Welcome to Project Arcanum
An Exploration of the Speculative and Fringe
If you’ve been following Morbidly Curious Thoughts, you know that it’s where I explore the science behind why we are interested in topics like horror, aliens, serial killers, government conspiracies, cults, monsters, the occult, and more.
And you probably know the answer I give for our why these topics are so compelling:
Because we are morbidly curious.
Sometimes morbid curiosity pulls us deep into stories that can’t be easily tested or neatly explained. It does for me, too.
I’m not only interested in why we are fascinated by aliens, conspiracies, cults, and unsolved murders. I’m also interested in the topics themselves.
That’s why I’ve launched Project Arcanum.
What is Project Arcanum?
It’s a new series within Morbidly Curious Thoughts.
You can think of it as my personal notebook for ideas that live on the fringe of science, belief, and cultural memory.
If the X-Files was real, this would be the case notes.
Maybe we’ll find that some of it is real.
In this series, I’ll be exploring a wide range of topics, including:
UFOs/UAPs and alien contact
Cults, conspiracies, and hidden knowledge
Cryptids and regional folklore
Parapsychology and psi phenomena
Occult texts, secret societies, and ancient anomalies
These ideas are deeply tied to morbid curiosity, but Project Arcanum isn’t about analyzing why people believe them.
That’s the focus of my main Substack.
Here, I’ll explore the ideas themselves.
How is this different from my usual posts?
In Morbidly Curious Thoughts, I will continue to write about topics such as:
Why do we enjoy horror?
What is psychopathy, really?
Why do people believe in ghosts?
In Project Arcanum, I’ll dig into more obscure topics, things like:
What is remote viewing, and is there really evidence for it?
Have we been visited by extraterrestrials?
What might explain some of the world’s most persistent mysteries?
My aim is not to debunk, nor is it to blindly believe. In Project Arcanum, I will share with my reader what I find as I investigate what lives at the edge of the known.
Project Arcanum will involve a few kinds of posts:
Field Notes from the Fringe — Explorations of strange cases, paranormal events, parapsychology, and alternative explanations in history.
Curious Objects — Short essays on eerie, forgotten, or symbolic objects: relics, devices, documents, and physical traces of fringe beliefs or macabre history.
Marginalia Macabre — Brief fragments of ideas, interesting facts, and side notes tha don’t fit elsewhere.
I’ll still be publishing the science. The essays on morbid curiosity, horror, true crime, evolutionary psychology, and more will continue on my main Substack.
But Project Arcanum gives me the space to follow the thread further.
If you’re already subscribed to Morbidly Curious Thoughts, then you’re all set.
Paid subscribers will receive full access to this new section.
Free subscribers will get an occasional post from Project Arcanum.
New dispatches are coming soon.
Stay curious.
