even*cleveland: ghosts

Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts

uncanny materiality

Andrew Wyeth, "Perpetual Care," 1961.

... [T]he pale, strained face of a girl dressed in white once seemed to Wyeth to be looking out of the high rear window of the Baptist Church across the St. George River. Wyeth, through binoculars, had been studying this church—an echo of Cushing with its frame structure and cemetery monuments mottle orange by lichen. He investigated and found nobody there. But the powerful impression remained.

Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth, 1968, pg. 104.

The Sibyl's Leaves, a set of 46 fortune-telling cards published by William Stoddard of New York, 1833, with a lithographic witch illustration by Edward Williams Clay. Via American Antiquarian.

Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), "Young watermelons and vine," from a group of six lacquer paintings. Via le jardin robo.

19th-century Appenzell whitework embroidered cloth, via Newlyn Lowly.

Hallway decorations by Nicolaas Maritz in the London home of Anthony Collett, photographed by Michael Sinclair for House & Garden, October 2021.

Vernacular owl-shaped birdhouse, ca. 1900. Via David Schorsch.

Edgar Allen Poe, from "The Bells," in The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allen Poe, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac, 1912.

Jell-O jack-o-lantern from It’s Dessert Time!, 1953. Via Weird Old Food.

A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for they were riding saddles of burning nails, and were being lifted in the air by invisible forces and dropped down again onto the points. Walchelin recognised the procession: it was the familia Herlequini, or Hellequin’s rabble, the grim and unquiet crowd mustered by the lord of the dead, about which he had heard many stories.

The account is dated 1 January 1091 and is the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the stirrup burned his foot and the reins froze his hand. Fifteen years after his experience, the scars remained, the authenticating brand from the other world: Walchelin showed them to the chronicler.

Marina Warner, "Suffering Souls." London Review of Books, June 18, 1998.

Human and puppet limbs are entwined, and there is a sense, both comforting and disconcerting, of a group-individual, like the shadowy figures who merge with the dark in Goya’s Black Paintings. Each puppet is both itself and a small society, and even the puppets’ materiality is uncanny—they are floating, airy creatures weighted by earthly human spirits. The puppeteers are not the only artists giving the puppets life. On a separate platform to the right of the action, three male chanters sit in a neat row, next to men playing the shamisen, a stringed instrument with a raw and piercing tone which is often used in vocal accompaniment. The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse—but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.

Jennifer Homans, "The Puppet Masters." The New Yorker, 11/4/2024.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty.

Virginia Woolf, "A Haunted House."

Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease.

Ella D'Arcy, "The Villa Lucienne."

The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn't see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs' bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones.

Hilary Mantel, "Destroyed."

Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition: Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang.

John Aubrey, Miscellanies, 1696.

'a witch's thimble, a hard-to-toll bell"

Remedios Varios, "Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando," 1963.

"A Victorian thrill seeker enjoying the volcanic gas on the island of Vulcano, just off the coast of Sicily." Via The Public Domain Review.

David Nash, Branch Chair, 1976. Via jitjindar.

Dagobert Peche, coffee and tea service, 1922-23, silver, ivory, and turquoise. Execution: Wiener Werkstätte. Neue Galerie New York.

Wolfgang Paalen, Smoke Painting (Fumage), ca. 1938. Oil, candle burns, and soot on canvas. The Menil Collection.

Soichi Sunami: Martha Graham in "Lamentation," 1930:

The dance is performed almost entirely from a seated position, with the dancer encased in a tube of purple jersey. The diagonals and tensions formed by the dancer’s body struggling within the material create a moving sculpture, a portrait which presents the very essence of grief. The figure in this dance is neither human nor animal, neither male nor female: it is grief itself.

Wojciech Weiss, Scarecrows, 1905.

Detail from a hand-decorated calendar, via Paper of the Past.

William Blake: The Gates of Paradise, Plate 12, "Help! Help!," 1793. Yale Center for British Art.

Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes.

You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.

Hilary Mantel, "Giving Up the Ghost." London Review of Books, 1/2/2003.

Barring any significant changes, we predict the energy your jealousy generates will enable you to keep going strong until you are at least a hundred, but given that we are somewhat short of hands, we would prefer if you were to make your way here before then. The sooner the better, as far as we are concerned. The numbers of people with the levels of passion it takes to become a ghost are decreasing every year, Contrary to common presumption, it's not just anyone who can assume spectral form. Without the requisite degree of jealousy or obsession, people just float straight to heaven. Between you and us, everyone is so blessedly sensible that we sometimes find ourselves wanting to give them a good talking-to. Are you really going to settle for that?

Aoka Matsuda, "The Jealous Type."

With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander;

With a Knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to Tourney:
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world's end;
Methinks it is no journey.

—ANON. (Tom o' Bedlam). Epigraph to Walter de la Mare's Henry Brocken.

Post title from "Foxglove Country," by Zaffir Kunial.

For a long time, we ignored them. They were easy enough to ignore, anyway, for most of us. People who knew things said there really was no problem, no problem. Some insisted no, that something had to be done, but they were in the minority; mocked, gently at first, but with escalating intensity that tilted toward cruelty, toward real division. But then, in certain circles at least, it began to be known that the people who knew things had secret doubts, that they were sharing their fears in closed, private conversations, amongst themselves, in encrypted chats and secure conclaves. They were making plans and arrangements for themselves, and actually, the government was involved, all the way to the highest levels.

Because, of course, we did see them. Everyone could see them. You couldn't help seeing them. They were there, always there, lingering under overpasses, huddling in parking garages, under bridges, in abandoned houses and the broken industrial spaces we'd outgrown, in the weed-tangled margins. Even if it was just a glimpse from a car window, shadows caught by the corner of an eye. Eventually the problem could not be denied. There were just too many, too many and always more, and pundits argued about what we had done, why their numbers were increasing, how to address the problem, what responsibilities, if any, we might bear, as if we could've helped it.

They were gathering, you see. And there were so many, so many; the old spaces could not hold them. They began to creep into our houses and garages, in basements and attics and garden sheds, taking up residence in any little-used corner. That is when we knew that something had to be done. They could not be left to fill the spaces we had made. It was too upsetting—the realization that they were there, always there. And knowing what they represented, what it meant. It shook us, even the most stolid, the most unfeeling, the hardened and unimaginative being paradoxically highly susceptible to the strange feelings their presence occasioned. We were unsettled; that was the word for it, unsettled. We were troubled, uneasy.

Perhaps those feelings fed them; the research was inconclusive. We did not quite understand how they were sustained, what it meant to exist that way. But what mattered is that we began to suffer from them. Health outcomes declined. Property values and overall productivity were adversely impacted. Children were fractious and restless; petty crime went up. They needed to go; we wanted them gone.

Different approaches were tried, even the old rituals, but the breakthrough came when a researcher discovered not only a method of capture but a means of distillation. A deep vault would be dug, and they could be stored, bottled, alongside the other indissoluble problems we had made. The problem had been solved.

Once they were gone, finally gone, though, we were no happier. No, we felt a strange jitteriness, a nagging discomfort, a feeling as if we had left something important undone, like the oven was on or the door was unlocked. We did not remember feeling that way before, not all the time, but there it was. Their going had left a space we could not tolerate. Theories shifted; perhaps, indeed, they were somehow necessary. The breakthrough came when it was discovered that their distillate was injectable—well-tolerated in human subjects, with minimal side effects—a gentle bruise, a passing malaise. Doses were made available, enough for all, but most especially the young and old and lonely, who were peculiarly vulnerable to them. Once they were in us, safely in us, and we knew they were there, we could rest again.

the tense of the unreal

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917. Oberes Belvedere, Vienna.

Berlinde De Bruyckere, Arcangelo II, 2020. Hamburger Kunsthalle.

C.P. Cavafy, “Clothes,” translated by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Anonymous Works: "In what could be called one of the strangest industrial designs ever, the Chicago-based Hurley Electric Laundry Equipment Company in 1936 created a version of their Thor electric washing machines with sculpted hands embossed on the agitator. At the time, some Thor dealers painted the fingernails of the hands on demonstration machines."

Gregory Halili, carved shells and pearl.

Mid-20th century Italian composite marble and limestone grave marker.

Margaret Cross blue sapphire "Devotion" ring.

James Merrill's Ouija Board.

I suppose it is submerged memories that give to our dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulfur in the blood is a volcanic inferno.

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.

The most interesting and valuable witness of the stupendous eruption of Bandai-san in 1888—which blew the huge volcano to pieces and devastated an area of twenty-seven square miles, leveling forests, turning rivers from their courses, and burying numbers of villages with all their inhabitants—was an old peasant who had watched the whole cataclysm from a neighboring peak as unconcernedly as if he had been looking at a drama. He saw a black column of ash and steam rise to the height of twenty thousand feet and spread out at its summit in the shape of an umbrella, blotting out the sun. Then he felt a strange rain pouring upon him, hotter than the water of a bath. Then all became black, and he felt the mountain beneath him shaking to its roots and heard a crash of thunders that seemed like the sound of the breaking of a world. But he remained quite still until everything was over. He had made up his mind not to be afraid—deeming that all he saw and heard was delusion wrought by the witchcraft of a fox.

Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

Americans’ belief in ghosts has been on the rise since 2015, according to a poll by YouGov, a research and analytics firm, and paranormal beliefs are becoming common, with 59 percent of women and 52 percent of men expressing a belief in haunted places, according to a 2019 survey by Chapman University. Even the U.S. government has refused to rule out the existence of aliens after making footage of unidentified flying objects public.

Taylor Lorenz, "The 'This American Life' of Ghost Stories is Captivating Gen Z." The Washington Post, 10/22/2022.

The pictures may ostensibly document the realm of the immaterial, the post-human, the ether, but they are moving precisely because of the grubby human and material stories they inadvertently disclose, of boundless grief and stubborn self-deception and feeble guile and pathetic compromise. They speak of propriety and barbarism, doubt and obsession, love and chicanery, exaltation and despair. They embody every sort of contradiction and every affective extreme. They can be terrifying, not because of their sideshow ghosts or tinpot effects, but because of the emotional undertow that lies just beneath their surfaces. It is not hard to imagine being unbalanced by loss and then thrown into a darkened room where the last tenuous grasp of reality finally gives way, or to imagine larkishly producing a hoax and then finding that a great number of people have become psychologically dependent on its indefinite perpetuation. There is a great unwritten book, or more than one, lurking behind these pictures, but it could only be a work of the imagination.

Lucy Sante, "Summoning the Spirits." The New York Review, 2/23/2006.

Would have, would have. The dead dwell in the conditional, the tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary feeling that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.

Sigrid Nunez, "The Blind."

Crossing the autumn moor—

I keep hearing
someone behind me!

Yosa Buson

"Now I know something you don't."

cold shivers

Franz Sedlacek: Flowers and Insects (Blumen und Insekte), ca. 1939.

Jan van de Velde the Younger: The Sorceress, 1626.

The Latin inscription along the bottom reads:

What evils Desire commands, in the small secluded place; who, by sweet incantation, overcomes the minds of the purest mortals, induces frenzy in everyone! But how quickly it slips by; Death overtakes brief life, brief delights. Laughing for a moment, in eternity suffering regret.

A chair with the shivers by Wilkinson & Rivera.

Druid news item, via endlesssummer.

Keiji Uematsu: Wave Motion I, 1976.

What I want to do is to make visible existence, visible connections and visible relations appear more clearly. And to cause non-visible existence, non-visible connections and non-visible relations to appear. And to cause visible existence, visible connections and visible relations not to appear.

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Two ravens ring by Castro Smith.

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George Schmidt, detail of a scherenschnitte hunting scene, ca. 1863.

1906 Promotional advertisement for Schupp's Butter Nut Bread.

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Lord Brooke Fulke Greville, "Sonnet 100," 1633.

Fetch (as defined in Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable): a preternatural vision of a living person, usually seen by a relative or friend. If occurring in the morning the visitation was a sign that the person, whose doppelgänger it was, would have a long and prosperous life; if in the evening it was a portent of imminent death:

She only looked with a dead, dead eye,
And a wan, wan cheek of sorrow:
I knew her Fetch!—she was called to die,
And she died upon the morrow.

John Banim, "The Fetch" (1857).

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part VI, lines 37-38.

... the fear of one's double goes back to even ancient civilizations, as Otto Rank reminds us in his essay, 'Der Doppelgaenger' (1914), where he points out that in ancient traditions and folk beliefs, the double was the first conception of the soul and was related to beliefs that the shadow was a second self ...

S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. Page 193. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007.

During this time, she discovered that her house was haunted. It wasn't only she who felt it—she overheard adults talking about the ghosts as well. She realized that they were as frightened as she was, and were helpless to protect her. She already understood that the world was denser and more crowded than her senses could percieve: there were ghosts, but even those dead who were not ghosts still existed; she was used to hearing talk in which family members alive and dead were discussed without distinction. The dead seemed to her only barely dead.

Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Dead Are Real," a profile of Hilary Mantel in the 10/15/2012 New Yorker.

We others are not like you. We are more prickly, more jittery, more restless, more reckless, more secretive, more desperate, more cowardly, more bold. We live at the edges of ourselves, not the middle places. We leave that to you. Did I say: more watchful? That above all. We watch you, we follow you, we spy on you, we obsess over you.

Steven Millhauser, 'We Others.'

... [W]e have created a technology that leaves no place for the dead. It is a realm of perpetual present, a realm of simulation, where the past is as fluid as the future. Deepfake, the technology that uses machine learning to create highly realistic false videos, can re-create its subject even posthumously. It can cause us to remember what never happened. No longer will we have any assurance that we are remembering the dead. And the dead will no longer remember us—we will have become unrecognizable.

Anne Michaels, "Mortal Soul, Moral Soul." Lapham's Quarterly: Memory, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter 2020.

One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted --
One need not be a House --
The Brain has Corridors -- surpassing
Material Place --

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting --
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase --
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter --
In lonesome Place --

Ourself behind ourself, concealed --
Should startle most --
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror's least.

The Body -- borrows a Revolver --
He bolts the Door --
O'erlooking a superior spectre --
Or More --

Emily Dickinson

'Goodbye forever! I'm flying away,' shouted Margarita, drowing out the waltz. She then decided that she had no need of the chemise and with an ominous chuckle she threw it over Nikolai Ivanovich's head. Blinded, he tumbled off the bench onto the bricks of the path.

Margarita turned to take one last look at the house where she had suffered so long, and in the lighted window she saw Natasha gaping with astonishment.

'Farewell, Natasha!' Margarita shouted and urged her broom upward. 'Invisible! I'm invisible!' she shouted even more loudly, and with the branches of the maple tree brushing against her face, she flew out over the gates and into the street. And the totally crazed waltz followed her aloft.

Invisible and free! Invisible and free!

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita, translated by Diana Burgin and Tiernan O'Connor.

Also: a hand of glory, a mysterious home for the mysterious bookshop (NYT), and the Stokes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns.

In the archive: posts of Halloweens past, including Halloween-ish reads for all ages.

odds and ends / 3.25.2020

Georgia O'Keeffe, Light Coming on the Plains I, 1917. Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Willy Guhl, concrete dog house ca. 1965. Lot 269 at Wright.

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Bent woman/simple movement, via Kickpleat's Instagram.

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How to draw a mouse, from What to Draw and How to Draw It, by Edwin George Lutz, 1913.

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M.F.K. Fisher, from How to Cook A Wolf.

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[Editorial interlude: What I've gathered here may feel—probably is—utterly irrelevant. But this blog has always been a junk drawer—a place to lay whatever is rattling around my brain, and these are rattling days. There are two links to pandemic-related pieces, both clearly marked—no need to click them if it amplifies stress.]

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The softly-rippling impact of a book, an essay, a story, a poem, isn’t calculable in figures. I think about my students with young children, my friends who are single parents and uninsured freelancers. I think about the authors we haven’t read yet, whose books may never exist, because they do not have the space, literal and figurative, to birth their worlds onto paper. I think about mothers in particular, because the burden of childcare still falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. These writers have unwritten libraries housed inside them, voices trapped inside the walls of our present system.

Who gets to live a spacious hour? Who gets to spend time with their children, and time doing work that fulfills them?

Karen Russell, "A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood." Wealthsimple.

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A ghost ship washes ashore after nearly a year at sea.

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Dissecting Garth Greenwell's extraordinary sentences.

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I told the art critic that I needed a rest for my mind, and that I was enjoying this stream of pure images. It was all squares, squares, squares of people’s children and flowers and dogs and sunsets and friends and family and parties and workouts and whatever else they saw that day.

Dayna Tortorici, "My Instagram." N+1, Winter 2020.

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The working class, the uneducated, the failures, and the washed out. We are creators too. And we are allowed to circumvent the tastefulness of the establishment, the cultural gatekeepers, and the university powerhouse. The art world hates us, yes. But art doesn’t.

Jessa Crispin, "The Topeka Fools." The Baffler, March 2020.

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Making these: Salted chewy chocolate cookies.

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'We just happened to be lucky enough to see the problem in terms we could understand. In terms of personal friendship, in fact.'

Margaret Talbot, "Ida and Louise Cook, Two Unusual Heroines of the Second World War." The New Yorker, 9/3/2019.

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How (and why) to sew masks for the CORVID-19 pandemic. (Editor's note: Nadia helped me spot the typo here, but I am leaving it so you can enjoy her comment about it. Sorry, though, crows!)

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The one thing that’s worth stockpiling is decency, that silver lining of our lives back in the USSR, with its near-permanent state of national emergency. Today, in America, where decency has taken a beating over the past four years, it might mean something as straightforward as not buying both of the last two loaves of bread, not forwarding that doomsday chain email, and not going out even if you are healthy.

Anastasia Edel, Oakland, California, 3/21/2020. The New York Review of Books Pandemic Journal.

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We must be at once cautious and courageous: courageous, in what doth not depend upon Choice; and cautious, in what doth.

Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758. Found thanks to Honey and Wax Books.
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'spooky action is real'

Photograph by Ann Parker from Ephemeral Folk Figures: Scarecrows, Harvest Figures, and Snowmen by Avon Neal and Ann Parker, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. NY, 1969. Image found at Family Business.

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I reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies' heads like a flock of starlings;
My enemies crumpled like empty sacks.
I came to them out of mists and rain;
I came to them in dreams at midnight;
I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;
When they thought themselves safe I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood ...

Susana Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell.

Detail from the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510.

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June Crisfield Chapman: Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard and Her Two Ghostly Husbands, ca. 1960s.

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Excerpt from Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood." (Listen here.)

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A grandmother's prediction machine, ca. 1929-1932.

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Ginseng root.

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Eadweard Muybridge: Animal locomotion, plate 535, 1887.

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‘It makes me creep to think of it even now,’ she said. ‘I woke up, all at once, with that dreadful feeling as if something were going to happen, you know! I was wide awake, and hearing every little strange sound for miles around, it seemed to me. There are so many strange little noises in the country for all it is so still.’

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Giant Wistaria." Quoted at Cunning Folk in an interview with Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940.

The Times reported in 2005 that a property developer in Perthshire, Scotland, had been prevented from breaking the ground for some houses on land he had acquired because there was a fairy stone standing on it. Local people were seriously protesting against its removal: the rock was ancient, it covered the entrance to a fairy fort or hill, and it was extremely unlucky to move any such ancient monuments because the fairies would be upset… and take their revenge. The Times reporters joked, dubbing the locals’ beliefs “MacFeng shui”. They quoted the chairman of the local council with responsibility for granting planning permission: “‘I believe in fairies,’ she said, ‘but I can’t be sure they live under that rock.’ For her, the rock had historical and sacred importance because it was connected to the Picts and their kings had been crowned there.”

The builder’s bulldozers were stopped; since then, there has been no more news from St Fillan’s Perthshire.

Marina Warner, "The Man Who Taught Us to Believe in Fairies." The New Statesman, 7/3/2019.

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It’s a recurring motif in folk horror that the countryside beckons to the characters as a place of hope. That events often culminate in graphic violence is a given: this is horror, after all. What is more interesting is the way in which these stories show how we’re seduced by the idea that the natural world is where we’ll find some kind of restoration, enlightenment and, ultimately, peace.

Andrew Michael Hurley, "Devils and debauchery: why we love to be scared by folk horror." The Guardian, 10/28/2019.

(Skip Midsommar, unless you really like flower crowns and hate grad students—it was too long and not scary; watch the deeply creepy 1973 Wicker Man instead.)

Ancient drowned forests, rising like zombies from the beachy sands, resurrected due to climate change.

Marianne Moore's fairy tales: "A wily cat, a strange romance, detestable daughters ..."

Hokusai directs his attention away from the Japanese landscapes he was most famous for depicting, inwards towards a realm of vengeful ghosts and demonic cannibals ... The series is fruit of the tradition Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai [A Gathering of One Hundred Supernatural Tales], where Japanese friends would meet to share fantastically frightening tales from folklore and their own experience. Having lit a hundred candles, they would give their blood-curdling accounts, one by one, blowing out a candle after each, plunging themselves deeper into darkness. Upon the last candle going out, a spirit was said to appear.

The Public Domain Review, "Hokusai’s Ghost Stories (ca. 1830)."

Dark Ships in the Forest: Ballads of the Supernatural.

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Spooky action is real.

in the spirit

It seems pumpkins do not inspire much respect. But I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual base.

Yayoi Kusama, via the Smithsonian newsdesk.