Inside the witch is a library of feral spirits, a hundred books that need not be written for their knowledge is best told by tree root and hedge blossom. Her living practice is a curation of wonders and wild wisdom. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Some will claim phantoms patrol places of broken stone due to a persistence of pain. That ruins are haunted because shades are bound to them by trauma. Is it not possible that many ruins have their ghosts in the ordinary way, spectred for nothing more than once being home? – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Goodnight from the 400 bus to London, where Joan Gale is aware certain passengers seem to disappear without ever getting off. Goodnight from Charlie Merrick, worried he hasn’t done enough to prevent his sins from being recorded in the Bone Angel’s Book of Reckonings. Goodnight from Hookland.

All wise children in Hookland know that the gauge doesn't just measure the river at flood and drought, but tell you whether the brook is deep enough for Stay Belows to swim. – Stella Fleet #VOH

Goodnight from Ben Knight, wondering if there’s a special god he can pray too that will reward him with Aurora Monster Scenes model kits. Goodnight from Clive Farley, sleeping in a burnt out Ford Consul on Gutridge waste, surrounded spirits curious about his dreamt terrors. Goodnight from Hookland.

We adorn buildings with lithic lookouts not just for their delivering of stern beauty, but because some atavistic element aches for protection. Soot=scarred they may be,, but we first set those stone spirits to watch what was beyond our own eyes to see. – #CLNolan, BBC National Programme talk, 1933

"One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day." A blog with a new poem from the collection & the story of what inspired it: a little bit of first-hand folklore.

The witch knows that places weave themselves into her story with the dance of their shadows, the singing of their songs. She becomes aware this process is bidirectional. The witch walks the wood and it remembers her footfall, every conversation with its spirits. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Spring is told in bulb bloom, wild garlic crowding. Spring is told in stretching shadows, the waking of ghosts. For the gentle kiss of the sun is a summoning. Whether at meadow edge or a town's neglected alley, few things can refuse it's call. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982

Goodnight from DI Callaghan, explaining to DS Nokes that the phrase ‘diabolic liberties’ has more than one meaning in the county. Goodnight from the painted lead soldiers in Neil Miller’s study, grandly pissed off to be fighting the battle of Hare Hill yet again. Goodnight from Hookland.

The fields have been harrowed. The fields have been frost-scarred. Now comes the sun to warm soil, wake its ghosts. Every crack leaks possibility. A hearing of spear against shield, a hearing of words spoken by the restless dead. Even with worm devoured tongues, they desire conversation.

Goodnight from the Mayford tractor factory, where the number of days without haunting board has been reset to zero yet again. Goodnight from Andrew Pickingale, taught a harsh and bloody lesson about the wrongness of fly-tipping by the Children-Made-of-Thorns. Goodnight from Hookland.

We instinctually know some buildings hold their hurt, release it as shades, coughs of bad memory. We pass them by with almost an expectation of ghost at the glass. Some feel relief when one is not glimpsed, others like myself, feel only an aching disappointment. – Dr. M. Benn, 1982 #Ghosts

It's the year of the Green Paths and paths are made by treading, by listening for where the Green goes ahead. Risograph of a lino print, after @hookland.bsky.social s account of the new year 2026.

Goodnight from The Bloody Babe pub, where the ferret fashion parade has sharply divided regulars on the wisdom of ever putting animals in costume. Goodnight from Dr. Fiona Low, continuing her experiments on containing spirits in the magnetic fields of C90 cassettes. Goodnight from Hookland.

and a Salt Hag of @hookland.bsky.social . If you have not yet visited the county you may very well discover (as I have) that it was home all along.

Folklore is a living current in perpetual manifestation, perpetual mutation. Each telling – whether in story swapped across pints or carved into a church's wooden bestiary – makes a bridge from then to now and onto tomorrow. Even the smallest oak dragon is transmission. – #CLNolan #FolkloreSunday

Goodnight from Lou Weeks and Jimmy Smith, their plans for testing the back seat of his Ford Capri derailed by ghost glimpse. Goodnight from Rosamund Fairley, dreaming of the night when the Pale Giant and all the other chalk figures of the county wake and walk the land. Goodnight from Hookland.

I learnt a new word of Hookland dialect today – wodwak. It's used to describe the sensation that a wood or even a specific tree is watching you. That moment when your psychic skin won't let you deny that bark-browed eyes are upon you. – #MattAdams

Folklore lenses the land with story. We take old corpse paths and wonder if the boneyard's iron gates will ward those spirits that did not find rest. We see first growth of bear garlic and think of Ghost Bear, hedge-priest medicine. To walk with folklore is to scuff up the strange. – #CLNolan

The Restal Waste is a place of bleak wonders. Marsh Ape navigations. Wides and pools where pale-eyed swimmers glare the surface. Salt-winds that cannot help but whisper dooms. Its mud covers your boots, its waters silt your soil. It stitches itself onto your imagination. – #DAKilroy

Goodnight from Darren Winch, offering the jukebox coins in hope for musical time travel to days when he had a wife to dance to Jeepster with. Goodnight from Jordan Leigh, gleefully spraying DROWNED DEAD RISING on the back of the Sea Cadets’ hut at Whitpole. Goodnight from Hookland.

Graffiti on publicly accessible outer walls of Drakewell Asylum accessible moves beyond the usual need to validate fragile teenage love or record one's existence. There's also apotropaic scarring; holes gouged to hold appeasing coins and charms. – Sophie Morley, 1982

I have spent enough time in Hookland to not be surprised by seeing a car park sign that reads: ‘This area liable to sudden flooding. Parked vehicles at risk of partial submersion and Stay Below Vandalism.’ - #MattAdams, 1981

Goodnight from Ashcourt Borough Council, where tonight’s meeting has been disrupted by angry calls to tackle the worsening phantom tram problem. Goodnight from the River Stannis, swollen with rain and a desire to break its banks in revenge for pesticide pollution. Goodnight from Hookland.

@shadikka.bsky.social Just to let you know you are following a really unpleasant right-wing troll. bsky.app/profile/hook...

Goodnight from Joel Holen, captain of the tug boat TB Grey Mare, still shaking after near collision with a submerged sphere of green glowing light. Goodnight from Kit Barton, trying to stay awake to see the ghost he’s sure is stealing from his stash of barley sugars. Goodnight from Hookland.

Every salt-hag has her place of standing. Rocks upon which she sings to summon the winds. Choired by gull shriek and surf rasp, these are her tide temples. These are her places where waves whisper wonders. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

This person put me on a MAGA block list. A particularly nasty form of defamation.

@watchdog666.bsky.social I am English. I run Folklore Against Fascism. I have spent more than a decade of opposing far right and ethnostate numptism on social media, more than three decades opposing on the streets of England. Please take me off the list, not least because it is defamatory.

To writers, boneyards are lithic libraries. We borrow from them the names of the dead to clothe our characters. We read their stones and find whole stories to tell in their economy of words. We gather the whispers of the dead to give our tales life. – #DAKilroy, 1982 #Writing

Goodnight from Fran Tyler, trying to pull down the iron shutters of her mind so her twin won’t know about her dalliance with Liz Grayson. Goodnight from Charles Lansley, wondering how best to say: ‘House burnt down due to angry faeries’ on the insurance form. Goodnight from Hookland.

Those neglected places – harsh, bosky and blurred by the speed they are rushed passed – are adored by the witch. For those places sing fierce songs. These are our thorn temples. Their spirits scratch the sky, tithe blood and offer wonders. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Weychester has a surfeit of haunted doors. Ways through walls that no iron lattice, no amount of locking will prevent phantoms from using. They phase and float through wood, make tunnels across time. Ghosts are not easily shut out. – George Kindred, 'Haunted Hookland', 1970 #Ghosts

Goodnight from Rex Yates, transfixed by the cobbler’s display on Axstane Street where mechanised cardboard elves are mending shoes and boiling children for glue. Goodnight from Andy Cooper, unable to sleep for worry he offended Mr. Parish the spirit-binder. Goodnight from Hookland.

To live on the coast is to know the sea as constant possibility of death. This leads – especially among those who earn their living from it – not only to superstition, but to acts of folk magic. Windowsills become altars for safe return, winds that bless and to gods that gift good catches.

Goodnight from Jo Bale, finding eel skin frightfully fragile to stitch. Goodnight from The Disciple pub, where there’s much discussion about what sort of creature made a nest of bone and hawthorn in the concrete sewer pipes they’re waiting to put in at Long Laver. Goodnight from Hookland.

I found something wonderful today. The internet still has beautiful moments of joyful surprise. #Hookland

The threshold sings a song of seduction. Shoreline. Riverbank. Wood edge. The witch hears it as summoning, as a promise of magics. It is a kiss in her ear, a pull upon her her bones. The witch is one who answers the call of wonder. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Good morning. Still in the county of Hookland with Mother Thel.

There will be proper distressed cardboard versions at some point.

Just sometimes I think I'm doing Hookland right.

Folklore is so much a part of our collective culture that it cannot help but spill out everywhere. It tumbles out of pub signs, street names, graffiti spat from spray cans. Manifests as wondrous acts of knitting. It is an essential element of us. – Dr. M. Benn #FolkloreSunday

Goodnight from Tommy Mann, instantly regretting a tattoo of Young Mother Kemp acquired while on a drunken night out in Ashcourt. Goodnight from the shade of Robert Shank, more perturbed by the missing buttons on his jacket than the fact that he is dead. Goodnight from Hookland.

The mark of the witch is not a third nipple or a refusal to drown, but in a thousand ritual acts as they dance with the land. - Tess Heller, Grey Horse Coven, 1978 #WitchSky

There are many ways to tell the home of a Tree Sprite. The first clue is often a ring of offerings around the trunk. Toys; trading cards; bones, bottle tops; buttons. A circling of appeasements, terror tithe display. Of course, if it's spitting curses at you, there's no need for further clues.

Goodnight from Tom Barton, more troubled by visions of folk pounding at locked exit doors during the 1962 Trocadero blaze than midnight showing of 'Wraith Cage'. Goodnight from Dr. Dench, wishing once again he could cure his patients of rabid superstition. Goodnight from Hookland.

Let's see, what sort of thing for today, then? Let's stay in Hookland for a bit- King Under Sea of that county. Good morning.

Wandering the Hookland, gathering sounds for a project I meant to start a decade ago…

The sky turns nursery pink, turns nursery blue. Wears the bruises of the day as it walks towards the dark. Sensible folk pick up their pace and hurry to home, club or pub. For twilight is a vulnerable threshold. It's best to be inside before it sees you. – #DavidKilroy, 1982 #VOH #Twilight