Introducing The EERIE Files: My New Home for Everything Unexplained

Right, so. I’ve started another project.

If you’ve read anything else on this site, you’ll know that’s not exactly a shock. I’m the man who rebuilt this entire website on a whim and dressed it up as pirates for a fortnight because a header image felt easier than a difficult scene. Starting things is not my problem. Finishing them is a separate, ongoing negotiation. But this one I actually want to talk about properly, because it’s been quietly eating my evenings for a while now, and it’s finally in a state where I can point at it and say: here, look, this is real.

It’s called The EERIE Files, and it lives at eeriefiles.com.

What It Actually Is

The EERIE Files is a home for everything that doesn’t have a tidy explanation yet. Ghosts. Cryptids. Folklore. UFOs and alien encounters. Witness cases — real accounts, from real people, written up properly rather than recycled as a listicle with a stock photo of a foggy forest. The aim is somewhere between an archive and a magazine: a place you can go to read a single strange account in full, or fall down a proper rabbit hole for an afternoon.

The centrepiece is something I’m calling The Vault — a growing encyclopedia of cases, creatures, sightings and folklore, indexed and cross-referenced properly, so a black-eyed-child sighting in one county can sit next to a folklore entry that might actually explain it, and a UFO report can link out to three other reports with the same odd detail nobody’s ever connected before. It’s the bit of the project I’m most excited about, and the bit that will take the longest to actually feel finished, because it’s designed to keep growing for as long as people keep sending things in.

Why Now

This isn’t a new interest dressed up as a new hobby. Back when I lived in Grimsby, I ran a paranormal investigations team called Spirit Searchers. It was a proper operation — a full team of investigators, a mix of believers, sceptics and psychic mediums all working the same case from completely different angles, and a genuinely long list of reportedly haunted locations we got in and investigated properly. It did well. Better than I think any of us expected when we started.

What stayed with me from that isn’t a specific ghost story, it’s the process. Watching a sceptic and a medium sit in the same cold room and come away with completely different accounts of the same twenty minutes, and neither of them being wrong exactly, just looking at the same evening from different directions. That’s the bit that never left me, and it’s the whole reason The EERIE Files exists: I wanted somewhere to keep doing that properly, in writing, at a scale one investigation team walking round one building at a time was never going to reach. The team eventually stopped, as teams do, but the itch to keep taking this stuff seriously never really went anywhere.

A lot of what’s out there in this space is either deeply cynical clickbait or so credulous it’s basically fiction. I wanted something that sits in the middle: genuinely curious, willing to take an account seriously without needing to “prove” it, and honest when the explanation is probably mundane. That’s a harder line to hold than either extreme, and it’s exactly the line I think is worth holding.

What I’m Hoping to Achieve

Selfishly, I want an excuse to keep researching a subject I already can’t stop researching, and to finally have somewhere to put it that isn’t a folder of bookmarks nobody else will ever see. Less selfishly, I want The EERIE Files to become a place people actually trust — somewhere a witness can send in an account and know it’ll be handled carefully, and somewhere a reader can land on a case and know it’s been written up properly rather than scraped off a forum.

If it works the way I want it to, in a year or two The Vault becomes a genuinely useful reference — the kind of place other people researching this stuff end up linking to, not just a stack of “top 10 scariest” posts fighting for the same ten stories everyone already knows.

How You Can Help

Here’s the honest bit: none of that happens if it’s just me shouting into the fog on my own.

If you’ve got a story — something that happened to you, or your family, or a case from your local area that never made it anywhere properly written up — I want it. Genuinely. Every case, every sighting, every bit of local folklore makes The Vault more worth visiting, and I’d rather have your account, however small or strange, than not.

If you don’t have a story to send, following and sharing does almost as much good. A project like this lives or dies on people actually finding it, and the easiest way that happens is someone seeing a post shared by someone they already trust — which, if you’re reading this, is hopefully you.

And if you want to go a step further, there’ll be a way to support The EERIE Files directly, because hosting, research time and eventually actual investigation work all cost real money, and I’d rather be upfront about that than pretend a project like this runs on enthusiasm alone.

So: have a look, send me your stories, and if it’s your sort of thing, stick around. I’ve got a lot of the fog to walk through yet, and I’d rather not do it alone.