Jim Brandon has had a significant influence upon those who write about matters Fortean; it is not an uncommon event for me to turn to the back of a work in this field and find Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States or The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit cited in the bibliography. Here are but a few of the books I have found which cite Mr. Brandon's works.
My most recent discovery in this effort is in a work of fiction, namely Neil Gaiman's
American Gods. Gaiman writes that "in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit.
I contend that Mr. Gaiman has been reading Weird America, specifically, this passage:
Sugarloaf Key (Florida)
The Perky Bat Tower was still standing during my last trip through here. Somewhat resembling a bladeless Dutch windmill, this weather-beaten cypress-wood structure was built as a novel, and unsuccessful, device to control the swarms of mosquitoes that made life a problem in the Keys during the days before insecticides. The active ingredient here was supposed to be hundreds of bat who would take up residence....A mysterious lure was employed to attract the bats which was so malodorous that people exposed to it became violently ill. Evidently the bats didn't like it much better....But even though no bats ever stayed here, that has not deterred certain occultists from explaining the real story: The tower is a secret shine, they solemnly aver, of cultists who venerate the Mayan-Aztec death god, Camazotz, who took the form of a gigantic bat and was in the habit of snipping off the heads of his followers who displeased him.
Mr. Brandon sounds as if he doubts that the tower will stand for much longer, but here is a link to images of the bat tower itself, which fortunately still stands:
Beth Scott & Michael Norman have written a number of works which testify to the number of people seeing strange things across the U.S., most of them apparitions of the dead; most of them cite Brandon's Weird America.
Haunted AmericaHaunted HeartlandHistoric Haunted America
Haunted Heritage: A Definitive Collection of North American Ghost Stories
The Haunting of the Presidents: A Paranormal History of the U.S. Presidency
I remember the first time I came across the original edition of Loren Coleman's
Mysterious America, in the public library of Santa Cruz, California; he has made it even better with a revised edition, in which, as in the original, he writes: "Fortean author Jim Brandon has done considerable thinking and writing about the correlation of place names and weird phenomena...Brandon, writing in the thoroughly enjoyable The Rebirth of Pan chooses, as his peculiar candidate for this game, the name Fayette...". Mr. Coleman continues playing this game in this work with place names that feature the word or names Devil, Diablo, Hob or Hobb, Logan, Rowan, and Decatur. As he demonstrates admirably, places with these names often have long histories of associations with Fortean events.
Christopher O'Brien, in his
The Mysterious Valley
writes that Weird America, "a county-by-county, state-by-state listing of anomalous areas in the United States, led me on an extended expedition around North America." He was en route to the mysterious San Luis Valley when a renegade snowstorm made it necessary for him to defer his wishes...but eventually he did indeed return to the spot, the scene of the strange and inexplicable death of Snippy and many UFO sightings.
Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings
The Secrets of the Mojave
Whitley Strieber, in his
Breakthrough
, writes that a spontaneous levitation of stones took place in Stone Ridge, New York in 1803, near his cabin, according to Weird America. John Carter, author of Sex & Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, and a fan of Weird America, denies this--and indeed, I have not found such an incident in Brandon's work.
Mike Marinacci's
Mysterious California: Strange places and eerie phenomena in the Golden State rests right alongside our copies of Weird America, Dennis Hauck's
Haunted Places: The National Directory : Ghostly Abodes, Sacred Sites, Ufo Landings, and Other Supernatural Locations
and
L.A. Bizarro: : The Insiders Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles; Fay & I spent a particularly frightening night near the site of the haunts of the Billiwack monster, a humanlike creature with a horned, ramlike head (nothing paranormal happened; it was just sort of creepy out there). Thanks to Mr. Marinacci for bringing it to our attention (Fay and I are convinced that the creature is one of the many modern manifestations of the Great God Pan, who is not dead!)!
Haunted America
Haunted Heartland
Historic Haunted America 
The Haunting of the Presidents: A Paranormal History of the U.S. Presidency 
I remember the first time I came across the original edition of Loren Coleman's
Mysterious America, in the public library of Santa Cruz, California; he has made it even better with a revised edition, in which, as in the original, he writes: "Fortean author Jim Brandon has done considerable thinking and writing about the correlation of place names and weird phenomena...Brandon, writing in the thoroughly enjoyable The Rebirth of Pan chooses, as his peculiar candidate for this game, the name Fayette...". Mr. Coleman continues playing this game in this work with place names that feature the word or names Devil, Diablo, Hob or Hobb, Logan, Rowan, and Decatur. As he demonstrates admirably, places with these names often have long histories of associations with Fortean events.
Christopher O'Brien, in his
The Mysterious Valley
writes that Weird America, "a county-by-county, state-by-state listing of anomalous areas in the United States, led me on an extended expedition around North America." He was en route to the mysterious San Luis Valley when a renegade snowstorm made it necessary for him to defer his wishes...but eventually he did indeed return to the spot, the scene of the strange and inexplicable death of Snippy and many UFO sightings.
Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings
The Secrets of the Mojave 
Whitley Strieber, in his
Breakthrough
, writes that a spontaneous levitation of stones took place in Stone Ridge, New York in 1803, near his cabin, according to Weird America. John Carter, author of Sex & Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, and a fan of Weird America, denies this--and indeed, I have not found such an incident in Brandon's work.
