Picture of me taken by Allen Ginsberg in Covent Garden almost exactly thirty years ago. I am unrecognisable. © @ginsbergpoem.bsky.social

A letter from the Tower of London about the ghosts in that blood-soaked allotment of kings

Goodnight. Shipwreck on a beach. I saw this as a boy, slowly washing away every year. At lowtide walking out to it. Writing poems about it before I found out its history.

Glad to hear you're back safely from hospital @johnnymains.co.uk

Hey who wants a handmade notebook? Going on my ko-fi shop later if no one shouts for it. £30 + £5p+p (UK only). Pocket sized just over 9x13cm, 160 pages. Paper takes fountain pen ink.

#SundayStonework #StoneworkSunday #Neolithic owl-faced idol 4300-4000 BC from chamber tomb excavated 1968 in Arnesano near Lecce, Puglia. 🏺 It has similarities w examples found in Cyprus + in Crete. Buried w ceramics associated w cult of Diana. in MArTA - Taranto arch museum #ancientbluesky

From the strange year when I was writing poetry, chasing ghosts and attempting to write for @2000ad.bsky.social

please make way on the timeline, cattle coming through

Thank you to Sacred Isle for reminding me of the old word geomorheorte, a description of a certain weightiness of the heart, a settling sadness. I should have paid more attention to my Anglo-Saxon classes at University.

Goodnight

#wildflowerHour Limehouse Basin

For folklore often holds the swan as the witches' bird. A deliverer of messages to our dead sisters. A wide-wing psychopomp that can fly between life and death. We make cloaks from its gifted feathers. We tell it our submerged secrets. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #FolkloreSunday

Posting this for my dear friend @hookland.bsky.social as it is salient to our joint Essex ancestry (mine from around farming High Easter). A rare copy of a real book at my aunt's house, claiming my grandmother's Lukin ancestry is from Melusine. This story even reached the ears of Marina Warner

So many beautiful things here. Take a look.

We live atop ghost soil. The past will always manifest. We must refuse summoning it as the warping gravity of nostalgia. Better to forge our relationship to it through history's wonderous facts, the living, connective current of folklore. – Dr. M. Benn #FolkloreSunday #Folklore

Imagine being a mother who steals from her three adoptive children while outwardly a pillar of the community

Just added "hotel" to muted words

Goodnight

This is an excellent book that I heartily recommend, whatever your position on ghosts.

Hey, if you’ve never read this you are MISSING OUT. Treat yourself. The chapter on the Hinton Ampner haunting is one of the best things I have ever read. #booksky

Looks like the Needles on the Isle of Wight

Yesterday at St Anne's church in Limehouse. A Hawksmoor masterpiece, with all the spook that entails. Someone at the church tells me this upstairs balcony is where the zombie priest scene was filmed in one of the 28 Later films.

Love love love this book. 💜

The best book on ghosts I have *ever* read. I read this as an early draft and yeah, it's a very special book indeed.

Still in print, and on sale! A Natural History of Ghosts. Help sort your ghosts out with Team Semi-Believer #SpectreSaturday hmv.com/store/books/...

It's St Mark's Eve. Spring Hallowe'en in other words. See you at the churchyard gate. Goodnight.

1/5 Today is St. Mark's Eve, when it was the custom to sit in the church porch to see the spirits of those who would die that year passing into the church. Those sitting had to keep silent between the bell tolling at 11.00 p.m. until the bell struck 1.00 a.m. #PhantomsFriday #FolkyFriday

Happy #PhantomsFriday

Good Morning! This is my morning dose of quackery plus fish oil in honour of the Rose of Nevada

Goodnight

I saw the new Mark Jenkin film Rose of Nevada a few weeks ago. Think it's his best film of the three. I don't think ALL ghost stories are time-slip stories, as the director reportedly thinks

"For some of the instincts of the wild animal had survived in Snarley, of which perhaps the most marked was his refusal to submit to the scrutiny of human eyes" My Dad would have liked this book

Happy St Arwald Day to those who observe it. A relict of the only genocide that took place on English soil A saint but not necessarily a Christian one share.google/H7cVgFk1ktWX...

Goodnight

A Le Fanu on sale at Jarndyce

Every day I wake up, and I feel so ill I wonder how it's possible to continue

Goodnight

I've been conducting a good deal of ancestry research recently. It's good when it touches on a famous ghost story This great-uncle took over from the man who saw a famous ghost at the Tower of London, a ghost story I've known since childhood and mention in my book

On Friday 1 May, the Society's Council is at the University of Warwick to meet with historians from the region. The day closes with a public lecture (5.30pm) by Sasha Handley on ‘The Haunting at the Rectory: Ghost Stories and Women’s Lives in Early Modern England’ bit.ly/4tnpwRa All welcome.

🪷 In the centre of the cuirassed chest of this marble bust of #Hadrian is, not a traditional #Medusa "Gorgoneion," but the instantly recognisable face of #Antinous! Excavated 1995 in Kynouria, Peloponnese. Symbolically, #Antinoos shields his emperor, warding off all evil and misfortune! 🪷

Goodnight

Love this stone in St Ives Museum

Goodnight

"Aurelius ordered Merlin to erect round the burial-place the stones which he had brought from Ireland. Merlin obeyed the King's orders and put the stones up in a circle round the sepulchre." - Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12thC account of the erection of Stonehenge. #BookWormSat #StandingStoneSunday

'Above our life we love a steadfast friend' Hero and Leander At the grave of Kit Marlowe near to his murder point in Deptford

‘Simon Being Taken out to Sea for the First Time since His Father Drowned’, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983, photo by Chris Killip. Weekly ritual to prevent him becoming afraid of the sea, where the community earned its living.

Goodnight

Apparently it’s International Haiku Day. I shall ignore it.

I see Danny Robins is doing an episode about the Cock Lane ghost, which remains one of my favorite stories. It's a story of mass drunkeness, class warfare and the machinations of the new gutter press. It was the first chapter I wrote for A Natural History of Ghosts, and got the book commissioned.

Goodnight