#ghost-stories — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ghost-stories, aggregated by home.social.
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BLOG POST: The tenth and final 'story by story' post is about how I wrote 'The Lost Seconds' which wraps up my latest collection.
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“Farewell Miss Julie Logan”, by JM Barrie
The tale of an uncanny romance in a remote winter glen, “Farewell Miss Julie Logan” is one of the most unnerving & tenacious examples of Scottish Gothic fiction. Listen to the story online, from Romancing the Gothic
10/10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enjQUoqUpy4
#Scottish #literature #JMBarrie #gothic #Scotland #supernatural #ghosts #ghoststories
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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 -
BLOG POST: How I wrote 'The Dead Spot'; why it's only as long as it needs to be (HT Owen Booth); and how it was influenced by decades of fretting about the potential for civil war.
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BLOG POST: How I wrote 'One Star Review', a story about a holiday let with a history that the hosts would rather not talk about, even if visitor after visitor notices that something is not quite right.
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Who you gonna call? (Sorry, couldn't help it...) It's time to introduce our very own Writing the Occult ghost hunter: author and paranormal enthusiast Rosie O'Carroll will join the seekers on 30 May to tell us the "how" and "why" of going on a ghost investigation 👻
Tickets for Writing the Occult: Seekers are now on sale, with more speaker announcements to come.
writingtheoccult.carrd.co
Meet Rosie🧵⬇️
#ghosts #paranormal #paranormalinvestigation #occult #writers #writing #ghoststories
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😱 Oh no, the AIs are coming to take over! 🙄 This article pretends to unravel the "mystery" of why we indulge in sci-fi nightmares about #AI, but spoiler alert: it’s because humans love a good ghost story — even when the ghosts are just lines of code. 👻💻
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-do-we-tell-ourselves-scary-stories-about-ai-20260410/ #Takeover #SciFi #GhostStories #HumanNature #Technology #HackerNews #ngated -
Frohe Ostern!🐇🐰🐣
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Siri Hustvedt: #GhostStories auf Kampnagel. Sie war sehr charming und funny, nachdenklich und tiefsinnig. Ein sehr schöner Abend, auch wenn wir Plätze in der obersten/ hintersten Reihe hatten...
Absolut herausragend auch der Moderator Jan Ehlert, der zwischen Englisch und Deutsch wechselnd ihre Beiträge übersetzte und direkt mit seiner weiteren sehr guten Moderation anschloss.
https://kampnagel.de/produktionen/siri-hustvedt-ghost-stories -
I’m a big fan of Helen’s work. Her stories are clever, atmospheric and often scare-filled, which is already a powerful combination. And then when you add in her exquisitely realistic and researched sense of place, the terror only increases exponentially.
There aren’t too many great writers furthering the pleasing terror agenda of M. R. James, and making it their own, but Helen’s surely one of them—and one of the best.
#SupernaturalHorror #GhostStories #Horror #SupernaturalLiterature #Books #Bookstodon #WomenInHorror @bookstodon https://mas.to/@helengrantsays/116277066752625876
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Lese jetzt Breyger und Hustvedt, diese zwei hauptsächlich und allerlei nebenher. Die äitiologische Untersuchung hat immerhin ein neues Medikament ins Spiel gebracht. Ganz langsam wird es aufdosiert, damit die Nebenwirkungen nicht allzu schlimm werden. Ich träume allerlei wirres und gleichzeitig für mich selbst nachvollziehbares Zeug, das aber sofort ausradiert wird, sobald ich wach bin. Das kleine Büchlein Träume in Europa von Wolfram Lotz habe ich tatsächlich in der Bücherei gefunden. Die Messe in Leipzig ist im vollen Gang, ab und zu höre ich etwas davon im Radio, die Preisverleihung an Katja Poladjan habe ich per Stream live verfolgt. Die Lyrikempfehlungen sind voller wunderbarer Bände, von denen ich einige schon kenne und viele im Laufe des Jahres lesen möchte. Es ist gut, das gefeiert wird und Menschen einander treffen und miteinander reden. Wir brauchen Widerstandskraft, und die, so glaube ich, nährt sich am ehesten durch Verbindung. In der Zeit erklärt Thea Dorn kenntnisreich wie unsere Demokratie gerade auf dem besten Weg ist, sich selbst lebensbedrohlich zu gefährden. Eva von Redecker erklärt in einem Interview im Freitag, welche Faktoren dafür sorgen, dass der rechte Rand immer stärker wird, dass Menschen diese eine Partei wählen. Ich bin froh, dass es so kluge Köpfe gibt, die die Zusammenhänge durchschauen und erklären. Aber ich habe auch Angst, dass diese Stimmen nicht durchdringen.
Siri Hustvedts „Ghost stories“ sind berührend, gerade weil sie ein Stückwerk sind, einmal handelt es sich um Tagebuchauszüge, dann werden Mails an die Freund:innen gezeigt, und später dann Briefe, die der dem Tode geweihte Paul Auster an seinen neugeborenen Enkel schreibt. Ebenso wie Joan Didion begegnet Hustvedt der Krankheit, indem sie alles verfügbare liest, sich so viele wissenschaftliche Artikel aneignet, dass ein Arzt sie fragt, ob sie auch Ärztin sei. Sie beschreibt, wie sie aus der Welt gefallen ist mit dem Tod ihres Mannes, und wie sie danach versucht, die zerbrochenen Stücke wieder zusammen zu fügen. Parallel dazu lese ich „hallo niemand“ von Y. Breyger, ein verrückter Roadtrip durch unsere verrückte Zeit.
Die Magnolie im Nachbargarten steht in rosaroter Pracht. In der Küche liegt die blassgelbe Wortschau mit wunderbaren Gedichten von Jürgen Brocan und beeindruckenden Zeichnungen von Christoph Heek. Es geht in dieser Ausgabe um Leichtigkeit und dieses Thema ist wirklich gut umgesetzt.
Ja, aber wie geht es dir selbst, fragt eine Stimme. Ich komme zurecht, sage ich.
#GhostStories #SiriHustvedt #Wortschau #YvgeniyBreyger -
#gamemastersbookclub Explores the Genres! - Bangsian (Afterlife) #fantasy #bangsian #afterlife #ghoststories #BleachAnime #goodomens #peterbeagle #garthnix #ghostbride #yangzechoo #books #bookstodon
Bleach - Tite Kubo
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett
A Fine and Private Place - Peter Beagle
Sabriel - Garth Nix
The Ghost Bride - Yangsze Choo -
Have you ever taken a dance class?
#Dance #Fiction #FlashFiction #Paranormal #Ghosts #GhostStories
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Reflections of Elegance: A Dance Beyond the Veil
Welcome to this week’s dance class, everyone. For those first-timers, I’m Michael, your instructor. Let’s begin with introductions from the first-timers.”
They moved around the circle, nervous laughter flitting between strangers. more so when Tom, dressed in a top hat and tails, introduced himself. When they finished, Michael counted again.
Eleven. An odd number.
“Well,” he smiled, clapping once, “who’d like to partner with me? Maggie?”
“I’m with Emily, my wife,” announced Maggie.
“Tom?” Michael gestured. “You don’t mind dancing with another man, do you? After all, you’re dressed for the part.”
Tom looked horrified. “Why would I dance with a man? I’m here with my wife.”
There was a polite pause while everyone waited for Tom’s wife to reveal herself. A few people looked towards all the empty space around Tom.
“Of course,” Michael said casually as he broke the silence. “Right, take your positions, everyone. I’ve some hits of the eighties to dance to later, but first we’re going to do an old-fashioned waltz.”
Tom frowned before music filled the room, and shoes softly whispered over polished wood. Partners turned, stepped, and breathed together.
Tom moved carefully, one hand curved around an invisible waist, the other clasping fingers no one else could see. Every now and then, Michael and the other dancers watched Tom smile as he spoke to himself.
“Tom,” Michael said gently, as he approached the edge of the mirror. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re dancing alone.”
“But she’s right here with me. We’ve been coming here for years,” he said as he faced Michael and the large, mirrored wall. “Tell him, Darling.”
In the room, the figure of a much younger woman in a ball gown appeared in Tom’s arms.
Maggie gasped. Emily staggered backwards while Michael felt the air leave his lungs.
The woman kissed Tom on the cheek, leaving lipstick on his face, and then lifted a hand and pressed it flat against the mirror.
Inside the mirror, Michael and the other dancers started to scream. Tom watched as their reflections shattered into tiny pieces along with the mirror before he and his wife left the room.
Outside the old music hall, where many from the past once danced, the ghostly figures of a man in a top hat and tails and a woman in a ball gown departed the hall once more. Tom hadn’t liked the glimpse of the future he had seen in the mirror.
Written in response to Esther Chilton’s Writing Prompt: Theme: Dance.
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#Dance #Fiction #FlashFiction #GhostStories #GhostStory #Ghosts #Paranormal #ShortStories #WritingChallenge #WritingPrompts -
If there is one modern author of ghost stories I would never hesitate to recommend, it is Darcy Coates. Over the past few years, I have read many of her books and have yet to be disappointed even once -- and Gallows Hill is no exception.
#ghoststories #books #novels #horror #literature
https://haunting.alexseifert.com/2026/02/13/gallows-hill-by-darcy-coates/