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…
January’s Wolf Moon bared its teeth, but February’s Snow Moon will firmly close its mouth, prick its ears and listen. Whether it snows tonight or not, this is the month typical for heavy snowfall – which is where the Snow Moon gets its name. This is the heart of winter, when cold feels heavy. When … Continue reading The Snow Moon…
Every winter has a presence, something beyond the cold. Something old, massive and unmistakably felt. In Scottish and Irish folklore, that presence is the Cailleach. Translated this means ‘the veiled one’, ‘the old woman’ or ‘the hag’. But who is she? She’s winter’s architect and keeper. The Cailleach is not a ghost in the traditional sense. She’s something … Continue reading The Cailleach…
Lost Delilah 6 months ago. ‘Dog camera’ is switched off. (Or so I thought). Went to bed. Woke at the usual time. Logged onto laptop. Started work. Late morning, a notification. Time stamp: 2:51am. ‘Someone arrived home.’ My quiet haunting. 🖤
January is a time of thresholds, hauntings and omens. It was once simply lumped together with February under the single banner of ‘winter’, an unnamed stretch of cold between the end and the beginning. With the year ending in December and starting in March, the unnamed ‘winter’ season must have felt like a bleak, liminal no-man’s land. No … Continue reading Winter Hauntings…
Winter is the season when the old ghosts stir. The cold settles into our bones, the nights stretch long and the past whispers. Of all my stories, Cribbins is possibly the one most tangled with whispers of buried trauma, unspoken truths and the unsettling ways the past can seep back into the present. At its core, Cribbins asks one … Continue reading Cribbins: Unravelling the Darkness…
Love it or hate it, this time of year strips everything back to its stark white bones and asks quietly: What ghosts are you carrying into the new year? Not literal ones (though those too, if you have them), but the emotional echoes we each drag behind us. All the unfinished stories and old fears and … Continue reading The Spirits of the New Year…
There’s something winter does to old buildings. It doesn’t animate them so much as reveal them. The cold sharpens edges. Silence behaves differently. History feels closer to the surface, like bone beneath thinning skin. Last weekend, during an off-roading adventure in the Lake District, I stayed in two pubs that have been standing for centuries, … Continue reading The Queen’s Head & The Mortal Man…
R. H. DIXON 