Affectionately known as 4E, 4SJ, Dr Ackula, and Forry, Forrest J Ackerman was the ultimate science fiction and horror fan. He gathered a collection of 300,000 movie photos, posters, original props, masks, books, magazines, and paintings that filled a 17-room mansion and three-car garage (“that you couldn’t fit a toothpick in”). Fellow fan Bjo Trimble once found a stack of Thrilling Wonder magazines in Forry’s fridge – between a box of chocolate éclairs and a quart of milk that had gone sour!
Many of the rare original movie props Forry owned had fortean, cryptozoological or UFO connections. They included Martian war-machine models from George Pal’s The War Of The Worlds, the foot of the Creature From the Black Lagoon, model submarines from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Atlantis The Lost Continent, original dinosaur models from the 1933 King Kong, a piranha from Piranha, and an alien head from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
MORE STRANGE DAYS
