South Trump

And now I'm all alone in the world

And now I'm all alone in the world

And now I'm all alone in the world

Hello and welcome you're tuned into the best in Paranormal Talk radio. I'm your host Dave Schrader and this is beyond the darkness.

We've got a great show lined up for you. I love looking into history and I love revealing facts about some of our

most popular historical characters that maybe others weren't aware of. When I say the name Mark Twain immediately Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to jump to mind and humorist and novelist and one of the greatest American writers, but did you know that there was a supernatural side to Mark Twain?

Well our guest tonight is here to spend some time talking about that. Alan Pell Crawford is the author of Twilight at Monicello and Unwise Passions.

He's a former US Senate speechwriter, Congressional Press Secretary and magazine editor. He's reviewed books on US history, politics and culture for the Wall Street Journal since 1993.

And his essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Nation, and elsewhere. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, his new book, How Not to Get Rich.

The financial misadventures of Mark Twain is out and available and you can get it right now. As a matter of fact, if you go to darknessradio.com and click on the Killer Deals tab, it'll take you to our Amazon page.

We'll have links to this book and all of the other books that you hear us mention on the show so that way you can find it a lot easier. Go to darknessradio.com, click on the Killer Deals link.

When Alan was researching this book and going through the information, he uncovered quite a bit regarding the supernatural aspect and fascination of Mark Twain. He's here to talk with us about that tonight. Thank you so much for joining us and being a part of this show this evening.

It's a great pleasure. It's always fun to talk about Mark Twain and no matter what angle you approach it from and he of course is a man of many angles.

Everybody loves Mark Twain. You read these books as a child and as an adult and one thing that if you become sort of alert to it, you find that even in the most seemingly innocuous books like Tom Sawyer, there's a kind of undercurrent of spookiness.

And Huck Fan is shot full of evidence, the evidently stories that Twain heard as a boy and a slave holding community in Missouri and where he picks up kind of Uncle Remus like Tails.

He's also a superstitious boy in a deeply religious but rather unsophisticated town. So he seems to both be somewhat amused by the folklore and yet deep down inside of him, he never quite throws it off and is kind of haunted by this side of life himself.

Were you surprised, Ellen, when you're doing research for this and obviously you're looking at kind of a more humorous side of Twain and all of the ways he tried to get rich and failed miserably, were you surprised to start uncovering these supernatural aspects of his life and fascinations?

Well, yes, I mean, I think I was interested in Twain generally and so I realized that the untold story of his life is the business side and the wildly American desire he has to get rich and how that never quite works for him despite all the money he makes as a lecture and as a writer.

But on the other hand, as you're reading this stuff and reading more about Twain, if you're kind of interested in the paranormal and the cult and ghosts and hauntings and all of that kind of thing and it's impossible to live in Richmond, Virginia and not be aware of all of that, then these things jump out at you throughout Twain, both in his writings and then in his life.

I mean, he said he had, he said his mother had second sight, he never explained quite what that meant.

He was a sleepwalker as a child, I don't know the psychological rampant what that implies.

...