A contagious epidemic of dancing swept 14th century Europe. The so-called St. Vitus Dance mania followed the Black Plague and was later blamed on fear, persecution and unrest. Dancers moved with zeal and fury, unable to stop until their bodies were broken and exhausted...
#MorbidMarch 🎨Von Dardel
My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
🖌️Toadstool Nook Tracy Parsons #BookWormSat
"I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past... The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins... I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear."
—Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
#BookWormSat
“I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.”
(Algernon Blackwood “Ancient Sorceries”)
🎨 Sidney Stanley (1932)
#bookwormsat #booksky #bookillustration #catdurday
Cemeteries were often surrounded by iron fences as this was believed to prevent the souls of the dead from leaving and wandering abroad... #MorbidMarch 🎨Franz Skarbina
"It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make".
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson #BookWormSat
🎨Atkinson-Grimshaw
In response to @ninaantonia13.bsky.social's post, here is 'Spiritism', 1905, by Serafino Macchiato.
#PhantomsFriday #spiritualism #occult #artsky
Some say the bogs are haunted at night by the glow of lost souls, will-o’-the-wisps (ignis fatuus) luring unwary travelers to their doom.
🎨Teodoro Wolf Ferrari (1897)
#PhantomsFriday
There's a series?! ooh!👻😍
A Ghostly Skeleton Trying to Strangle a Sick Child; Representing Diphtheria
by Richard Tennant Cooper
#PhantomsFriday
According to a Flemish folktale, a group of girls was scared to death of a gigantic black dog, said to be the devil. One evening, they witnessed the dog shapeshifting into fire and saw the word FIREGHOST written on the spot where the dog had been.
🎨asmeesh
#PhantomsFriday
"Bílá paní - The White Lady"
🎨 Līga Kļaviņa-Raiska
#Phantomsfriday
In Danish folklore, Hyldemoer - the Elder Mother would punish those who took her branches without permission... #MorbidMarch 🎨Arthur Rackham
Thomas Carwarden was the Queen's Master of Revels and Tents. His final job was to design lavish masques for Queen Elizabeth 1st at West Horsley Place (Button House in BBC Ghosts) A week after the festivities he died, following complications from a broken leg sustained during the set-up #MorbidMarch
Welcome to #BookologyThursday 🍃
Today we begin our early St. Patrick’s Day celebrations with the theme:
🍃Irish Literature and Culture🍃
…in literature, art, legends, and lore.
🎨 Neil Parkinson
In Polish folklore, the Platenik was the soul of the drowned and was associated with heavy low-hanging clouds. They could shape the clouds from fog above the rivers and move them using ropes. If one visited your house, it had to be greeted as an old friend and asked no questions... #MorbidMarch
Hidden in the British Museum there is a 3d replica of a marble statue of a horse. It is smaller than a wavelength of light, the size of a speck of dust; created and released by Oxford’s Institute of Digital Archaeology to provoke dialogue around museum acquisitions... #MorbidMarch
📷IDA/AD Karenowska
'Hamilton Terrace, Autumn Morning', St John's Wood (1933) by George Clausen
(Private collection)
Orpiment pigment creates a bright golden gilt effect. Once it excited alchemists as a way of making gold, and then it was famously used by artists from Rembrandt to Tintoretto, it has since fallen out of use because of its arsenic content... #MorbidMarch
December 1926 Agatha Christie's abandoned empty car was found in bushes, headlights on. A huge police search ensued. Clairvoyants sought. Then a waiter contacted police to say the writer was in a Harrogate hotel under an assumed name. It is still a mystery as to how & why she vanished. #MorbidMarch
The 19041 Olympic marathon was chaos, run in 32C heat with no water stops. The winner Thomas Hicks was given egg whites, brandy and strychnine sulphate (legal at the time) to keep him on his feet but became too weak to collect his medal. He never ran a marathon again... #MorbidMarch
The overpoweringly sweet smell of the hawthorn is produced by the chemical trimethylamine. This is also one of the first chemicals exuded from a decomposing corpse. Perhaps explaining why hawthorn and its blossom has long been linked with death in British & Irish folklore... #MorbidMarch
🎨VanGogh
For #5 (SWEET)...did you know that La Morgue in Paris was not only a tourist attraction to view corpses but vendors and hawkers routinely set up shop outside the morgue to sell snacks? It was possible to buy sweet treats in case you got peckish while viewing unclaimed bodies.
I'm not posting an image from the movie because I feel too upset at the treatment of Shelley Duvall in making it!🖤
"Kensington Gore" theatrical blood began to be manufactured in the 1960s by pharmacist John Tinegate. Since his death, the name "Kensington Gore", a pun on the London street, has become a term for any fake blood used on the stage or in films. It was famously used in The Shining... #MorbidMarch
aww, you never know...!
🤣
Scottish legend tells of the Blood Dogs which haunted battlegrounds to drink the blood of the fallen. They would manifest from morning mist, digging deep into the earth to find the blood and feast. Their breath could scorch but their paws left no prints... #MorbidMarch 🖌️Paget
The #wormmoon shines tonight and all kinds of ghoulies, ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties walk - and us, of course, up in the borderlands between Scotland and England, where we meet some of them in our 3rd #darkspringtide tale - read it below!
🎨 Franklin Booth
🍀🌕🍀Pointing at the moon was thought to be disrespectful and would bring misfortune. In the north-midland counties of England it was said that doing so nine times would prevent you from entering Heaven.
#OwlishMonday #MythologyMonday #FairyTaleTuesday #FullMoon #WyrdWednesday #LegendaryWednesday
