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1000 results for “grey_ghost”
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Ghostkeeper (1981) Available February 24
#horror – #horrormovies – #Ghostkeeper – #CanadianInternationalPictures – Who next becomes the keeper of the beast that lives on human flesh? During a New Year’s Eve snowmobiling trip, Jenny (Rabid’s Riva Spier), her boyfriend Marty (The Grey Fox’s Murray Ord), and their friend Chrissy (Sheri McFadden) veer off path to explore a patch of private […]
#ad #Ghostkeeper #horror #Releases
https://horrornerdonline.com/2026/01/ghostkeeper-1981-available-february-24/
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Ghostkeeper (1981) Available February 24
#horror – #horrormovies – #Ghostkeeper – #CanadianInternationalPictures – Who next becomes the keeper of the beast that lives on human flesh? During a New Year’s Eve snowmobiling trip, Jenny (Rabid’s Riva Spier), her boyfriend Marty (The Grey Fox’s Murray Ord), and their friend Chrissy (Sheri McFadden) veer off path to explore a patch of private […]
#ad #Ghostkeeper #horror #Releases
https://horrornerdonline.com/2026/01/ghostkeeper-1981-available-february-24/
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Ghostkeeper (1981) Available February 24
#horror – #horrormovies – #Ghostkeeper – #CanadianInternationalPictures – Who next becomes the keeper of the beast that lives on human flesh? During a New Year’s Eve snowmobiling trip, Jenny (Rabid’s Riva Spier), her boyfriend Marty (The Grey Fox’s Murray Ord), and their friend Chrissy (Sheri McFadden) veer off path to explore a patch of private […]
#ad #Ghostkeeper #horror #Releases
https://horrornerdonline.com/2026/01/ghostkeeper-1981-available-february-24/
-
Ghostkeeper (1981) Available February 24
#horror – #horrormovies – #Ghostkeeper – #CanadianInternationalPictures – Who next becomes the keeper of the beast that lives on human flesh? During a New Year’s Eve snowmobiling trip, Jenny (Rabid’s Riva Spier), her boyfriend Marty (The Grey Fox’s Murray Ord), and their friend Chrissy (Sheri McFadden) veer off path to explore a patch of private […]
#ad #Ghostkeeper #horror #Releases
https://horrornerdonline.com/2026/01/ghostkeeper-1981-available-february-24/
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Steven Caple Jr. Launches New Banner Grey Skies And Sets ‘Ghost Fleet’ Movie As First Pic Under New First Look Deal
#News #GhostFleet #GreySkies #StevenCapleJrhttps://deadline.com/2025/06/steven-caple-jr-ghost-fleet-movie-1236441911/
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The Big Grey Man story has been around for more than one hundred years, with many reports of ghostly sightings and strange sounds resonating through the rough terrain of the Cairngorm Mountains. #bigfoot #cairngormmountains https://bigfootbeat.blog/post/812325077159903232/big-grey-man-scottish-mountains-terrifying
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The Big Grey Man story has been around for more than one hundred years, with many reports of ghostly sightings and strange sounds resonating through the rough terrain of the Cairngorm Mountains. #bigfoot #cairngormmountains https://bigfootbeat.blog/post/812325077159903232/big-grey-man-scottish-mountains-terrifying
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The Big Grey Man story has been around for more than one hundred years, with many reports of ghostly sightings and strange sounds resonating through the rough terrain of the Cairngorm Mountains. #bigfoot #cairngormmountains https://bigfootbeat.blog/post/812325077159903232/big-grey-man-scottish-mountains-terrifying
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More Gwen and Grey. Gwen has just sent a messenger spell to call Emily down.
Gwen waited a minute or two, and then sent a second messenger spell after the first, this one glowing a little brighter than the first. A few seconds later there was a loud "thump" of a book hitting the floor. A few seconds after that Emily's head stuck down through the ceiling. "Gwen! Did you have to pull the desk aside?" Then she looked around, and floated down to the floor, drifting up against Allen, taking stock of his expression. "Ah. All right, I see." she continued in a far more subdued tone.
"Father," Allen spoke with an uncommon seriousness, "Emily has brought something to my attention about my returning her to herself. She has reminded me that magic has a cost, and a balance. What I did not know was how that balance would be paid."
"Is it going to kill you, son?"
"No, but Emily's existence has a limit, after which she will not even be a ghost. That is the price and the balance."
Emily broke in "I have made it clear to Allen that he is not to follow me when it is time! Or before."
"I see. How long?"
"My life. So about seventeen more years."
Allen spoke up again "We've talked about it, and she wants me to find someone to anchor me to life for when she has to move on. But Emily, my heart, you are the only one for me."
"And that, dearest is why I want to find someone who can love you enough to ground you until the pain of my passing fades."
The Baron considered his son and ghostly daughter-in-law "Allen, as much as the idea appals you, the men of our family love too hard and too deep. I had you and Gwen to keep me here after your mother passed. You will not have that."
"Not just the men, Father" Gwen added, to which he nodded. Then he continued "The King will be here in a day or two. Perhaps we might find someone in his entourage. If not, Emily, I believe we shall be traditional about this. We shall hold a festival ball. I think it is best that we find someone sooner, so that they can get to know both of you properly."#SF #SFF #Fantasy #Ghost #Dragon #GwenAndGrey #tootfic #IAmWriting
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FENS
Grey green fens. The flat land
Sodden with pooled rain. Ghosts
Of trees, winter bare, in dishevelled
Clusters. Houses built on peat
And silt. Erosion of land and
The culture of travel. This Heat
Age rips more out of the soil
Than the Ice Age ever did.
Constant insistent wind. Bare
Ribs of civilisation. Dour attendants
At community meetings. Ice-faced,
Not a single #optimist amongst them. -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
My childhood brushes with ghost lore
Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.
Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.
The Grey Lady
I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.
In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.
The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.
The Yellow Lady
The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear.
The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child.
Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.
The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.
Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.
Haunted houses and witch houses
Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)
Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.
Read about more ghost lore here.
#books #england #EnglishFolklore #fiction #Filton #folklore #ghost #ghostLore #ghostStories #ghostStory #Gloucestershire #GreyLady #hauntedHouse #history #horror #TockingtonManor #witches #writing #YellowLady -
Another little bit of Gwen and Grey. Enjoy. (Includes the previous snippet.)
Emily looked at Gwen in horror "Did it hurt?"
She got a twisted smile in return "Unless you are an egg, like these ones", she gestured at the serpents, "being born always does. But yes, 'Len, I am still your sister in my heart, even if the heart itself is a little different now. And as the big sister..."
"Nope! You're the little sister now. You got born a second time. And after me, that makes you the little sister!"
At that Grey laughed, and it was such a laugh of joy that the tension in the room suddenly shattered.
"Your big brother has you there, love!" they said between laughs.
"My big brother??" Gwen sputtered "He's the ... why ... you ... Emily!!"
The ghost looked from one to the other "I know better than to get between siblings, come Grey, let us leave these children." and she started drifting towards the door.
Grey looked at Allen and Gwen. "No, we need to set a good example for the hatchlings."
"We are." came the prim reply "We are demonstrating prudence." and she drifted through the door. Then her head stuck back through the closed door with a "Come along Grey, and you too, children," and then she was gone again.#GwenAndGrey #SFF #Fantasy #Dragon #Ghost #IAmWriting
Read the whole thing so far here:
https://rdmasters.lympago.com/p/gwen-and-grey-fantasy.html -
Some mornings, Venice gives you nothing but grey skies and a ghost of a boat.
That's usually when the best photographs happen.
Punta della Dogana, Leica, patience.#Venice #Leica #MoodPhotography #DocumentaryPhotography #ItalyInBlackAndWhite
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Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Yes but see Tobias Forge is involved in the university Groningen psychology Epstein Zeta Grey timelime computers experiment... the mouth of Sauron IS behind it... they went to Ghost meet and greets. #mouthofsauron #shelob #tobiasforge #viy #morgoth #hexagonian #alchemicaltimelines #jarlborg #saintboniface #ruguniversitygroningen
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Yes but see Tobias Forge is involved in the university Groningen psychology Epstein Zeta Grey timelime computers experiment... the mouth of Sauron IS behind it... they went to Ghost meet and greets. #mouthofsauron #shelob #tobiasforge #viy #morgoth #hexagonian #alchemicaltimelines #jarlborg #saintboniface #ruguniversitygroningen
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And g'morning (out here at least). Grey and rainy as we go through another one of these -- hope you're keeping safe if necessary -- but in the meantime, enjoy a wonderfully ghostly/moody new single from #MegBaird, I sez. #music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFUMNbD3WUk
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Belle Flower stands barefoot and bleeding while the world burns. Red finds her like a ghost from better days. The man in grey hunts. The news screams. The towers fall. “You’ve got steel now,” Red says. But Belle knows the heat is coming. She’s being watched. Hiding under the dash like old contraband. And it’s not over. Not yet.
▶️ https://youtu.be/LQp7AkJnuhY
🎧 https://watchtowerintel.com/2025/09/26/chapter-tough-talk.html
#WatchtowerFiles #SurveillanceState #PsychologicalThriller #NoirRevival
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Belle Flower stands barefoot and bleeding while the world burns. Red finds her like a ghost from better days. The man in grey hunts. The news screams. The towers fall. “You’ve got steel now,” Red says. But Belle knows the heat is coming. She’s being watched. Hiding under the dash like old contraband. And it’s not over. Not yet.
▶️ https://youtu.be/LQp7AkJnuhY
🎧 https://watchtowerintel.com/2025/09/26/chapter-tough-talk.html
#WatchtowerFiles #SurveillanceState #PsychologicalThriller #NoirRevival
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Belle Flower stands barefoot and bleeding while the world burns. Red finds her like a ghost from better days. The man in grey hunts. The news screams. The towers fall. “You’ve got steel now,” Red says. But Belle knows the heat is coming. She’s being watched. Hiding under the dash like old contraband. And it’s not over. Not yet.
▶️ https://youtu.be/LQp7AkJnuhY
🎧 https://watchtowerintel.com/2025/09/26/chapter-tough-talk.html
#WatchtowerFiles #SurveillanceState #PsychologicalThriller #NoirRevival
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Belle Flower stands barefoot and bleeding while the world burns. Red finds her like a ghost from better days. The man in grey hunts. The news screams. The towers fall. “You’ve got steel now,” Red says. But Belle knows the heat is coming. She’s being watched. Hiding under the dash like old contraband. And it’s not over. Not yet.
▶️ https://youtu.be/LQp7AkJnuhY
🎧 https://watchtowerintel.com/2025/09/26/chapter-tough-talk.html
#WatchtowerFiles #SurveillanceState #PsychologicalThriller #NoirRevival
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Belle Flower stands barefoot and bleeding while the world burns. Red finds her like a ghost from better days. The man in grey hunts. The news screams. The towers fall. “You’ve got steel now,” Red says. But Belle knows the heat is coming. She’s being watched. Hiding under the dash like old contraband. And it’s not over. Not yet.
▶️ https://youtu.be/LQp7AkJnuhY
🎧 https://watchtowerintel.com/2025/09/26/chapter-tough-talk.html
#WatchtowerFiles #SurveillanceState #PsychologicalThriller #NoirRevival
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Updates include a flurry of #poltergeists from 1962, some #hauntings in Devon, and a couple of Lady Jane Grey manifestations... https://www.paranormaldatabase.com/recent/ #ghosts #fortean