Every first-year at Merlyn Academy writes down their future #goals, then seals them away. Upon graduation, these letters are returned.
As Estreza opened hers, the long-dried ink slithered into new words: Overthrow the King. Break the Tower of Seers. Become the Red Queen.
#vss365

There is no ghosting hour. Every segment of the clock holds phantoms and every segment may leak them. Sunlight is no charm against them, nor does twilight guarantee their loosing. The shades of a place may walk beside us at any time. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Goodnight from the Dabfoot Distillery, where the new nightwatchman is getting his ghost orientation so he knows not to disturb spectres if they’re rotating barrels. Goodnight from Cathryn Oxby, inadvertently painting pylon prophecies in her sketchbook. Goodnight from Hookland.

You can walk and after two miles of tangled lane that's untroubled with being on the Ordinance Survey, find a feral church. These are the chapels beyond bishops, untethered from parishes. Existing in green communion, their gathered ghosts sing wild hymns. – #DAKilroy, 1982

Rain-bullied to mud, fields release sodden spectres. Winter ghosts resenting solid walls and hope of hearth. Old Hooklanders have a word for these shades - glumsucks. To be touched by one is to shiver to sickness, to have twilight's sorrows tattooed on your bones. – #DAKilroy, 1982 #Ghosts

Goodnight from The Sisters fish and chip shop, where the pickled goose eggs are sold-out due to rumour they cure lover’s droop. Goodnight from the steps of the Foundling Hospital at Coreham, where the temporal shades of abandoned babes wail for their mothers. Goodnight from Hookland.

When you feel depleted of enchantment, walk the wood. It is where magic lives loudly. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982

A calm body of inland water, an old, thin stone ramp – littered with late autumn's bullying of willow – leads gently into it. The solar alchemy of a year knowing it is dying enfolds everything.

A schoolteacher friend told me the kids in her class believe the Stay Belows are now 'at mud'. Usually such gossip is a good signal of how things are. However, my trip to Wystan Lumb suggests otherwise. The shadows in the water still whisper. – #EmilyCBanting, diary entry November 15th, 1982

You can change a buildings purpose. Rip out all the machines that used to live there. You can call an old factory a visitor centre, a museum, a heritage site – don't change what it was. Remove and remake all you want, you can't erase its ghosts. It stays haunted. – John Peck #VOH #Ghosts

Goodnight from Vicky Copfield and Danny Sleight, belatedly deciding that Lockley Cemetery isn’t the best place to express their lust. Goodnight from Winter Fields School, whose phantoms wait in hope that its living boarders will hold another unwise séance. Goodnight from Hookland.

Goodnight from Joe Waterfield, dismissing his sighting of Corpse Friars’ lanterns as a sign he drank too much at The Windlass pub. Goodnight from William Heywall up at Palefire Farm, writing a petition to the Field Sprite to amend the terms of its blood tithe. Goodnight from Hookland.

We wake to mornings of cold magic. Exhale dragon-breath, crunch frost-frozen leaves as we walk. The year is dying. We feel it as rush of ghosts, a shivering that foretells the blade of ice upon its neck. No wonder this is the season where folklore burns bright. – #DAKilroy, 1982 #Folklore

The beautiful decay of a massive and abandoned Art Deco theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Arguably criminal that we let these architectural masterpieces rot, rather than maintain and treasure them...

#abandoned #urbex #theater #EastCoastKin #BlueSkyArtShow #Philadelphia #exploration

Goodnight from Tony Wrox, realising that stealing an item labelled ‘The Ghost Child’s mirror’ from the Crowhythe Museum of Curiosities was always going to be a mistake. Goodnight from Bethany Butterfield, eager for morning and its possibility of frost lace divinations. Goodnight from Hookland.

There are infections of blood. There are infections of the soul. There are I believe, infections of the place. For the land itself may be wounded by our traumas. Where its psychic skin cracks, the spoilings of rot and wickedness can set in. We call such infections hauntings. – Rev. A. Morley

I take this as a high compliment given that Bruce Springsteen wrote one of the greatest zombie stories of all time in 'Atlantic City' ('Everything dies baby that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back').

Rooks shout the dying day. Spirits wake. Twilight as threshold engine for my magics. Twilight as a time of summoning. My tongue spills secret names. My tongue seduces the world to see things my way. I am a witch. Change is the wake of my walking. – #EmilyCBanting #WitchSky

Goodnight from Ethy Bond, feeding blood to her nightshade homunculus before its winter sleep. Goodnight from Leah Worton in Martle Cottage Hospital, gulping bottled breath and hoping she’ll live long enough to pass on her knowledge of calling the Empress Eel. Goodnight from Hookland.

Goodnight from Danny Trower, already feeling it was a mistake to meet at the Hawgate Trading Estate to discuss the selling of Faery bones. Goodnight from Joan Letts, afraid to lift the curtains and look out in case its the Wicker King knocking on her caravan door. Goodnight from Hookland.

I think we sometimes love certain places as they reflect what we feel, but can't say aloud. There's an old Hookland phrase – to be tulled – meaning to be caught between two worlds and at home in neither of them. I feel that a lot and I'm sure my favourite places do as well. – Martha Twilling #VOH

@tomsbrown.bsky.social She falls into her bog bed. Peat-pillowed. Moss-blanketed. Cradled by its brown waters. A protection of humic acids, tannins. Heather honey on the tongue of her bitter dreams.

People talk about us Children of The Hum as 'weirdo hippies, 'ragged walkers' blindly following something they couldn't hear, couldn't understand. They never understood that we lived in a landscape of wonder. They saw pylons, we saw sublime structures. – Trippy Pete, ex-Pylon Person #VOH

Goodnight from Justine Tuttle, wondering how cold the nights have to get before the chimes of the phantom ice cream van stops being heard. Goodnight from Grace Nash, tying ribbons of prayer to the bare wooden bones of the wild cherry trees on Mill Lane. Goodnight from Hookland.

Goodnight from Wiverstone, where the village green firework display has provoked the ire of rudely wakened Moss Maidens. Goodnight from the Egyptian Bingo Hall, where the clinking of lucky charms grows louder as the evening’s grand prize is about to be called. Goodnight from Hookland.

Here’s Sarah of the break-spell
Here’s cousin Jem of the curse
Give me Bloody Emma who twists the knife and makes it worse

- Trad. Hookland witch rhyme

November’s early darkness enfolds us. The smell of applewood fires and rot is a constant companion at twilight. We hurry between home and evensong, home and pub. Ghosts crowd the lanes, our folklore becomes filled with tales of cold teeth. Winter begins to growl. - #CLNolan

Goodnight from The Ghost Bear’s Bowl pub, where there’s much talk about what the oil extraction company up at Trotton Grove might disturb. Goodnight from Ali Weaver, wishing her mother wouldn’t tell the children stories about the Hairy Pike at bedtime. Goodnight from Hookland.

Goodnight from Rob Eley, sure he can see rough and not entirely human shapes on Salt Tear Marsh. Goodnight from Weychester University Library, where the sound of pages being turned has not stopped even though no living reader is left on the premises. Goodnight from Hookland.

When everything tide-touched becomes property of the King-Under-the-Sea, high tide is a crucial matter. Even more so when it comes to the county's causeway islands. No-one wants to get trapped on Os or Far Gore. No-one wants to spend even an extra hour on Strood. – #MattAdams

In November hares come to wood edge. Most say this is for cover, for food. Yet more than one old countryman has told me they come to pay tribute to the wood itself, to have one last dance with the Moss Maidens before their cold sleeping. At twilight they feed and mutter omens. - #CLNolan