I remember my mom reading me this book when I was pretty young. Raising the dead, sorcery, warlocks, doomsday countdown, even a hand of glory?? John Bellair's writing and Edward Gorey's art sparked a lifetime's interest in the occult in my little brain. 🥰

I recently reread this childhood treasure-- "From deep within the tomb came a sound. Boom! A deep hollow sound. The iron doors jolted, as if they had been struck a blow from inside. The chain rattled, and there was a clunk on the pavement. The padlock had fallen off..."

Title page of Clemence Housman's 1896 novel 'The Were-Wolf', described by Mike Ashley as 'the greatest story of lycanthropy ever written'. Clemence was the sister of 'Shropshire Lad' poet A E Housman. #BookChatWeekly #booksky #werewolf #fantasyfiction #Shropshire

2/2 "..... but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people.On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples."

It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. #BookWormSat 📖Dracula by Brom Stoker 🖼️ Carl Gustav Carus

"...a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows..." 👻Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House #BookWormSat

🤍🐈🤍"Thereon were seated in a hundred decorative attitudes, or stood immobile like carvings, or walked superbly across their sapphire setting, interweaving with each other like a living arabesque, a swarm of snowwhite cats." 🏰Titus Groan - by Mervyn Peake #BookWormSat #Caturday

‘He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence‘ ~ Victor Hugo. #BookWormSat 🖼️ David Roberts, 1828.

"..And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, .. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe." ✍️Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame #BookWormSat

'Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain; They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again' -The Belfry of Bruges, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. @signemaene.com welcomes you to #BookWormSat 🎨Frank Brangwyn & Yoshijiro Urushibara.

“Look at the Sphinx,” I urged. “Even I can feel the mystery and the charm it exhales.” Poirot looked at it discontentedly. “It has not the air happy,” he declared. “How could it, half-buried in sand in that untidy fashion.” -The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb #AgathaChristie #BookWormSat

I do not like the Tower of any place. Shakespeare, RICHARD III, 3.1 #BookWormSat #TowerofLondon #WhiteTower #PrincesintheTower #Architecture

‘It is Stonehenge!’ said Clare. ‘The heathen temple, you mean?’ ‘Yes.Older than the centuries; older than the d'Urbervilles!’ Tess of the D’Urbervilles Hardy #BookWormSat

‘The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite’ Susanna Clarke Piranesi #BookWormSat

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier #bookwormsat

Source: www.bbc.com/travel/artic...

Around 11km outside the city of Siauliai in northern Lithuania, an old, earthen mound hunches under the weight of thousands of crosses. As the wind blows across the fields of rural Siauliai County, ornate rosaries clink against metal #PhantomsFriday 🧵

RP @roger1952.bsky.social Surreal or #ghostly, I'm calling this a #PhantomsFriday worthy post! 😀

"The Ogre's ghost is sometimes said to appear in the form of a sawn tree trunk and haunts Brede and the Groaning Bridge at Stubb's Lane, Brede." #PhantomsFriday #Brede #Sussex

#PhantomsFriday Art and poem credits in alt text.

If anyone knows a link to any of these stories, I genuinely want to read them. Research purposes, obviously. #PhantomsFriday

"It was on the third night that the trouble with the telephone started." Living in his girlfriend's flat while she's thousands of miles away, Edmund St Jude endures the opposite of ghosting from a troublesome telephone in Robert Aickman's short story 'Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen'. #PhantomsFriday

Buckland Abbey, Dorset is the focus of many tales of the supernatural. Monks are said to walk its staircases, added long after their time. They are also said to visit the Great Hall, once at the heart of the abbey and to silently pass visitors walking through its extensive grounds… #PhantomsFriday

Ettington Park, where part of The Haunting (1963) was filmed, is reputed to be haunted by a woman in a long white dress. A spectral child in medieval clothing has also been seen running down the main staircase. #PhantomsFriday

"Out of the Firth with his reckless crew He sailed on a Christmas morning!" Swallowed by the sea and all hands lost, but the 'ghost ship' Betsy Jane is still seen desperately trying to reach Whitehaven harbour more in my: 'Folklore of the Lake District' #phantomsfriday #booksky

Katsukawa Shunsho: 'A Man Falling Over Backwards, Startled By A Woman's Ghost', 1782. #PhantomsFriday #Japan #JapaneseArt #artsky

Did you miss this weekend's talk on Well Folklore and horror? Worry not, here it is! youtu.be/LPxeK2DAAXQ

#BookologyThursday #WyrdWednesday "We are little airy creatures, All of different voice and features; One of us in glass is set, One of us you'll find in jet. T'other you may see in tin, And the fourth a box within. If the fifth you should pursue, It can never fly from you." Jonathan Swift

Ostentiferous - that which brings monsters or strange sights. #WyrdWednesday #BookologyThursday

Day 2 of our #WyrdWednesday / #BookologyThursday crossover! The theme - “Absurd Words, Nonsense Poems, and Nursery Rhymes!” And remember, at no point in the rhyme does it say that Humpty Dumpty was an egg... 🎨 by Blanche Fisher Wright

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.'" —The Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carroll #BookologyThursday

"’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe." —Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll #BookologyThursday

"'Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare 'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.' As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes." —'Tis the Voice of the Lobster, Lewis Carroll #BookologyThursday

Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin's lost his sleigh Kojak's lost his lollipop And he doesn't know what to say Hey* (repeat until the end of time, or until the bell goes) The Playground, 1970/80s *Other versions available #bookologythursday nonsense rhymes

My latest #blog post: Memory and Inspiration On the anniversary of my father's passing, I'm reminded of how he used this #PaulKlee painting to teach me about how our brains create story. #creativity #art

#WyrdWednesday #LewisCarroll From Carroll's collection of poems 'Phantasmagoria' 1919 featuring the illustrations of A.B Frost.

Words were never just sounds, they were spells in disguise🪄 From Wyrd, where speech could shape fate, to secret charm words of nonsense syllables, such as Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo! Folk belief held that rhythm carried power when said with intention and focus. #BookologyThursday #WyrdWednesday

Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky may be based on the County Durham legend of the Sockburn Worm - a poisonous dragon who lived on a peninsula in the River Tees who was beheaded by a local noble. Carroll's father was the rector of the nearby village of Croft. #WyrdWednesday #folklore #literature #weird

Wyrd/Urd is the Germanic concept of a personal fate or destiny, but has had an absurd journey across linguistics, coming to mean odd, supernatural, or bizarre in the modern weird. Urd is also one of the Norns, and is the Fate That Was, goddess of the past. #WyrdWednesday

The Voynich/Cipher manuscript. Is it a herbal almanac written in code? Is it a joke so old we can't get the humor? An invented astrological language? Does it hold the mysteries of the universe? No one knows! But it sure is fun to look at. #WyrdWednesday collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002...

Tolkien mentioned an animal called "pard" in the poem. Medieval bestiary manuscripts described pard as a giant, swift, spotted feline, which killed its prey with a single leap. In Tolkien's world, pards lived in wooded lands of the East, perhaps beyond Rhûn. 2/2 🎨: Aberdeen Bestiary, Folio 8

Nonsense poetry isn’t truly nonsense. Writers like Lewis Carroll filled their verses with invented words that somehow still feel meaningful, as if language remembers something we don’t. #WyrdWednesday

'Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky.' - The Mad Hatter #WyrdWednesday #LewisCarroll

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift gave us Brobdingnagian (giant), Lilliputian (tiny) and Yahoo (let's go with 'uncouth'). (I haven't read it, and for years all my knowledge of the book came from watching a cartoon on the telly, which only included the Lilliputians.) #WyrdWednesday absurd words

We read to know we're not alone. ~William Nicholson Good night, dear Bibliophiles 🎨Adam Oehlers

Family #selfie #tilesontuesday

Wyrdlings, 271 years ago #OnThisDay, Dr Johnson published his famous dictionary & even if “aardvark” was left out, #BookologyThursday’s BookCat & the Mothers of #WyrdWednesday team up, take the opportunity & give you: “Absurd Words, Nonsense Poems, and Nursery Rhymes” as this week’s joined topic!

In Norse lore, seers known as völvas entered trance states to see what others could not. Their visions came at a cost, pulling them between worlds where not everything wished to be seen. #MythologyMonday Art: Lady of the Vanir by Annie Stegg

#mythologymonday (dreams and visions) Mr Sandman youtu.be/VNUgsbKisp8?...

"Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck; And yet methinks I have astronomy, But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality" Sonnet XIV #ShakespeareSunday