From Macbeth’s castle in the Scottish Highlands to the shores of Hampshire, Britain has many haunted castles that go bump in the night. Sad stories, gripping tales, injustices, battles and sieges, kings and queens, all spanning two thousand years of history.
Each morning the sun rolls across the sky. In Estonia it was the hatched egg of the enchanted swallow bird, an emu’s egg bursting into flames in Australia, and a golden piece of bacon for the Nama people of South Africa. In the evening, it descends into the sea, as a bridegroom or warrior, golden rays transformed into spears or robes of light, hissing with heat as the waters close over it, before swimming back to the east. Sometimes in gloom-shrouded nights, we may imagine it will never return and we will be plunged into unyielding darkness, but still it rises and always will, at least for the next five billion years or so!
An old Russian fairy tale brings us food for thought in these challenging times. Lisa Schneidau explores the mysterious story of the Firebird.
Shell grottos have a certain murky ambiguity to their history and folklore. This for me made them all the more enticing to use as the basis for a ghost story in my tale, ‘The Grotter’ in Nyctophobias. Especially with my roots as a Whitstable native in Kent, where grottos are still primarily lit once a year as part of the Oyster Festival celebrations. These grottos are usually stacked in a ‘beehive’ style pyramid, held together with wet sand and illuminated by a short candle.
While less well known than their priestly counterparts, German folklore also had plenty of “secular” exorcists who resorted to magic to drive unruly ghosts away. The following tale from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has a closer look at this profession, along with its associated hazards.
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