Halloween

like scratches from a black cat’s claws black & gold lightning sunders the sky leaving evanescent scars on an orange moon I watch in sweet surprise as phantoms float & fade exchanging kisses of darkness listen as my sisters of the Sidhe sob & mourn their tears opalescent in the lurid light of jack o’lanterns [...]

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The Couriers

I’ve noted before that, save in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia–the southernmost of the thirteen original colonies–we don’t have a great many stories that date to the Revolution in the South. But there’s a tale from the days leading up to the great Battle of Kings Mountain, in South Carolina, that has resonances [...]

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The Hitchhiking Flapper

The Vanishing Hitchhiker motif is an old, old one, going back to the folklore of many nations. It’s been the basis for many a literary, TV and movie plot, and many a song; “Bringing Mary Home”, written by Joe Kingston, Chaw Mank and John Duffey, said to have been inspired by an episode of The [...]

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Quoth the Raven

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of [...]

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The Headless Haunt at Wellington Barracks

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Wellington Barracks, near St. James’s Park in London, was known simply as the Recruit House, and was home base for the renowned Coldstream Guards unit. There are a couple of ghost stories attached to Wellington Barracks. One of them begins on a bitterly cold January morning in [...]

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Where Wolves Go to Die

There are legends from various parts of the world of places where bones of many, many individuals of the same animal species are found–elephants in Africa, mammoths in Siberia, and so on. Some such places are probably the remnants of human butchery; in others, causes of death are not so clear. Over time these places [...]

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The Club of Dead Men

They were seven young men from various parts of England and various colleges at Cambridge, who, in 1738, formed a club: the Everlasting Club. The oldest of the seven was a thirty-year-old from Ireland, who already had attained an undergraduate degree and was working toward a graduate one; the youngest was twenty-two, the heir of [...]

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God Will Reward Me

We refer to “lynch mobs”– but what if one man carries out vigilante justice on his own? And what if he truly believes he’ll be rewarded in Heaven, even though he only had reason for vengeance–to his twisted way of thinking–on one of the men he killed? This story comes from Joseph A. Citro’s Green [...]

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The Mob

Sometimes the rough justice of a mob takes care of business, in a few minutes, that would take the law years to accomplish. And sometimes, as in this story from the Michigan woods, rough justice comes to the mob. They were cousins: Big Mac–born a MacDougall–and Little Mac–born a MacDonald–, known collectively as the MacDonald [...]

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Talons

Another repeat–another sick day. This is one I posted in March of 2010; it didn’t get much attention at the time, but I think it’s one of my better ones. This story was, in part, handed down from generation to generation in my friend Sharon’s (aka Aunt Ornery) family. She’s never been able to establish [...]

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