#ghost-stories — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ghost-stories, aggregated by home.social.
-
TIL sobre el doblaje oficial USA del anime #GhostStories y estoy flipando con la burrada maravillosa que es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5LjA0gjeX8
-
I had to get an insect bite checked at the pharmacists today, so I popped into Oxfam to see what books I might be able to get my hands on. Look at these two beauties; and only £2 each. #books #bookstodon #thewomaninblack #susanhill #EdithWharton #ghoststories
-
Fellow lovers of classic #SupernaturalLiterature, a question for you - do you know if Ash Tree Press ebook titles are available to buy anywhere other than on the dreaded Am*zon? Many years ago I bought a few of them from Christopher Roden direct, when they still maintained a website, but I think that's gone now?
Any help (and/or boosts) would be very much appreciated. Thank you!
#AshTreePress #GhostStories #SupernaturalFiction #Ebooks #Bookstodon @bookstodon
-
It’s both #Caturday and the birthday of M.R. James (born #OTD in 1862), perhaps the finest author of ghost stories we’ve ever known. This makes it a very good day indeed.
(Donnie, on the right, was born in 2020 but he can be as supernatural as the next cat.)
#CatsOfMastodon #DonnieTheCat #MRJames #GhostStories #GhostStoriesOfAnAntiquary #SupernaturalLiterature #Bookstodon @bookstodon
-
The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town (The Uncanny Chronicles)
"Thirty-Three Tales. Thirty-Three Tellers. One Lost Town"
Sale: $6.99 to $1.99
by Gregory Miller
Rating: 4.3/5 (1,685 Reviews)
#horror #fiction #books #booksky #thriller #ghoststories #shortstories #creepy #mystery
The Uncanny Valley: Tales from... -
The Unquiet Hour - No Cost Newsletter
#TheUnquietHour #GhostStories #Folklore #StrangeHistory #Unexplained #Mystery #HauntedPlaces #LocalLegends #Storytelling #CuriousMinds #writing
-
Oh! YES! Another Zackie story!
reynafavis.wordpress.com/2026/07/02/t...
Kinda going back to stories predating the ones so far, does that make it a prequel of sorts? #Zackie #ZackieStories #psychopompZackie #fangirling #mysteries #ghoststories #indieauthors #books #summerreading #faveseries -
Why yes, I sure did wear a "I ❤️ Weenies" right before going to grab some pictures of St. Luke's Chapel with these two, and yes, downtown Raleigh was in the middle of a pride celebration. Turns out, a lot of others like weenies as well!
#Skepticism #Paranormal #CriticalThinking #PhantomChoir #GhostStories #Debunked #ParanormalInvestigation
-
Stocksbridge Bypass Revisited
There are some stories that refuse to stay buried.
You can examine them, challenge them, investigate them and pull apart every available piece of evidence. You can stand in the places where events allegedly occurred. You can interview witnesses. You can compare accounts and search for inconsistencies. You can spend years trying to separate fact from fiction. Yet somehow the story survives.
The Stocksbridge Bypass is one such story. For many years the road has been described as Britain’s most haunted highway. Tales of phantom monks, ghostly children, strange figures and unexplained encounters have become woven into the folklore of South Yorkshire.
Television programmes have featured the road. Paranormal investigators have visited it. Podcasts continue to discuss it. New generations of ghost hunters discover it every year.
In 2010, alongside my good friend and colleague Steve Mera, I took a critical look at the legend. Together we examined witness accounts, investigated locations, considered alternative explanations and attempted to establish what could actually be known about one of Britain’s most famous hauntings. You can read that report here – Stocksbridge Bypass: A Critical Review
The article generated considerable discussion.
Some readers felt the evidence supported the existence of something genuinely unexplained. Others felt the case demonstrated how easily stories can grow and evolve over time. Others, well… They just thought we were being killjoys. What fascinated me most, however, was not the evidence itself.
It was what happened afterwards. The legend carried on. If anything, it became stronger.
Sixteen years later the monk still walks. The children still play. The stories continue to circulate. And perhaps that tells us something important. Because the real mystery of the Stocksbridge Bypass may not be whether it is haunted. The real mystery may be how modern folklore is created.
To understand that, we need to go back to the beginning.
The bypass opened during the late 1980s, designed to ease traffic congestion around Stocksbridge. It was, by any reasonable measure, a modern road. Unlike ancient lanes and forgotten trackways, it arrived complete with engineers, planning documents and living witnesses. Yet almost from the beginning strange stories began to emerge.
Construction workers reported unusual experiences. Security guards described encounters with mysterious figures. Most famously, stories began circulating about a hooded monk seen near Pearoyd Bridge. Other reports quickly followed. Ghostly children. Shadowy figures. Unexplained feelings of dread. As often happens with folklore, the stories accumulated.
One witness tells a tale. Another adds a detail. A newspaper reports the account. A television programme broadcasts it. A book repeats it. A podcast retells it. Each retelling adds another layer. By the time most people encounter the legend, they are rarely hearing the original story. They are hearing the latest version.
Folklorists have long recognised this process. Traditional folklore was once carried by word of mouth around hearths, pubs and village greens. Today it spreads through websites, social media, documentaries and YouTube channels. The mechanism has changed. Human nature has not.
The Stocksbridge Bypass exists at a fascinating crossroads between traditional folklore and modern media. Had the story emerged a century earlier, it might have remained a local tale known only to nearby communities. Instead it appeared at exactly the right moment. Local newspapers reported it. Television discovered it. Programmes such as Strange But True? introduced it to a national audience and suddenly a South Yorkshire ghost story belonged to the whole country. The monk became a celebrity.
What is particularly interesting is how the various elements of the haunting reflect much older traditions. Take the monk – Please take him. He has a dirty habit(sorry!)- Britain is full of phantom monks. Many appear near ruined abbeys, ancient churches and former religious sites. Some are associated with historical events. Others seem to exist purely because a hooded figure emerging from the darkness is an inherently unsettling image.
The ghost children are equally familiar. Stories of spectral children appear throughout British folklore. Sometimes they are linked to tragedies. Sometimes they seem entirely disconnected from any identifiable historical event. They both occupy a strange place within our collective imagination.The bypass may be modern. Its ghosts are anything but and this raises another intriguing possibility – Perhaps Stocksbridge Bypass did not create new folklore. Perhaps it simply provided a new stage upon which old folklore could perform – After all, roads have always attracted stories. Travellers are vulnerable. They are away from home. They move through unfamiliar landscapes, often at night. The road is a liminal space, neither here nor there. Folklore thrives in such places, from phantom hitchhikers to black dogs, from highwaymen to ghosts, Britain’s roads have never been short of stories. The bypass merely joined a much older tradition.
The surrounding landscape contributes its own atmosphere. This part of South Yorkshire possesses a unique character. The hills rise abruptly above former industrial communities. Woodland presses against roads and reservoirs. Old boundaries blur into newer developments. There is a sense of transition everywhere. The landscape feels ancient and modern simultaneously. On misty evenings the bypass can appear genuinely uncanny, but hat does not prove the existence of ghosts.
It does, however, help explain why ghost stories flourish there. The atmosphere matters, as does landscape and even the place. After all, the most enduring legends are rarely attached to locations that feel ordinary.
So, as the years pass, another process becomes visible.The original witnesses gradually fade from the story. Some have passed away. Others have withdrawn from public discussion. Yet the legend continues independently of them. It no longer requires the original events, it has become self-sustaining and this, perhaps, is the final stage of folklore. A story reaches a point where it no longer belongs to individual witnesses. It belongs to the community. Stocksbridge Bypass has reached that point.
Whether one believes in ghosts or not almost becomes irrelevant. The legend now exists in its own right. Visitors still stop. Investigators still search. Stories continue to be told. And somewhere between the steel towns, the moors and the woodland valleys of South Yorkshire, a hooded figure continues to walk through the public imagination.
My investigation with Steve Mera remains one of the most rewarding pieces of research I have undertaken. Not because we solved a mystery, but because we were able to watch folklore at work. The bypass taught me that legends are living things. They evolve and adapt. They survive criticism. Sometimes they even grow stronger because of it.
The monk may never be conclusively identified, the children may never be explained. But the debate? The debate will undoubtedly continue.
The greatest lesson of the Stocksbridge Bypass investigation for me is that stories have power – not because they are true or because they are false. But because people continue to tell them.
And as long as that happens, the ghost road of South Yorkshire will never truly fall silent.
Further Reading:
David Clarke – articles on contemporary folklore and road ghost traditions
Steve Mera and Kirst Mason D’Raven – Stocksbridge Bypass: A Critical Review
Strange But True? archives
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud – A Dictionary of English Folklore
Katharine Briggs – British Folk Tales and Legends
Copyright Notice:
© 2026 Mysterious Times. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations used in reviews, research or educational purposes.
#BritainsMostHauntedRoad #ContemporaryLegends #DavidClarke #GhostHunting #ghostStories #HauntedRoads #History #ModernFolklore #paranormalInvestigations #PhantomHitchhiker #Sheffield #SouthYorkshire #SteveMera #StocksbridgeBypass #StocksbridgeBypassGhost #StocksbridgeMonk #YorkshireFolklore -
I'm reminded, by way of a post from my friend Mark Valentine (https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-centenary-of-connoisseur-and-other.html), that Walter de la Mare's collection of stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, was published a century ago this year. It contains some truly singular ghost stories that are masterpieces of the form: the title story, Mr. Kempe and All Hallows to name but three of them.
I'm also reminded when getting it from the shelf that my copy contains on its front pastedown a lovely bookplate of one Dorothy Nash, about whom I've not been able to find out very much. The age of the plate would seem to be contemporaneous with this 1926 volume. Its motto - “adscriptus glæbe” - means something like tied, or attached, to the soil or the earth. The depiction of an oak sapling sprouting from the acorn might even be a playful nod to the æ ligature also known as an “ash”.
One other book listing online has the same plate which it describes as “Interesting Bookplate of Dorothy Nash (actress.)” IMDB tells me that Ms. Nash is “known for Johnny Ring and the Captain's Sword (1921) and The Stain in the Blood (1916)” but since both of these appear to be US-made films, I think it's unlikely to be our Dorothy…
And finally, right at the bottom of that front pastedown is also a tiny bookseller's label, with gold type on a black background, which reads:
S.W. SIMMS & CO., Booksellers
12 George Street & 8 Bridge Street
BATH.I love that books contains these secrets and avenues for investigation, even before you get to the "true" contents.
#WalterDeLaMare #TheConnoisseurAndOtherStories #ShortStories #GhostStories #StrangeStories #Bookstodon #Bookplates #ExLibris #DorothyNash @bookstodon
-
Listening tips: Ghosts and hauntings
There’s something deeply satisfying about listening to ghost stories on a dark, rainy evening. The suspense, the thrill, the fear of the unknown… Regardless of whether you take them seriously or see them as a form of entertainment, ghost stories have been around for a very long time, trigerring something primordial in the human psyche.
In this post, I’ll share with you some of my favourite podcasts on the subject of ghosts and hauntings (as in real-life experiences, not the literary genre of ghost stories). From whispered accounts of haunted houses to chilling explorations of folklore and paranormal investigations, these shows invite us to lean in and believe—if only for a moment—that the veil between worlds is much thinner than we might think.
Hosted by Danny Robins, this BBC Radio 4 programme is an absolute must. While it also covers other supernatural / paranormal phenomena, such as the UFOs, ghosts feature prominently. Each episode consists of an interview with a witness to an uncanny experience, followed by comments from experts in the field – one of them on Team Believer, the other on Team Skeptic. At the moment of writing, there are close to 100 episodes available, including a recent release of Cold Case episodes, exploring famous and still unexplained mysteries from the earlier centuries.
Jim Harold’s The Paranormal Podcast is one of the longest-running shows dedicated to the supernatural, featuring interviews with leading voices on ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena. Since 2005, Harold has built a loyal audience by blending guests, folklore, and chilling accounts into a weekly exploration of the unknown. With over 900 episodes available, you’ll have plenty of listening material!
Similar in scope and concept, Otherworld—hosted by Jack Wagner—presents detailed witness accounts, typically unfolding like a documentary-style investigation, designed to make listeners feel like they’re part of the story. Episodes last from anywhere between a couple of minutes to hour-long features, some of them serialised over several episodes.
This podcast series is rather different, in that it explores the religion of contemporary American spiritualism, from its roots in the 19th century (ever heard of the Fox sisters?) to whatever remains of the once thriving spiritual and social reform movement. The host, Jamie Loftus, guides us through this fascinating history and introduces us to a present-day community of practicing spiritualists.
And if you’re not at all familiar with the history of the spiritualist movement, Season 2 of the Unobscured podcast is a great resource. Presented by veteran podcaster Aaron Mahnke and including interviews with prominent researchers and historians, this series is a wonderful addition to his other very popular podcast, Lore.
There are many more podcasts out there on this (and related) topics, not all of them of great quality. If you have any additional tips and recommendations, do post them in the comments section below!
NOTES
I’m a freelance language tutor (English, Latin, Classical Greek), researcher, and a literary scholar currently based in Belgrade, Serbia.
If you wish to receive new content from my blog – as soon as it’s published – please enter your email address in the subscribe box below.
To support my work, you can send me a donation via PayPal. It would be greatly appreciated!
COVER PHOTO CREDIT
#ghostStories #ghosts #listening #paranormal #podcasts #radio #spiritualism #supernatural