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“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Henry David Thoreau
Stories
Dickens’s 1859 Christmas “haunted house” turns out to be less about specters than about how rumor and memory haunt the living. A skeptical narrator debunks village frights and, in Master B.’s garret, meets the truest ghost of all.
A grand seaside hotel once filled with gaiety, the Old Mansion fell into ruin after a tragic shipwreck, whispers of looted dead, and ghostly visions of drowned mothers and children. Today, only charred timbers and haunted memory linger on the dunes of Long Beach.
A wily blacksmith traps a demon through wit and iron, only to discover that bargaining with darkness never ends cleanly. Ralston’s folktale hums with the clang of hammers and hellfire, where cleverness courts damnation and escape is always partial at best.
A genteel country house, a moonlit lawn, and the slow, dreadful approach of something scratching at the window—Croglin Grange is less ghost story than early vampire myth, told with the precise domestic detail that makes its horror feel uncannily plausible. Hare’s anecdote lingers not for its gore, but for its composure: evil enters quietly, and returns again.
Modern Ghosts explores how specters have adapted to the styles and anxieties of modern fiction, shifting from the sprawling Gothic novel to the sharper, more psychological short story, and expanding their powers from pallid wraiths to vivid, corporeal, and even humorous presences. No longer bound to castles or midnight hours, these ghosts haunt trains, bedrooms, and everyday lives, reminding us that while mortals fade, the ghost never goes out of fashion.
Discover the rise of the Gothic novel as the foundation of supernaturalism in modern English literature, exploring its roots in medievalism, its reliance on haunted settings, ghosts, witches, devils, and its role in shaping themes of terror and mystery. And learn how Gothic fiction introduced new narrative conventions — castles, storms, dreams, and madness — that influenced both later Romantic works and supernatural storytelling.
Parties
Friendsgiving
Where Thanksgiving insists upon ritual, Friendsgiving thrives on invention. Its visual language is culled from the eccentric margins of history: an etched turkey with exaggerated plumage, children dwarfed by improbable gourds, abstracted florals painted in jewel tones. These fragments, reshaped into placemats, puzzles, invitations, and table dressings, turn the table into a stage for chosen family.
Crafts
