Goodnight from Vicky Copfield and Danny Sleight, belatedly deciding that Lockley Cemetery isn’t the best place to express their lust. Goodnight from Winter Fields School, whose phantoms wait in hope that its living boarders will hold another unwise séance. Goodnight from Hookland.

You can change a buildings purpose. Rip out all the machines that used to live there. You can call an old factory a visitor centre, a museum, a heritage site – don't change what it was. Remove and remake all you want, you can't erase its ghosts. It stays haunted. – John Peck #VOH #Ghosts

A schoolteacher friend told me the kids in her class believe the Stay Belows are now 'at mud'. Usually such gossip is a good signal of how things are. However, my trip to Wystan Lumb suggests otherwise. The shadows in the water still whisper. – #EmilyCBanting, diary entry November 15th, 1982

When you feel depleted of enchantment, walk the wood. It is where magic lives loudly. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982

Goodnight from The Sisters fish and chip shop, where the pickled goose eggs are sold-out due to rumour they cure lover’s droop. Goodnight from the steps of the Foundling Hospital at Coreham, where the temporal shades of abandoned babes wail for their mothers. Goodnight from Hookland.

Rain-bullied to mud, fields release sodden spectres. Winter ghosts resenting solid walls and hope of hearth. Old Hooklanders have a word for these shades - glumsucks. To be touched by one is to shiver to sickness, to have twilight's sorrows tattooed on your bones. – #DAKilroy, 1982 #Ghosts

You can walk and after two miles of tangled lane that's untroubled with being on the Ordinance Survey, find a feral church. These are the chapels beyond bishops, untethered from parishes. Existing in green communion, their gathered ghosts sing wild hymns. – #DAKilroy, 1982

Just for any academics, let me be clear, Hookland is anti-nostalgic. It's an exploration and exorcism of my childhood, not a celebration of falsely remembered sunshine. Nostalgia is a warping gravity.

Goodnight from Tony Wrox, realising that stealing an item labelled ‘The Ghost Child’s mirror’ from the Crowhythe Museum of Curiosities was always going to be a mistake. Goodnight from Bethany Butterfield, eager for morning and its possibility of frost lace divinations. Goodnight from Hookland.

@tomsbrown.bsky.social The mire refuses to mourn her transformation. Gifts her crown of Bog Asphodel. Its golden tufts whisper their secret names to her. Bane-ward. Bone-breaker. Death-kiss and Marriage-marker.

The witch works with the season. When the year begins its slow striptease, she reads the language of the trees' wooden bones. Reads tomorrow in a fall of phyllomancy. When birds come to harvest high berries, auspicy is her share. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

How Hookland Works – you all own it, fill you boots. Now updated to reflect how AI means Arseholes Involved. #Hookland

Goodnight from Ethy Bond, feeding blood to her nightshade homunculus before its winter sleep. Goodnight from Leah Worton in Martle Cottage Hospital, gulping bottled breath and hoping she’ll live long enough to pass on her knowledge of calling the Empress Eel. Goodnight from Hookland.

@timescarcass.bsky.social You had me at antifascist and Gothic.

Rooks shout the dying day. Spirits wake. Twilight as threshold engine for my magics. Twilight as a time of summoning. My tongue spills secret names. My tongue seduces the world to see things my way. I am a witch. Change is the wake of my walking. – #EmilyCBanting #WitchSky

I am going to get through the next six-eight weeks of being housebound with books and good company. Today I am much helped by @sarahkat.bsky.social’s fabulous Fernseed and humbled to find Hookland mentioned in the acknowledgements.

If I lived in the north, I would be submitting to Carnyx Press. Good advice from good folk.

I take this as a high compliment given that Bruce Springsteen wrote one of the greatest zombie stories of all time in 'Atlantic City' ('Everything dies baby that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back').

The witch walks and plucks wild omens, picks plants for the curing of tomorrow. Jack by the hedge, wood sorrel, the fertile hope of navelwort. The witch walks and harvests auguries, the gossip of trees. Her movement across the land is a magical act. – #EmilyCbanting, 1982 #WitchSky

There are infections of blood. There are infections of the soul. There are I believe, infections of the place. For the land itself may be wounded by our traumas. Where its psychic skin cracks, the spoilings of rot and wickedness can set in. We call such infections hauntings. – Rev. A. Morley

Goodnight from Danny Trower, already feeling it was a mistake to meet at the Hawgate Trading Estate to discuss the selling of Faery bones. Goodnight from Joan Letts, afraid to lift the curtains and look out in case its the Wicker King knocking on her caravan door. Goodnight from Hookland.

People don't like to talk about the time when the trees of Whirlow Wood grew wooden people to send as emissaries to Barwell village. People don't talk about the Treaty of the Axe. The ongoing offerings. – Ruth Hyde #VOH

Rails thrum with trains that never arrive. Limbs made phantom by branch line butchery become ghost grooves for steam-powered spirits to move across the land. No aspect of what was once modernity is immune to temporal shading, is immune to being haunted. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

AI usually means Arseholes Involved. It’s a thieving, hollowing and unethical beast of a thing. It has no place in an ethical, decent society. It has no place in Hookland and never will.

Goodnight from Justine Tuttle, wondering how cold the nights have to get before the chimes of the phantom ice cream van stops being heard. Goodnight from Grace Nash, tying ribbons of prayer to the bare wooden bones of the wild cherry trees on Mill Lane. Goodnight from Hookland.

@tomsbrown.bsky.social She falls into her bog bed. Peat-pillowed. Moss-blanketed. Cradled by its brown waters. A protection of humic acids, tannins. Heather honey on the tongue of her bitter dreams.

I think we sometimes love certain places as they reflect what we feel, but can't say aloud. There's an old Hookland phrase – to be tulled – meaning to be caught between two worlds and at home in neither of them. I feel that a lot and I'm sure my favourite places do as well. – Martha Twilling #VOH

People talk about us Children of The Hum as 'weirdo hippies, 'ragged walkers' blindly following something they couldn't hear, couldn't understand. They never understood that we lived in a landscape of wonder. They saw pylons, we saw sublime structures. – Trippy Pete, ex-Pylon Person #VOH

Goodnight from The Ghost Bear’s Bowl pub, where there’s much talk about what the oil extraction company up at Trotton Grove might disturb. Goodnight from Ali Weaver, wishing her mother wouldn’t tell the children stories about the Hairy Pike at bedtime. Goodnight from Hookland.

November’s early darkness enfolds us. The smell of applewood fires and rot is a constant companion at twilight. We hurry between home and evensong, home and pub. Ghosts crowd the lanes, our folklore becomes filled with tales of cold teeth. Winter begins to growl. - #CLNolan

Here’s Sarah of the break-spell Here’s cousin Jem of the curse Give me Bloody Emma who twists the knife and makes it worse - Trad. Hookland witch rhyme

A gentle reminder that this is one of those generational good books which will still being read in 20 years time.

Goodnight from Wiverstone, where the village green firework display has provoked the ire of rudely wakened Moss Maidens. Goodnight from the Egyptian Bingo Hall, where the clinking of lucky charms grows louder as the evening’s grand prize is about to be called. Goodnight from Hookland.

Hookland is closed for the rest of the day due to hospital admission. Don’t worry if there is no goodnight. Don't attempt to talk to the ghosts on Brighthaven Pier till it re-opens. The only thing likely to be on @cultauthor.bsky.social is pictures of wheelchairs and corridors.

Goodnight from Lilly Weyburn, too afraid to find out what’s making moaning sounds in the apple cellar. Goodnight from Kitty Lansbury, wondering why the Victorian sampler hanging in her Nanna’s bedroom appears to have been copied from a grimoire. Goodnight from Hookland.

In November hares come to wood edge. Most say this is for cover, for food. Yet more than one old countryman has told me they come to pay tribute to the wood itself, to have one last dance with the Moss Maidens before their cold sleeping. At twilight they feed and mutter omens. - #CLNolan

Even at the unfashionable end of Ashcourt Necropolis, there are houses of the dead that try to lord it over their neighbours. For all the grand statements made by their stones, they still whisper lonely sorrows. Inequality wins few friends. – #CLNolan

When everything tide-touched becomes property of the King-Under-the-Sea, high tide is a crucial matter. Even more so when it comes to the county's causeway islands. No-one wants to get trapped on Os or Far Gore. No-one wants to spend even an extra hour on Strood. – #MattAdams

#VOH stands for Voices of Hookland, because you can’t tell the truths of anywhere and exclude voices that aren’t the middle class academics, authors and professionals the weird fiction genre relies too heavily upon. Dairy men, shelf stackers, factory workers all sing the strange truths of place.

Goodnight from Rob Eley, sure he can see rough and not entirely human shapes on Salt Tear Marsh. Goodnight from Weychester University Library, where the sound of pages being turned has not stopped even though no living reader is left on the premises. Goodnight from Hookland.

You may want to do this for when Hookland is rude …

The wooden bestiaries of England's churches offer a library of carved folklore. Here a giant wyrm or ghost bear to keep you company as you pray. There a manticore, flown from far Persia, to growl at tedious homilies. – John Betjeman, The English Alphabet , BBC Two, 1972 #Folklore

The year limped on with a malign heart, never quite letting go of its fever. Even as it moved towards the inevitably of ice and long hours of darkness, the village sweated out visions. Evening chatter in both pubs was filled with augury. Ghosts gathered. - #CLNolan, The Growling of the Land, 1912

I like properties where spirits have thrown their ectoplasmic weight around to the point the owners have fled. More so, I adore a property so phantom-plagued no estate agent can find a willing renter. Ghosts that defy the property market are worth studying. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Rain and mist envelop #Hookland this morning. Field, river and mound emerge for brief moments, then fade back to obscurity. @hookland.bsky.social

Finally have some time to start reading this! Absolute delight so far, feeling the lack of a keyboard I can try to plonk the tunes out with. If I use the clarinet I will be a semitone out on everything though xD

Children leave for school early on November 6th. They want extra time to collect the sticks of fallen rockets. They sit in class comparing numbers, passing around the ones with strongest smell of gunpowder, inhaling as if each whiff contained the memory of its display. - Joanna Vickers #VOH

Goodnight from Gosmer, where the villagers have chosen to burn an effigy of Thatcher the Iron Witch instead of Guy Fawkes. Goodnight from David Appleyard, walking a night filled with bonefire incense and the heady gunpowder smell of exploded fireworks. Goodnight from Hookland.

For the witch, there are times when the river becomes a fluid scrying, a constant flow of omens. It's tutelary spirit whispers wisdom in her ears, its magics ripple across her psychic skin. She becomes one with its shaping song. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Those talking openly about witchery often focus on the active aspects – possibly because they like telling people what to do. There's a neglect of passive enchantments, those parts of witchery where we listen, where we commune with the land. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky