If a relative is taken by the fairies and a changeling left in their stead, you have one chance to get them back in some lore: you must go to where the fey are known to congregate on the next full moon and there negotiate with the joyful taken. #MythologyMonday

🖼️: E. Hughes

Fairy comes from the Old French faie, which referred to a woman powerful in magic, word, or craft. This evolved to Fairy, Fey, etc. over time. Beings we call fey have other names: for example in Gaelic they are aos si, among other terms. #MythologyMonday

🖼: B. Froud

It seems that fairy lore, from Italy to the Hebrides, is the lore of the land, the lore of those who came before: fairies are most strongly tied to cairns, to burial mounds, and to sites of great importance, and those spirits remain with us, reminders of the land #MythologyMonday

@smoothdunk2.bsky.social

The site where the Korean Declaration of Independence was read was made into a Japanese restaurant by the occupiers, popular with soldiers, but a year later in 1920 a rain of blood fell on everyone in the restaurant, the spirits of the dead angry at freedom denied. #SpookySunday

Jack was a cunning soul, barred from Heaven but denied by Hell because of a bargain he made with Satan. Thus forced to wander Earth eternally, he took hellfire and put it in a turnip: thus were born Jack-O-Lanterns. #FolkloreSunday #SpookySunday

🖼️: J. Ukropina

Kaiserwalzer is one of Vienna's haunted restaurants, where patrons have seen plates fall with no cause, furniture moving of its own accord, and even shadowy patrons moving and blocking passage. No one can quite account for why. #SpookySunday

The first known example of apple bobbing comes from Celto-Romano fusion, combining the two cultures and spreading accordingly. A maiden who placed a bobbed apple under her pillow would dream of her future lover. #FolkloreSunday

youtu.be/JgeaqpmqUT8?...

"The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;"

(Edgar Allan Poe "Ulalume")

🎨 Edmund Dulac

#Bookwormsat

At Samhain it is believed that the dead return home, coming to seek hospitality and see how the living have gotten on. This leads to happy reunions at times, while in other cases, the disappointed dead bring the fright we associate with Halloween today. #WyrdWednesday

In the American South, birds are connected to angels. Many believe feathers found on the ground are signs angels have visited. The dead return as angels, and when a cardinal visits you, it is the spirit of the dead coming to visit you. #WyrdWednesday

Even gods can return from the dead: murdered and then cut into pieces by his brother Set, Osiris was reconstructed by his wife Isis, and then left his son Anubis to the Duat, to become King of the Dead while his other son, Horus, fought for kingship of the Living. #WyrdWednesday

Wyrdlings!

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague”, Poe famously wrote and for the anniversary of his own death, we give you:

“Sometimes they come back – Return from the Great Beyond”

as this week’s #WyrdWednesday topic.

Come, tell tales of the living dead! 💀