#witchcraft #halloween #horrorcommunity #weirdtales #horrorfamily #horrorstory #witches #horrorstories #hitchcock #booktube #robertbloch It’s not the kind of story that the columnists like to print; it’s not the yarn press-agents love to tell. When I was still in the Public Relations Department at the studio, they wouldn’t let me break it. I knew better than to try, […]
‘John leaned in and almost whispered, “And one more thing Dale that gives me the jitters. I figure, probably the longer a brujo is a skinwalker, the lesser their humanity. Devoid of empathy, of kindness, and of love, their evil master fills the brujo’s very heart and soul with infinite forbidden knowledge, and intoxicating, malignant power to do whatever unspeakable acts of mischief and violence this demoniac entity demands. A skinwalker commits tortured acts so heinous that they break our will spiritually, and mentally before we pray for death.’
—Thomas Swafford (Skinwalker)
‘We lay, my love and I
Beneath the weeping willow
But now alone I lie
And weep beside the tree
Singing “Oh willow waly”
By the tree that weeps with me
Singing “Oh willow waly”
Till my lover returns to me
We lay, my love and I
Beneath the weeping willow
But now alone I lie
Oh willow I die
Oh willow I die…’
—George Auric & Paul Dehn (O Willow Waly)
‘For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.’ –Edgar Allan Poe (Annabel Lee)
“Child’s play,” he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,—as if I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into the “game,” as he called it, with ardour. Nothing would do but to try the experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found The King in Yellow.’–Robert W. Chambers (The King in Yellow: The Mask)
When Lazarus left the grave, where, for three days and three nights he had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and returned alive to his dwelling, for a long time no one noticed in him those sinister oddities, which, as time went on, made his very name a terror.–Leonid Andreyev (Lazarus)
There was no moon. What a night! I was frightened, horribly frightened in these narrow paths, between two rows of graves. Graves! Graves! Graves! Nothing but graves! On my right, on my left, in front of me, around me, everywhere there were graves! I sat down on one of them, for I could not walk any longer, my knees were so weak. I could hear my heart beat! And I heard something else as well. What?.—Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant (Was it a Dream?)
Sometimes an Appalachian story is so humanistic, so brutal, and horrific, that its very existence is terrifying. We can’t believe such a tale has been allowed to fester and erupt like a malignant, rotting boil. Yarns like the one I’m about to spin, are the hideous tales whispered in the shadows and taken to the grave. But sometimes the tale, like the undead, rise up to haunt us again, and again for all eternity. And some of us have just a few meager years left to be terrified in each of our own haunted worlds. Alas, cold in the ground with the Conqueror Worm our only friend, we may continue to be tormented by the ghosts—or demons—of our past. –Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge: In the Beginning)
Sometimes an Appalachian story is so humanistic, so brutal, and horrific, that its very existence is terrifying. We can’t believe such a tale has been allowed to fester and erupt like a malignant, rotting boil. Yarns like the one I’m about to spin, are the hideous tales whispered in the shadows and taken to the grave. But sometimes the tale, like the undead, rise up to haunt us again, and again for all eternity. And some of us have just meager years left to be terrified in each of our own haunted worlds. Alas, cold in the ground with the Conqueror Worm our only friend, we may continue to be tormented by the ghosts—or demons—of our past. –JL (In the Beginning)
And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares not destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king’s subjects- or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!—Clark Ashton Smith (The Flower-Devil)
One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom, trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about my head. I remembered Camilla’s agonized scream and the awful words echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in the first act, and I dared not think of what followed—dared not, even in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is absorbed. –Robert W. Chambers (The King in Yellow: The Repairer of Reputations)
Lost from those archangelic thrones that star,
Fadeless and fixed, heaven’s light of azure bliss;
Forbanned of all His splendor and depressed
Beyond the birth of the first sun, and lower
Than the last star’s decline, I still endure,
Abased, majestic, fallen, beautiful,
And unregretful in the doubted dark,
Throneless, that greatens chaos-ward, albeit
From chanting stars that throng the nave of night
Lost echoes wander here, and of His praise
With ringing moons for cymbals dinned afar,
And shouted from the flaming mouths of suns.–Clark Ashton Smith (Satan Unrepentant)
‘We started back through the forest. We walked some distance and then night fell. We lost the brook. After a half hour’s wandering we heard it again. We started for it. The trees began to thin out and we thought we were approaching the beach. Then Waters clutched my arm. I stopped. Directly in front of us was the open space with the stone god leering under the moon and the green water shining at his feet!’ —Abraham Merrit (The Pool of the Stone God)
Apparently disembodied, or set in a face too vast for human cognizance, they burned before him in chaotic murk; Then, by degrees, he saw the other features of the sorcerer, and the details of a lurid scene; and became aware of his own situation.’
—Clark Ashton Smith (The Colossus of Ylourgne)
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
–Lord Byron (Prometheus)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 