#PhantomsFriday "Fair Rosamund", 19thC English pre-Raphaelite painting by an unknown artist. According to medieval legend Rosamund was the mistress of King Henry II & they frequently met secretly in gardens. She was poisoned out of jealousy by Queen Eleanor & became a symbol of doomed romance.

Members of our Folk Horror Revival Facebook group helped with this article! It's such a seminal book for a generation. I found my parent's copy lurking on their shelves, and then accidentally destroyed the dust jacket by carrying around with me in my school bag. Bonus #shelfie of its current home.

Create your own Barchester stall!

I can't vouch for whether it's any good, but there's this:

It's usually IDed by cryptozoologists as a surviving ground sloth, but that's based on rather a selective interpretation of the local accounts, as it's sometimes described as one-eyed hairy monster with a mouth in its stomach. Art by the appropriately named Ray Troll.

Hang on, a carved stone figure uncovered near Hexham? Is it wise to remove this given what happened last time?

If I've got it correct the one in your photo is a gatekeeper. Now I need to learn how to tell the difference between a large and a small white for the Big Butterfly Count.

I hope you don't mind me pointing out that they're separate species. I only just learnt this myself as I recently bought Richard Lewington's guide to British and Irish butterflies and it's my favourite fact so far and I'm paying special attention to the ones I see. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pocket-gu...

Loads more to see in the house, it was packed with treasures. A couple of things that particularly caught my eye were some carved wooden griffins, a painting of a man on horseback attacking an ostrich, & an embroidered picture of a giraffe gifted to King Charles X of France by Muhammad Ali in 1827.

#PhantomsFriday Another room is a bedchamber haunted by Mehettabel, or Hetty, Walwyn. In the 17th century she eloped with a commoner, but returned when he died. Her family locked her away in the room for 30 years because of the disgrace until she died too and now she haunts the house at night.

#PhantomsFriday On the Hellens Manor tour our guide told us that under a rug in Queen Mary's room is a bloodstain from a priest hacked to death by Roundheads in the Civil War. When Simon Callow slept in the room he was awoken by a phantom priest pacing back & forth so refused to stay another night.

Vast passenger pigeon flocks flying overhead. Accounts in the mid-1800s describe them as being numerous enough to block out the Sun for hours and in waves km long, with estimates of a total population of 5 billion. Hunting & persecution meant that the last individual died in 1914. 🎨 Julian Hume

#StandingStoneSunday Earlier today I visited Hellens Manor in the village of Much Marcle, Herefordshire, parts of which may date back to King Harold II. In the grounds at the end of a long meadow is a modern stone circle (~10 years old) with each stone inscribed with a quotation.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has washed her lace (She chose a summer day) And hung it in a grassy place To whiten, if it may. ... Queen Anne, Queen Anne, is dead and gone (She died a summer's day), But left her lace to whiten on Each weed-entangled way! By Mary Leslie Newton #BookwormSat

Not just ghosts, it also includes the Renwick cockatrice, called a ghostly bat here.

#PhantomsFriday New acquisition found earlier today in a charity bookshop, 'Ghosts of the Lake Counties' by Gerald Findler from 1977, with a number of line drawings by E. Gower of the ghosts within.

There's also a suspicious line stretching away from it across the fjord (difficult to get a good screenshot of) so I wonder if it's netting entanglement or something similar?

#WyrdWednesday In 1786 a sea monster described as 14 metres long with a human-like head and a hard turtle-like shell was washed up at Porthleven in Cornwall after a storm, as depicted in this contemporary watercolour by Charles Catton. peter-moore.co.uk/blog/histori...

#WyrdWednesday 'A Witch by the Sea', etching by Einar Norelius (1900-1985)

#WyrdWednesday In Gunwharf Quays in Gunwharf, Portsmouth, is a bronze statue of a whales tail designed by Richard Farrington covered in engravings of old sea monster illustrations, including several from this chart

#WyrdWednesday Cypress Garden's water skiing troupe of witches, Florida, 1955 🌊🧙🏄 This may have been quite easy for them, as we all know that witches float.

Got my alarm clock set! ⏰

#WyrdWednesday "Davy Jones is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters warning of death and woe." 'The adventures of Peregrine Pickle' by Tobias Smollett 1751 #BookChatWeekly

Next if someone can upload the 1975 adaptation of Catherine Sefton's 'Sleepers on the Hill' from the series Merry-Go-Round, about a gold bangle uncovered in a burial mound in rural Ireland which awakens ancient forces...

"The children do love their divinity lessons. It's most important that each new generation be made aware that here the old gods aren't dead."

Sounds like you need to join the Unarians

#OwlishMonday 'On the nest: Long-eared Owl' by Alan Harris www.alanharrisbirdartist.co.uk/index.php/pa...

#WyrdWednesday In 1933 Alfred Watkins of leyline fame gave a lecture at the Queen’s Stone, Symonds Yat in Herefordshire, in which he proposed that the grooves in the rock were carved to support a wicker cage for trapping human sacrifices within, & reconstructed how he believed it would have looked.