#ghoststories — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ghoststories, aggregated by home.social.
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What did Razelle really see #disappear around the side of the house? Was it truly a #ghost or something completely different? #supernatural #ghoststories #testimony
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https://www.europesays.com/hu/95249/ Index – Kultúr – Az özvegy lerántja a leplet a halhatatlan legenda árnyoldaláról #CeFemina #CeNapi #Entertainment #GhostStories #HU #Hungarian #Hungary #irodalom #könyv #kultúr #Magyar #Magyarország #memoár #PaulAuster #SiriHustvedt #Szórakozás
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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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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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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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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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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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“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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“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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“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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“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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Made a fun new short for my YT channel this morning. If you have a minute, give it a few and, if you enjoy it, hit the like button please.
It's a snippet of a video I made earlier this year detailing some unexplained experiences I've had, and my rationalization for what I think occurred. (But I've made an effort to present it in a spooky context.)
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Made a fun new short for my YT channel this morning. If you have a minute, give it a few and, if you enjoy it, hit the like button please.
It's a snippet of a video I made earlier this year detailing some unexplained experiences I've had, and my rationalization for what I think occurred. (But I've made an effort to present it in a spooky context.)
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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
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 -
He hadn't been seen for weeks. Then one night, he took the stage.
The Fiddler's Dram — a Tennessee folktale about the greatest fiddler in Weakley County — is the new episode of The Moonlit Road. Out now: https://www.themoonlitroad.com/fiddlers-dram-a-strange-tennessee-folktale/
Storyteller: David Hirt. Soundtrack by bluegrass legend Randall Franks.
🎻 Music: Mississippi Sawyer — Don Richardson (1916) | Public Domain | via https://archive.org
#SouthernFolklore #GhostStories #TennesseeFolklore #Paranormal #TheMoonlitRoad #randallfranks
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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 '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 '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 '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 '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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In GHOST The Lingering Spirits Of North Devon , mother and daughter share their personal experiences, dispelling the belief that spirits are to be feared. #Devon #GhostStories #BookLovers #weekendreads
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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"Before you can scare others, you must be scared yourself. Ghostly fear is transmitted, not concocted." - H R Wakefield on the art of writing ghost stories, of which, of course, he was a master. #BookWormSat #ghoststories #supernatural #vintagepaperbacks
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"Before you can scare others, you must be scared yourself. Ghostly fear is transmitted, not concocted." - H R Wakefield on the art of writing ghost stories, of which, of course, he was a master. #BookWormSat #ghoststories #supernatural #vintagepaperbacks
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The house is gone now.
But some stories don’t disappear with the walls.
Some things don’t need a house to stay behind.The full tale is now up on The Moonlit Road Podcast. 🌙
https://buff.ly/xpc4m1R#SouthernGothic #GhostStories #NewOrleans #Folklore #Folklife
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A ghost comes to tea. From 'A Book Of Ghosts' (1904) by Sabine Baring-Gould. The illustration is by D Murray Smith. #PhantomsFriday #ghosts #ghoststories #BookChatWeekly
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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 -
😱 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 -
😱 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 -
😱 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 -
😱 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 -
He gave her everything —
silk, jewels, a grand house in New Orleans.But some gifts come with a cost.
And some houses remember exactly what was done inside them.The story is now up on The Moonlit Road Podcast. 🌙
https://www.themoonlitroad.com/the-devils-mansion-of-new-orleans -
After this episode, there's no more Ghost Stories. This is one of those shows that will never get another season, or a remake. Is that good or bad? Up to you... #Crunchyroll #ADVFilms #GhostStories #学校の怪談 #anime #supernatural #comedy #abridged #TBGN #SSHITAnime #SundayMorning
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Frohe Ostern!🐇🐰🐣
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Frohe Ostern!🐇🐰🐣
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Frohe Ostern!🐇🐰🐣
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Do you like Death riding a motorcycle? If so, you'll mildly tolerate this episode of Ghost Stories. I will not claim you'll like it. That's too much... #Crunchyroll #ADVFilms #GhostStories #学校の怪談 #anime #supernatural #comedy #abridged #TBGN #SSHITAnime #SaturdayMorning