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Of the long dead, who lived therein,

Paused by the cold hearth I felt the tendrils of hot sin,

Call of the bed, lover’s sigh made my head spin,

Head all aswirl, my mind lit in colors ablaze,

Will I survive this Christmas witch’s love haze?

Will I survive this Christmas witch’s love haze?

–CHRISTMAS WITCH

‘Night is approaching. I can feel the change of temperature in the tomb. The worms are becoming more active in their squirming all around me. The maggots inch by the dozens across my chest. I hear the excited squealing and clawing of the rats too.’ –Jeffrey LeBlanc (SARAH ETERNALLY ENTOMBED)

“Forasmuch as it is ordained of God that all flesh hath spirit and thereby taketh on spiritual powers, so, also, the spirit hath powers of the flesh, even when it is gone out of the flesh and liveth as a thing apart, as many a violence performed by wraith and lemure sheweth. And there be who say that man is not single in this, but the beasts have the like evil inducement, and – ”

—MEDITATIONS (DENNEKER)

‘Again the withered hag poured forth the monotonous words of a prayer that was not meant to be acceptable in Heaven; and soon, in the pauses of her breath, strange murmurings began to thicken, gradually increasing so as to drown and overpower the charm by which they grew. Shrieks pierced through the obscurity of sound, and were succeeded by the singing of sweet female voices, which in their turn gave way to a wild roar of laughter, broken suddenly by groanings and sobs, forming altogether a ghastly confusion of terror and mourning and mirth.’

–NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (The Hollow of the Three Hills)

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Ye little skelpie-limmer’s face!
I daur you try sic sportin’,
As seek the foul thief ony place,
For him to spae your fortune.
Nae doubt but ye may get a sight!
Great cause ye hae to fear it;
For mony a ane has gotten a fright,
And lived and died deleeret
On sic a night.
–Robert Burns (Hallowe’en)

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HIS voice came to us again. He said, at first, that he saw nothing in the abyss below him. Then he gasped, swayed, and almost lost his balance. We could see the sweat standing out on his brow and neck, soaking his blue shirt. There were things in the abyss, he said in hoarse tones, great shapes that were like blobs of utter blackness, yet which he knew to be alive. From the central masses of their beings he could see them shoot forth incredibly long, filamentine tentacles. They moved themselves forward and backward — horizontally, but could not move vertically, it seemed. They were, he thought, nothing but living shadows.
Robert A.W. Lowndes (THE ABYSS)

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hey were people of curious aspect, short and squat, high-cheekboned, with dingy yellow skin and long almond eyes; only in one or two of the younger men there was a suggestion of a wild, almost faunlike grace, as of creatures who always moved between the red fire and the green leaf. –Arthur Machen (The Turanians)

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