Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud says she’s had it with ripped guys after her split with footballer Ashley Cole. Now she says she’d favor a pot-belly over an athletic physique. But I’ve got just the recipe to bring Cheryl lasting romance and fidelity.

This is what I’d do for her: I’d fix up a love charm bag filled with angelica and spearmint, a sigil from unknown tongues, a lucky sixpence (for luck in love), love oil and and a conjure rod. I’d do some incantations over a cemetery grave and would instruct Cheryl to keep the charged-up items in the red flannel charm bag, which she would need to carry at all times.

This would attract the right kind of guy to the X Factor judge.

It would bring Cheryl someone who don’t go runnin’ off with every rooster in the barnyard. Someone she can depend on and who won’t cheat on her.

It would be a full-on TNT love spellworking performed in an old Victorian cemetery where I live in Norwich, England.

Cheryl is a nice girl. She deserves some luck in love and a love attractor spell would bring her that.

I asked him about previous relationships. It turned out he’d been married at 18, but this ended in divorce. “It ended bad,” he said. “My wife had it in for me.”

It turned out his ex had consulted a root worker to put a hex on him so he could never again find happiness with another woman. Even though she no longer wanted Frank she didn’t want anyone else to have him either!

Frank had heard this through mutual friends.

I decided to do a diagnosis on Frank using a “Jack”, a highly polished copper coin – an old Victorian British penny. I placed it on Frank’s forehead, then told him to wait while I went into another room to consult the Jack – which my old hoodoo mentor Earl Marlowe described as a “dread and all-powerful instrument.” To use the Jack effectively involves going into a mild trance and communing with the spirits in unknown tongues, the language of the subconscious.

When I was done, I returned to Frank and held the coin in front of his eyes.

“Look closely,” I said. “You will see how the bad work was done on you.”

Mostly people do see too. I don’t mean the coin is like a DVD player, more that it helps them see with their inner eye.

Anyway, once the diagnosis was done with, I fixed up a hex removal working using a conjure box – one of my more heavy-duty tactics when it comes to removing bad work.

It seemed to have an immediate effect on Frank. Like a weight was lifted from his shoulders. I also gave him various rituals to perform himself to ensure that the baleful spells done on him never return.

Wesley Shepardson, aged 49, and his friend, a youth called Norman West, went to the cops to make a complaint. Wesley told them he was being “hoodooed” by a conjure woman from the east side of the city, who apparently was trying to separate him from his wife.

Wesley told Police Captain Evans that the hoodoo woman visited his home the evening before and threw “conjure powders” on the floor. He said he was asleep upstairs at the time and the moment the powder hit the floor he woke up with a start.

He cautiously made his way downstairs and found the hoodoo woman sitting on the sofa between his wife and daughter. Wesley saw the conjure powder on the floor and became very scared.

Rushing out onto the street he ran into the arms of Patrolman Purcell, who he’d had dealings with earlier in the week.

“Lord, I’se sure glad to meet you,” he said. “You done saved my life by arresting me once this week, and now you got to do it again fo’ sure.”

Wesley’s arrest earlier that week worked out this way: He worked at a sand pit where an African-American man was killed. Had Patrolman Purcell not arrested Wesley on a charge of breach of peace, he would likely have met the same fate as the unfortunate guy – who died when a bank at the sandpit collapsed. As it was, he was safe and sound in a police cell.

“De Lord is with me sure enough,” Wesley told Patrolman Purcell. “And you done saved my life. [The Lord] done sent you.”

Purcell duly took Wesley to the police station.

When questioned about the powder the conjure woman had allegedly thrown on the floor of his house, Wesley said: “Well, it was red, white and blue stuff and had something else in it.”

“Did it smell bad?” he was asked.

“Smell! Well, man, you never did smell anything so bad in all your life before! I done opened every door and winder in de house and still de smell stayed there.”

Wesley then invited the officers to go to his house to smell it for themselves, but they declined.

At that point, Norman West, the youth who had accompanied Wesley to the police station, weighed in with his thoughts on the matter.

He told of his experience with conjure women. All you had to do, he said, was go into the woods and get some snake root and catch some flies. Then take both items to an African-American woman called Black Snake, who lived beyond a bridge in the city. She would fix it so that you could use it to good effect against your enemies.

Captain Evans said he would investigate the terrible state of affairs. And with that Shepardson left saying that they might never see him alive again.

“I just felt good when I come home this afternoon,” added Wesley, “but since dat powder was thrown at de floor I’se no good and have been acting kind of crazy ever since.”

Here’s some quotes from the study:

May Satterfield of Lynchburg gave a recipe for making a charm to bring good luck:

“…Git some rat veins, wil’ cherry blossoms, an’ bile ‘em togeder wid whiskey an’ make bitters.”

Interviewee John Spencer of King George County recalled the following:

“When one negro became angry with another, he would bury in front of his enemy’s house a bottle filled with pieces of snake, spiders, tadpoles, lizards and other curious substances, and the person expecting to be tricked would hang an old horseshoe outside of his door to break the spell.”

Unsurprisingly, white slaveholders didn’t encourage African occult beliefs. Partly because of the ever-present threat of revolt and also through fear that the hoodoo conjurations might just work…

Marrinda Jane Singleton, a former slave from Norfolk, Virginia, described the white slave owners attitude towards African spiritual practices:

“Such superstitions and practices caused so much confusion among the slaves, along wid fear dat the Marsters took steps to drive it out by severe punishment to those that took part in any way. This did not put an end to these practices. Many of us slaves feared de charm of witchcraft more then de whippin’ dat de Marster gave. They would keep their tiny bags of charms closely hidden under their clothes.”

“The most striking thing about him were his shiny black patent shoes,” she recalls. “He also wore very formal black trousers with razor-sharp creases and a smart dinner jack. He looked like he’d walked out of the [British] TV series Upstairs Downstairs, or the novels of Evelyn Waugh.”

But she couldn’t make out his face.

“It was very odd. I could see his clothing in detail, but his face was blurred slightly – like if your TV is a bit off station.”

Oddly, the first feeling she had at seeing the visitation was one of euphoria. She felt great. But this soon turned to terror.

“I must have been in shock and the good feeling was a result of endorphins,” she says. “I then blinked and he was gone.”

She had numerous other encounters with the mysterious figure. In one incident she was giving her boyfriend David (her husband of many years standing) a goodnight kiss. She happened to open her eyes and there was the man…not surprisingly the romantic moment came to an abrupt end. But when David turned round, the apparition was gone.

David was sceptical then and, as a practical-minded accountant, remains so today.

Jane told her mother about the ghostly visions and went on to make enquiries. It turned out that the house they lived in had been built on the site of a very old house that had lain derelict for years. The local postmistress remembered that a reclusive father and son had lived there. The son had mental problems and had died young.

After getting married and leaving the family home, Jane still had psychic experiences. On holiday in Cyprus she entered a historic building and had visions of a death chamber – it turned out that twenty or so people had been executed there.

Even today, she has to be careful where she goes for fear of seeing apparitions who may have met a grisly end, or been extremely unhappy in life for various reasons.

It’s like Norwich’s own Sixth Sense but with a woman in the lead, not Bruce Willis…

“In the West African view of things, man lived and died – that was natural. In the natural order of things, the trees, the animals too, were born and died. Yet death was not seen as an end of life, for life was a continuum and after death man’s spirit, his ghost, remained close by loved ones – caring, assisting and helping meet their needs. Since man had doubles , each animate and inanimate object in nature did too. This world of spirit doubles’ was revered by the West African.”

Rod Bodin in Voodoo Past and Present.

Up until his death a few years back, Eduardo Calderon (born 1930) was a shaman operating on the north coast of Peru, near the city of Trujillo, some 600 miles from Lake Titicaca. He was the subject of UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) anthropologist Douglas Sharon’s thesis and book, The Wizard of the Four Winds, and other academic studies.

Calderon also gets a mention in British archaeologist, Evan Hadingham’s book, Lines to the Mountain Gods of Peru. In the book Hadingham says of Calderon: “Don Eduardo is a bit of a charlatan, but there’s no doubt he has tremendously improved on our understanding of Andean shamanism.”

Calderon was highly eclectic in his sorcery. He’d think nothing of mixing and matching concepts from Tibetan Buddhism and Biblical imagery with his native belief systems. On many occasions he probably did look like he was making it all up as he went along. But that didn’t make him a charlatan. Far from it.

Investigative writer Patrick Tierney, author of The Highest Altar (1989), also met Calderon and gained a lot of intriguing insights from him – along with many fantastical tales such as how the mountain gods opened up a sacred peak for him and showed him rooms filled with gold.

One of Calderon’s stories concerned a black magician, who he described as a “brujazo” or “big witch”…

Calderon related how he was at an all night ceremony being run by the big witch. At one point the big witch instructed him to leave the room and spit outside – spitting being a way to drive off certain evil spirits.

“But when I went outside,” said Calderon, “I saw this kind of gorilla, which was half drunk. It scared the hell out of me, and I bolted back into the house. But when I got back to the mesa (ritual area), the gorilla was seated right next to the big witch. The brujazo looked at me and laughed. `You see him don’t you? This is my guardian spirit, Chicanga. He does anything I want him to’. That’s when I realized he was a black magician. You’d never catch me working with a creature like that big black thing. It was really ugly.”

Calderon said such entities are “thoughtforms” created by the minds of magicians…

Not all thoughtforms are intended for bad work like the gorilla. As an example of positive thoughtforms, Calderon cited Jesus and Buddha. “Thoughtforms like Jesus or Buddha can go on for eternity,” he explained. “As long as people think of Jesus, it’s like a continually charging battery. But if people forget him, then, like others before and since, he’ll be dissolved.”

Colin Bennett is an important figure for our times. Not only has he written the definitive biography of Charles Fort (1874-1932), the maverick paranormal commentator, who went on to inspire a whole generation of writers and thinkers. But he’s waging a one man battle against political correctness, which is eating into our society and gradually eroding all forms or creativity and freedom of expression.

Bennett also writes provocative articles for UFO Magazine.

Bennett’s book on Fort is called Politics of the Imagination. It has a forward by John Keel (author of The Mothman Prophecies) and was published by Cosimo Books in spring 2008. Bennett’s thought-provoking novel, The Entertainment Bomb is also well worth adding to your collection. Both titles are available via Bennett’s site, www.Combat-Diaries.co.uk, or from Amazon.

I interviewed Colin during a brief lull in his busy schedule.

DR SNAKE: Why do you describe your website as the “New Fortean Times”? What’s wrong with the old one? And do the editors of the Fortean Times magazine mind?

COLIN: The Fortean Times (FT) began brilliantly, that is to say that as an editor, Bob Rickard was quite brilliant. By contrast, I would rather not comment on his partner, for fear of the law of libel. The trouble began when they were taken over by Felix Dennis publishing. From an A5 format, FT went on to develop into a full-color commercial magazine. I wrote regular full-feature articles for them about Candy Jones, Jack Parsons, and John Keel.

As far as I was concerned the trouble started when a cabal of anti-American skeptics (such as Paul Devereaux, Peter Brookesmith and Mark Pilkington of Magonia Magazine to mention but a few) almost took over the magazine. Article after article appeared putting down anything magical, mystical, transcendental, or New Age. They attacked particularly the Rendlesham Forest UFO story, one notorious woman sceptic (Jenny Randles) actually stated that the things seen by the US base commander and his men were reflections from a distant lighthouse!

Thus did the thin edge of the wedge appear as far as I was concerned.

Things got far worse when Bob Rickard himself went on TV to state that UFOs did not exist, and that Ufology was an American consumerist fantasy. FT then appointed two died-in-the-wool skeptics (Andy Roberts and Dave Clarke) to try and kill all not only the UFO, but the corn circle phenomenon, and all things metaphysical.

How FT squared all this with “Fortean” thinking is a mystery in itself. Fort’s main idea as a very advanced early postmodern thinker was that fact versus fiction arguments were expressions of very different media systems locked in mortal combat. Fort used countless examples of odd anomalous events to show the battles between systems of explanations as a function of real politic.

There was yet another negative tendency. The FT view of Charles Fort was that he was anything but a postmodern politician, completely relevant to modern techgnotic, cyber, matrix, and meme ideas.

Instead of moving forward on this front, the image of Fort in FT eyes was retrograde: In FT eyes, Fort became a lovable late-Victorian uncle, a kind of very English friendly chappie with whole boxes full of amusing beetle-stories and twee Humphrey Littleton public-school bun-throwing glee-club jokes. The Nessie-gnomes, the ageing folklore gurus, and the “urban legend” lefties and depressing social-scientists who formed the core of FT enthusiasms wanted Fort to remain a jolly story-teller whose weird accounts of things were giggling tales to be told after lights-out in the dorm.

The dimensions of Fort’s astounding symbiotic political ideology was quite beyond the mental grasp of FT, whose original editors were by then well beyond retirement age. They were getting tired, and losing the New Age. Like many similar magazines, FT became stuck in a corn-ball analogue milieu, showing no understanding of web formulation regarding artificial intelligence, postmodernism, meme-theory or digital semiotics.

My biography of Charles Fort, “Politics of the Imagination” (with Introduction by John Keel, author of “The Mothman Prophecies”) won the Anomalist Award for Best Biography 2002. This book was ignored almost completely by FT, the editors of which had not written hardly a single significant sentence about Charles Fort in their entire journalistic lives.

My last feature in FT was a postmodern interpretation of the claims that the original Moon Landing was media fraud. I conceived of the two opposed points of view as mediatexts battling for prime time, thus unlocking the accepted paradigm of fact versus fiction.

Such articles as this caused so much outrage amongst the old aunts and knitting circles of FT. I was almost howled off the stage by FT queens and devotees at the 2004 Uncon. Onstage, I was outnumbered by assembled skeptics of the cabal whose influence had almost destroyed FT as a Fortean Journal.

At best they wanted Fort to remain a Victorian fantasist, a mere eccentric who happened to as much fun as Alice in Wonderland. They did not want him and his work to be dragged into a modern scheme of things.

After this event I decided to create The New Fortean Times website. The immediate result of this was the new editor screaming down the phone at me and saying that FT was going to sue me. I told him to go ahead, as I would countersue under the Trades Description Act on the grounds that FT was not a Fortean Magazine. As the award-winning biographer of the said person, I added also that I was well-qualified to debate this issue in court or anywhere else.

DR SNAKE: Is your Combat-Diaries.com website a one man war against conventional society and the encroaching political correctness?

COLIN: It is war alright, but not as we know it. Before the digital age the cerebral culture was almost exterminated by a rising culture of pop, poo, and pudding.

To answer this question more fully, let me give you a mercifully short biographical note.

Once I was a playwright. I wrote good plays and had them performed at major London venues (two toured, and one was produced at the Royal Court Theatre). But alas, I am an incorrigible right-winger (back bench of the Tory party, nothing to do with Adolf Hitler!) and theatre began to be almost completely dominated by an “alternative” sector comprised of communists, left-liberals, and a those of a sexual persuasion I am politically gagged from insulting.

Mainstream theatre did not interest me; it was the same as it always was: an old sleepy dog by the family fire whose social comedies and general expression were positively pre-electric.

The result was that because of my views I could not get decent productions. Certainly no stage director knew anything about the burgeoning world of new technology. The film directors did, but then the possibilities of the impoverished low-key British film world were almost zero.

Theatre gazed somewhat askance at the burgeoning cyber age, and even today theatre cannot express the characteristics of the Web culture. It stays as ever it was: intellectually static, frozen in latter-day neo-Edwardianism and with a left-liberal milieu almost a century behind techgnotic culture and the postmodern cerebral dimension involving technology of any and every kind.

As an Oxford-educated plain-cake Midlander and ex-mercenary soldier, I had little in common with the usual camp types met in Theatre.

The worst thing was the pastel shades of the dying A&F (Arts and Farts) culture. On a sample pre-Web-Sunday morning, the “quality” press offered such delights as the memoirs of a woolly-jumper 50-year-old school prefect (homosexual, of course) who wrote terribly English “novels” about Jack and Jill in Hampstead. These sighing works (always looking back, never forward), were usually about one of the many thespian uncles arrested for odd behavior in public lavatories whilst dressed in women’s clothes.

It was whilst I was moving out of this degenerate, dead and dying culture, that one day, my girlfriend told me she had just bought something called a Mac LC (MK 1). From that moment my entire world changed as she showed me the magic lantern of the Internet, although with only 4Mb of RAM, at times it was not without some difficulty!

For millions, such early contraptions as the Mac LC were escape-hatches into another world. The last cerebrals clambered aboard the Web life-raft. Wounded injured, they bathed their scars and left the world to break its teeth on poo, pop, and media pudding. Somehow I had been dragged out from the jaws of cultural death.

I bought a Mac LC the next day and scrambled out from a British grave like a revived corpse. With the early Web as inspiration, I went on to write three successful biographies of George Adamski (“Looking for Orthon”), Charles Fort (“Politics of the Imagination”) , and Captain Edward Ruppelt (“An American Demonology”).

DR SNAKE: But are you winning your war against political correctness? What hope have we got against its creeping mediocrity and staleness?

COLIN: The Web (and to a far lesser extent newspapers such as the Sun) are the only outlets who are fighting political correctness. My own Combat Diaries is an anarchist/situationist site in which we feature porn and madness, radical politics and visionary expression with no holds barred.

I don’t know in an absolute sense who is winning, but the Combat Diaries now has three to four million hits per month (if one includes the whole of the United States), so we must be doing some good. One of my main influences is The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) by Andre Breton, the text of which can be seen here.

DR SNAKE: What’s your position on UFOs and aliens? I’ve personally seen quite a few UFOs. But my position is: nothing is literal (not even us) and reality is weirder than we can imagine, even in our most surreal nightmares.

COLIN: Yours is the view of Charles Fort, and my view as his biographer. I have seen a UFO, I lost time during that experience. I have written this up to be published in a future edition of UFO Magazine, for whom I am a feature writer.

Visit Colin’s site at: www.Combat-Diaries.co.uk

The rootworker would go on to explain that an amulet or charm had been buried in a graveyard, thrown in a river, nailed up a tree or simply buried in the dark conjurer’s backyard. And that this was the bad work which was affecting them.

If the person went to a regular doctor, they’d typically be told there was nothing physically wrong with them. But afflicted person would know deep down that something was not right.

That’s why they’d put their faith in a rootworker who would not only diagnose a spiritual illness, but would also lift the curse with a fancy little trick or two of their own.

“…The practice of conjuration was carried out by quite a few. The Negroes who were from the Indies and other islands were greatly responsible for these teachings. The brewin’ of certain concoctions composed of roots, herbs and scraps of cloth with certain fowl feathers was believed to work charms or spells on the persons desired… They believe that [if] herbs or roots of certain types were place where the victim would walk over ‘em, he would become deathly ill soon after an dperhaps die of the spell if it was not removed.”

Marrinda Jane Singleton. Former slave from Norfolk, Virginia, born in 1840 and interviewed for the U.S. government’s Virginia Negro Studies Project around 1937.