The Day Graham Phillips Met Andy Collins

One of the biggest challenges when developing The Paranormalist series was establishing the correct sequence of events. With so many extraordinary experiences spanning decades, accuracy mattered.

One of the great advantages of having access to Andy’s remarkable archive is the ability to verify dates and reconstruct a detailed chronology of many key events. Whenever memories differed between Andrew B Collins and Graham Phillips, I could often turn to Andy’s diaries for confirmation.

Andy began keeping a diary in 1978 using a modest, appropriately named Collins A5 Slim booklet. Each double-page covered an entire week, with only brief notes recorded each day—sometimes none at all. Fortunately, he soon upgraded to much larger A4 diaries, allowing him to document events in far greater detail.

The image here is a scan from one of those early 1978 diary entries. At first glance, it may seem unremarkable, but it records a date of enormous importance in the chronology of The Paranormalist series:

The day Graham first met Andy.

A seemingly ordinary meeting that would ultimately lead to decades of investigations into mysteries, anomalies, and the unexplained.