This is how the story introduced itself to me… Chin up, kidda, says the gaunt-faced, hollow-eyed woman reflected on the surface of the bus shelter’s rain-mottled Perspex panel. She looks like me but also doesn’t. As a fragment from the first draft, it may change. Some things should. But also, it may not. I just wanted … Continue reading Fragments from Harrow House…
In Gothic fiction truth isn’t delivered cleanly or conveniently. It’s concealed in walls, sealed in letters, drowned in wells, locked in cupboards and buried in gardens – and it waits in all those places because it must. Buried truths aren’t narrative tricks, they’re the engine of Gothic fiction. From crumbling houses to unreliable narrators, the … Continue reading Buried Truths…
March’s Worm Moon tonight marks the slow thaw of the earth. As soil softens and frost loosens its grip, worms rise again, turning and aerating the ground that’s been locked tight for months. In truth, it’s an unglamorous name, right? Earthy and faintly unsettling. But entirely appropriate, nonetheless. As the ground warms, it releases what … Continue reading The Worm Moon…
March! Here we are caught between worlds. The ground’s still cold, but something restless stirs beneath it. Buried roots, perhaps? Buried memories? Buried truths? Spring doesn’t arrive all at once with grandeur. It creeps in on stealthy cat’s paws so as not to rouse all things still sleeping. And within this space where winter and … Continue reading The Season of Secrets…
As a final story for The Ghosts of Winter, it seems only right that I tell you a ghost story. A personal one. It was 2010, shortly after my grandma died. Her funeral had passed and the world settled back into its ordinary rhythm. Then I had a dream. At least, I think it was a … Continue reading A February Ghost Story…
While I’ve been thinking about quiet hauntings for this month’s theme, I keep being drawn to mirrors. People once believed that mirrors could trap a soul. There was even an old superstition of covering mirrors after someone had died to allow loved ones a safe passage to whatever comes next and prevent them being trapped. This quiet horror … Continue reading Quiet Hauntings…
As we shuffle through February, we enter the closing chapter of The Ghosts of Winter. A strange, liminal stretch where the season feels neither fully alive nor truly dying. Winter’s thinning, but spring hasn’t found its voice. The light’s returning, but slowly. Somewhat reluctantly. And in this pause, this breath between seasons, something happens. The unfinished parts … Continue reading The Last Ghosts of Winter…
Some stories don’t end when the last page is turned, they leave fragments. Not scenes exactly. Not even memories in the usual sense. More like impressions. Images that don’t belong to a single chapter but feel inseparable from the story in its entirety. A face half-seen. A room you don’t remember entering. A sense that … Continue reading Cribbins: Visual Residue…
I had fever dreams. The kind that obliterate the border between reality and imagination. I kept waking in sharp bursts of panic, convinced there was a presence in the house. Each time I tried to explain it to my confused husband, the certainty slipped away again. The night became repetitive and exhausting. Quietly terrifying, in … Continue reading Something Passed Through…
There’s a reason winter ghost stories endure. Winter strips everything back and, due to long, unending nights, it can leave us alone with the parts of ourselves we usually outrun. It’s a season that pushes us inward towards reflection, reckoning and the quiet truths we don’t face up to in brighter months. Ghosts, whether from … Continue reading Why We Need Winter Ghosts…
R. H. DIXON 