Paranormal Case Files: Italy: 16 Cases with a Paper Trail

Three times a year, in Naples, an archbishop lifts a reliquary with both hands and turns it over in front of a packed cathedral. Inside there is a dark mass stuck to the glass. Sometimes it takes minutes. Sometimes it takes hours. And at some point it comes away and flows.

The ampoule has not been opened in six hundred years. Nobody has ever analyzed what is inside it.

This book brings together sixteen Italian cases of phenomena nobody has fully explained, and it has a single condition of entry: that a file exists. An inquisitorial record, a medical report, the account of a professor of physiology who got under a medium’s table to watch her feet.

Of a house with a leaflet you can write a blog post. Of a file you can write a book.

Every chapter also contains the boring explanation: the proven fraud, the thixotropic gel, the laboratory analysis published in twenty-four hours, the neighbor with a lighter. In some cases it wins outright. In others it does not, and there they remain.

The last case is solved, and it is last on purpose.