The Strange Story Of Essie Dunbar, The Woman Who Was Allegedly Buried Alive In 1915

This is not a sufficient reason to accept the story.

It is a reason not to treat the absence of documentation as conclusive proof that nothing happened.

The Fortean Tradition and the Story’s Journey

Before reaching Bondeson’s 2001 book, the Essie Dunbar story traveled through the world of Fortean journalism — the tradition of reporting on anomalous, inexplicable, or unusual phenomena associated with the magazine Fortean Times, founded in 1973 and named after the American writer Charles Fort, who spent his career collecting accounts of strange events that conventional science couldn’t explain.

Fortean journalism occupies a specific niche in the information ecosystem: it takes seriously phenomena that mainstream media and mainstream science tend to dismiss, and it provides a platform for stories that fall outside the ordinary categories of reportable events.