The Ghost Monk
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theghostmonk.bsky.social
The Ghost Monk
@theghostmonk.bsky.social
Enthusiast of British (mainly) ghostlore, folklore and vintage ghost and weird fiction. Collector of old magazines. Also keen on prehistoric monuments, old churches and suchlike. Am decidedly Q. All scans/photos my own (unless stated). Runs #PhantomsFriday
A perfectly acceptable repost for #PhantomsFriday, I feel. Words from the great man himself (by which I also mean John Silence).
#ghost #ghosts #AlgernonBlackwood
"Not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where floats the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead."

Algernon Blackwood, 'A Psychical Invasion'

#ghost #ghosts #ghoststory #weird #weirdfiction #horror #spritualism #BookChatWeekly #booksky
November 28, 2025 at 11:09 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
Fragment of a Ghost Story by P.B. Shelley

Often mistaken for Percy's entry to the famous Villa Diodati ghost story competition of 16 June 1816, that saw the drafts for Polidori's Vampyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Sadly, no text by Percy survives.

#PhantomsFriday #poetry #gothic #booksky
November 28, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
"... hear my plaint of dead men's hate intolerable. Me, sternly slain by them that should have loved...Hewn down in blood by matricidal hands. Mark ye these wounds from which the heart's blood ran". Clytemnestra's spectre calls on the Furies to exact revenge on her killer/her son #PhantomsFriday
November 28, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
In the early twentieth century there were a number of sightings of a ghost on the road from Shipston to Stratford nr the gates of Alscot Park. On one occasion a man saw it walk in front of his car and thru the park wall.
#PhantomsFriday
November 28, 2025 at 8:11 AM
In Gilbert Watson's weird tale 'The Face In The Jungle' (Pall Mall Magazine, 1907), the weirdest things are actually the feet in the jungle - the ghostly echo of horrible cruelty meted out to an Indian dancing girl.
#PhantomsFriday #ghost #ghosts #weirdtale
November 28, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Striking illustration of Oscar Wilde's 'Canterville Ghost' by the great Charles Keeping.
#PhantomsFriday #ghost #ghosts #OscarWilde #CharlesKeeping #BookChatWeekly #artsky
November 28, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
The spectral black dog pads its way across international folklore. In Flanders Die Roden Ogen, in Germany the Roggenwolf, in S America El Cadeho. Known by various names across the UK, in Suffolk we know him as the Shuck. His claw marks can still be seen on church doors…
#PhantomsFriday
November 28, 2025 at 6:37 AM
The medieval wooden font in the little church at Efenechtyd in North #Wales. It's a lovely thing: the colour of treacle and invitingly tactile. Exceedingly rare, it's survival is probably due to the fact that the great Welsh folklorist and antiquarian Elias Owen was vicar here.
#FontsOnFriday
November 28, 2025 at 8:00 AM
#PhantomsFriday again tomorrow, of course. I look forward to further fear-filled and fascinating #ghost stories old and new; #folklore; art; poems and bloodcurdling info on haunted sites. @phantomsfriday.bsky.social is the place to go.
#BookChatWeekly #booksky #artsky #legends #haunted
November 27, 2025 at 1:22 PM
"She fell forward, and even as she fell a hand, far colder than the snow, caught her neck. She lay struggling in the snow and as she struggled there two hands of an icy fleshless chill closed about her throat. Then she lay still."
- Hugh Walpole, 'The Snow'
#BookologyThursday #booksky #ghoststory
November 27, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Some new Christmas games as suggested by W Heath Robinson, scanned from a (rather tightly bound) 1935 Christmas edition of The Strand Magazine. They are 'Splashing The Scotch', 'Throwing The Wishbone and 'Hunting The Mince Pie'.
#BookologyThursday #HeathRobinson #humour #Christmas
November 27, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
Here's a 1810 recipe for Fig Sewe:

chopped figs
bread cut into small cubes
boiled in ale
seasoned with treacle and nutmeg

more: 'Folklore of the Lake District'
bardofcumberland.com/folklore/

#bookologythursday #booksky
November 20, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Now because BlueSky has an even dirtier mind than I have (they labelled a photo of Michelangelo's David AC because you could see his marble bits and pieces), I suspect this innocent image might suffer the same fate. It's from the Reader's Digest Book - the story is beneath.
#ghost #ghosts #folklore
November 27, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Absolutely wonderful. @folkhorrorrevival.bsky.social, what say you? There's something about the little boy standing at the top of the soon-to-be bonfire as the giant dummy topples over that I find weirdly eerie. Clearly, they "did it beautifully".
#FolkHorror
"Pevensey Historical Pageant. Episode 1. A Tale of the Coming of the Romans. Circa B.C. 54." The Druids Sacrifice. July 1908.
#WyrdWednesday #Pevensey #Druids #1900s
November 26, 2025 at 1:04 PM
You know how it is when you're not sure what to post and you end up posting a picture of a Vampire Elephant? Well, that.

(Victor Biegas painted a whole series of himself being molested by grotesque (mainly female) monsters but this is the weirdest. The man had issues).
#Vampire #Elephant #artsky
November 26, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
"Introduction Of Christianity Into Britain: Christian Missionaries Interrupting A Human Sacrifice." By J. E. Christie. In The Exhibition Of The Royal Society." The Illustrated London News 1.6.1878. #WyrdWednesday #Art #1870s
November 26, 2025 at 9:00 AM
The reason why the tiny and ubiquitous wren (Britain's commonest bird) should have been considered King Of The Birds has always eluded me. Left alone on all other days, on Boxing Day boys would hunt it down and then give out its feathers to households in a sacrificial protection rite.
#WyrdWednesday
November 26, 2025 at 9:09 AM
Was King William II's death while hunting in the New Forest, #Hampshire, an accident, murder - or was it a pre-Christian god-king human sacrifice made to ensure fertility to the land and future prosperity to the people, as has been suggested? (But by whom I've forgotten - Murray?).
#WyrdWednesday
November 26, 2025 at 7:43 AM
November 26, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
At Vale Royal Abbey today, I was reminded of how local lore has lingered here for 700 years. I gave a talk on it last year and an elderly lady came up to me at the end and asked if I ever walked in the woods where the abbot was murdered in the 1330s. There, she said, 'the birds never sing'.
November 23, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Some stories in the old magazines are surprisingly gruesome. A Bernard Hodgson's short-short story, 'Flies', about miners - who we understand are also murderers - being engulfed by a colossal swarm of flesh-eating insects is especially horrid. (Pearson's, 1906).
#horror #horrorstory #BookChatWeekly
November 25, 2025 at 10:09 AM
I'm having a bathroom fitted, which is noisy chaos, so I've been hiding in the sitting room re-watching #Quatermass And The Pit, with headphones on. I'm sure many have already noticed this but when the missile's glowing, the roundels inside look just like the Tardis interior.
#DrWho #DoctorWho
November 24, 2025 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by The Ghost Monk
WIDDERSHINS means moving counter clockwise; this inversion of the natural order was associated with the devil and witchcraft. In this image Witches delight in flying widdershins around North Berwick church with their broomsticks #FolkloreSunday
November 23, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Hijacked by another Monday morning.
(Roland Topor).
November 24, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Hideously tinted but rather charming picture entitled 'The Fairy Circle'. It was reproduced in an edition of 'Pall Mall Magazine' in 1907 and is by Elsie Gregory.
#fairy #fairies #faerie #folklore
November 23, 2025 at 1:06 PM