Popular TV personality and comedian Jackie Gleason delighted audiences for decades with his raucous quips and slapstick humor, yet “The Honeymooners” star had a penchant for the dark side and the other worldly, as well.
After Gleason died at his Florida home in 1987 at the age of 71, his family donated the entertainer’s entire personal library of items—all ostensibly about death—to University of Miami Libraries as a special collection.
The Jackie Gleason Special Collection contains approximately 1,700 books, magazines, and periodicals that explore UFOs, out-of-body experiences, witchcraft, cosmology, demons, spiritualism, mysticism, reincarnation, telekinesis, clairvoyance, mythology, and the supernatural.
“While he was famous as a comedian, Jackie Gleason was a serious guy in his real life. He’d lost people close to him early in his life and was always very drawn to explore and collect books on topics of the paranormal and the life after,” said Cristina Favretto, librarian professor and head of Special Collections.
Gleason established his career in his native New York, starring in movies and launching the popular television series “The Honeymooners” and “The Jackie Gleason Show” from the mid-1950s to 1970. Filming for the shows moved to Miami Beach in 1964 when Gleason took up permanent residency there.
Favretto noted that University Libraries has created the Gleason Adjacent Collection, purchasing and adding materials of parallel themes to Gleason’s original collection. Special Collections also houses a wide number of artists’ books, rare books, and zines that explore paranormal topics, life on other planets and aliens living amongst us, witchcraft, and ghost apparitions including spirit photography.
Spirit photography, the librarian explained, really took off in the late 1800s. The cameras themselves sometimes shifted, causing blurred, ghostly images in the background and photographers—some as professionals and some out to scam—created a brisk trade claiming the ability to capture these images of faeries and lost souls.
The Gleason collection includes such rare items as “The Book of Werewolves,” published in 1865 and considered one of the most authoritative texts on the superstition; “Vampires, Zombies and Monster Men,” published in 1976; as well as a number of tomes on the Abominable Snowman legend.
Chelsea Jacks, senior library assistant, facilitated a presentation on “Monsters and Creatures” in the spring of 2021, part of the libraries’ “Deep Dives into Special Collections” series.
As part of her talk, Jacks explored the fascination with horror in literature, history, art, and folklore and why we consciously seek to find things that scare us.
“First to teach,” Jacks said. “Stories, where a hero triumphs over an evil monster reinforces moral codes, shows that the world is full of danger and that that can be overcome with diligence. Yet also, as in many of the Vikam and the Vampire stories we find complex teachings on the nature of knowledge itself—and trickery and logic are part of this teaching.”
Jacks noted, too, that the brain produces many of the same chemicals in response to fear as it does in response to pleasure. “So, watching a scary movie, reading a scary book, or going to a haunted house will produce pleasure chemicals, even if it feels a little different,” Jacks pointed out.
“Purposefully including fear in situations that we know are safe may acclimate the body to conditions of flight or fight. And when physiological changes happen during exposure to a true threat they aren't emotionally or physically unfamiliar enough to shut down our system,” Jacks said. “Very likely, it's a combination of all of these things and, for whatever reason, monsters and the fear that come with them are just part of the human experience.”
While the Gleason Collection is open to the public, it is a research collection and the materials are kept in closed stacks. To visit in person, an appointment is suggested. To view online, visit the Jackie Gleason Collection.
For those seeking a more uplifting tone or for budding comedians, the collection also includes some of Gleason’s joke books.