CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
"As he recognized the photograph, his aureole leaped into livid flame—she writhing there to escape his two sepulchral hands." From Hearst's International, 1921.
What happens when we die? It's a fair question, but this is from a magazine for military chaplains, and we'd have assumed they already had a pat answer for this. It turns out that most everybody is confused about everything. God help us. From The Link, 1962.
"Ectoplasm, an established marvel or a flimsy myth?" A photo from Baron Von Schrenck-Notzing's The Materialization of Phenomena, in which a spirit medium summons a ghost through a strong, painful effort of will. From Current Opinion, 1922.
This ghost appears in the University Rhode Island yearbook of 1975. It has been said that "ghosts exist because we determine them as ghosts -- narrate them into 'life'" (Clive Bloom, in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History).