“Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing—what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur Whateley’s father?"
(H.P. Lovecraft "The Dunwich Horror")
🎨 Franz Stassen
#booksky
Two puzzled men look on as a man in a lab coat gestures furiously at a tiny worm on a pile of dirt in a tray.
One of the strangest stories featuring Edgar Wallace's 'Four Just Men' involved a man who hated earthworms. And here is demonstrating the fact (in a 1921 edition of The Strand Magazine).
#EdgarWallace #crimefiction #vintagecrime #detection
"It was the moon that had made her so pale, and there was something from the gods that enveloped her like a subtle vapour. Her eyes seemed to gaze far beyond terrestrial space.”
(Flaubert “Salammbô”)
🎨 Lobel Riche
#booksky #bookillustration
On a full moonish #Wyrdwednesday morning in early spring, we walk the misty moors north of Bremen to come across an old local legend... and names writ in uncanny foresight in the family register.
Meet the cursed Heemsen family in our 4th #darkspringtide tale linked below.
🎨 Gustav Carus
Painting of a deer in the forest at night.
In a Flemish folktale, a woman who was said to have been a thief during life haunted a town in the shape of a deer. The ghost deer would knock on doors and wait. Between her horns she carried an illegible text. She stopped appearing when someone deciphered the text.
🎨Eugen Krüger
#WyrdWednesday
“The writer has felt and experienced the wonder of things—the beauty of the sun and the hieroglyphic mystery of the figures that the birds make in the air—and he feels, quite rightly, that to describe wonders one must suggest wonder by words.”
(A. Machen “Hieroglyphics”)
🎨 Oorchach
#wyrdwednesday
I looked with amazement at the absurd hieroglyphics upon the paper.
"Why, Holmes, it is a child's drawing," I cried.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
Arthur Conan Doyle
#WyrdWednesday
"Came the feast day of the saint, all Cornwall celebrated, from Penzance to the Tamar.
And a shadow stirred on the ancient threshold. A figure stepped forth, veiled in cold fire, bearing a crozier marked in tin."
www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...
'The soldier's memorial' Lithograph, hand colored Published by Currier & Ives, New York, c. 1863. A woman in black Victorian dress mourning at tomb of Civil War soldier.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
– Alfred Tennyson, 'Tears, Idle Tears' 1847
#booksky #MorbidMarch
“…so glad were spirits and men
Before the coming of the sinful Queen.”
(Tennyson "Idylls of the King")
🎨 Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1913)
#bookologythursday #booksky #bookillustration
Painting title: Discovering Daisies. A woman with red hair admiring daisies in a grassy field.
'Bright flower! whose home is everywhere
Bold in maternal nature's care
And all the long year through the heir
Of joy or sorrow,
Methinks that there abides in thee
Some concord with humanity,
Given to no other flower I see
The forest through.'
-Wordsworth
🎨Henry John Stock
“I am unbody’d by thy books, and thee,
and in thy papers finde my extasie.”
Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1531)
🎨 Giuseppe Arcimboldo “The Librarian” (c 1570)
#WorldBookDay #booksky
Today is St Piran's Day, feast day of the patron of tin miners and of Cornwall herself.
So, we go out west and hear a story of Jan Tregeagle, Cornwall’s own Faust, who rose from doing penance for his sins in Dozmary Pool, with hellhounds on his trail.
Read our 5th #darkspringtide below
🎨 Minns
Don’t forget about Vendel
scandinavianaggression.com/2025/04/welc...
"But on bright spring nights, when the wind moves strangely through the trees, the villagers still warn:
Stay out of the woods.
For the Unseelie Queen rides with sluagh."
www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...
Not all those who wander are lost.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien
📷 Inge Schuster
A spectral black dog with a luminosity surrounding it, leaps forward. meanwhile hiding behind the small hill are two bowler-hatted gentlemen.
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
03.03.2026 12:06 — 👍 33 🔁 12 💬 1 📌 1
“I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure, so strange that the day on which it happened is always called the White Day.”
(Arthur Machen, #BOTD 1863, “The White People”)
#booksky #bookillustration
Painting title: The Soul of a Rose. Woman with ginger hair smelling a pink rose that grows against a brick wall.
'But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose'
-John Keats
🎨Waterhouse
So EXCITED that my poem "Toxic Blue" will be published in Issue 29 of the beautiful @theshorepoetry.bsky.social 💙
🔗 www.theshorepoetry.org
‘ Don't get rid of my devils, because my angels will go too.’
~ W. H. Auden
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562)
“Villiers, that woman, if I can call her a woman, corrupted my soul….I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now I would dare not whisper in the blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness”
(Arthur Machen "The Great God Pan”)
#booksky
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
"They used to come to her at dusk, the girls of old Riga, quick breath and their hands trembling. A ribbon, a ring, a lock of hair—tokens of envy, of love turned bitter, of fates better left undone.
“Juglena, craft me a charm to make Anna’s Juris come to me!”
www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...
Painting title: Forest Music. Painting of a ghostly figure in the woods.
She plants the forest, pours the flood:
Life's poor day I'll musing rave,
And find at night a sheltering cave.
-Robert Burns
🎨Jules Pierre van Biesbroeck
“I am all astonishment.”
(Jane Austen)
🎨 Nobertine Bresslern-Roth
#owlishmonday
An illustration depicting a young woman, dressed in white, whose hand is clasping the black veil covering a picture. She is looking away from the picture, however, toward another woman who is clutching at her arm fearfully. The illustration is labeled "Engraved by R. Rhodes from the original picture by M. Craig" and beneath is the caption "THE VEILED PICTURE."
Frontispiece to the 1802 bluebook adaptation of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, published by T. Plummer as:
THE VEILED PICTURE; or, The Mysteries of Gorgono,
The Appennine Castle of Signor Androssi.
A Romance of the Sixteenth Century
#MorbidMarch
An example of the surreal, enigmatic, dreamlike art of Gertrude Abercrombie. 'The Queen' depicts a woman with long dark hair, wearing a blue gown with a long train, and a crown. She carries a sceptre/wand. She is standing in a bare room with a dark red floor, her gaze turned towards us. Perched on a ledge behind her is an owl, who holds up the end of the train in its beak.
"Surrealism is meant for me. I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it."
~Gertrude Abercrombie
🎨 The Queen, 1954
#OwlishMonday
“The Doubtful Guest Came Seventeen Years Ago.”
🎨 Edward Gorey
Wyrdlings!
Some things are set in stone. Or wood. Or bone. You name it, since this week:
"Carvings, Inscriptions & Writings on the Wall"
is our #WyrdWednesday topic – so, tell us tales of wyrd bas-reliefs, strange runes on artefacts and otherworldy hieroglyphs found in deep dungeons!
