraction of repulsion," and he spent so much time looking at the bodies he started to have nightmares and hallucinations. Dickens was also obsessed with sketches and imagery of the living eating the dead. Despite his odd fascination, Dickens had a real impact on morgue culture when a scandal broke about how the bodies of the dead were being treated, heaped into piles with others while waiting for burial. The families turned to Dickens for help, and he had a hand in creating a system where bodies were treated with respect and dignity instead of being tossed aside like empty soda cans.
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