The Stones of Landane -

 ‘Fear her now, fear the queen,

As in her stone she reigns supreme…’

When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside. But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular holds a fascination for her. Within hours, her personality begins to change, and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.

Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear.

Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.

Publishing on January 14th, 2025

available for pre-order now (ebook, paperback, hardback)

Amazon

Flame Tree Press

Barnes and Noble

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

and/or wherever you shop for books

and to get you in the mood...

Newgrange - Clannad

If You Go Down To The (Screaming) Woods Today...

 

..You had better be prepared to experience more than you bargained for. Especially if the woods in question are in the vicinity of the Kent village of Pluckley. Properly known as Dering Woods, this forest is more commonly known as the Screaming Woods – and for very good reason.

The area itself is situated just south of England’s (arguably) most haunted village – Pluckley – where it seems almost every building and piece of land has its own ghost story to tell. Pinnock Bridge has its Gypsy or Watercress Woman who is supposed to have set herself on fire from a combination of the pipe she was smoking and the gin she was drinking at the same time. She wafts around as a misty figure.

The Elvey Farm has a haunted dairy where an 18^th century farmer – Edward Brett – fatally shot himself. He is still heard, muttering ‘I will do it.’

A black silhouette of a miller haunts the site of an old windmill, while a red lady walks her small white dog around the churchyard and a white lady wanders around inside the same church. The locals at the time of her death must have really feared her. She was buried inside not one, but seven coffins AND an oak sarcophagus. She’s still pacing around there though!

An unfortunate love affair led to the suicide (by poisoning) of the Lady of Rose Court, and a poor man who fell into a clay pit still screams in agony. A schoolmaster who hanged himself is still apparently trapped at the site of his demise.

Now, after experiencing all that, you could well be forgiven for deciding to retire to the local hostelry (the Black Horse Inn). Surely here you could kick back and relax over a pint of foaming ale or a glass of comforting wine? Not a bit of it! After the phantom coach and horses have thundered by outside, expect things to start flying around you as the resident poltergeist gets to work.

But I digress. Back to the woods.

In the 18^th century, a highwayman called Robert du Bois was tracked down and run through with a sword while he hid in a tree in these very woods. Another version states that he was dragged to the woods before being lynched. Either way, his are the screams which give the woods their name - along with a couple of other unfortunates, such as the army colonel who hanged himself and still can be seen dangling from his tree, and the ghostly soldier who wanders the woodland paths. Others who have simply lost their way - and never found it again - add their desperate voices to the cacophony from beyond the grave.

Sceptics might say it’s just foxes. Everyone knows foxes can make a terrible racket. As if hell itself had opened and let the screams of the damned escape.

But those of us who know about such things, don’t need any such explanations.

Do we?

Evil runs deep at Mordenhyrst Hall…

When Grace first sets eyes on the imposing Gothic Mordenhyrst Hall, she is struck with an overwhelming sense that something doesn’t want her there. Her fiancé’s sister heads a coterie of Bright Young Things whose frivolous lives hide a sinister intent. Simon, Grace’s fiancé, is not the man she fell in love with, and the local villagers eye her with suspicion that borders on malevolence. 

Her friend, Coralie, possesses the ability to communicate with powerful spirits. She convinces Grace of her own paranormal gifts – gifts Grace will need to draw deeply on as the secrets of Mordenhyrst Hall begin to unravel.

Amazon

 Flame Tree Press

 Barnes and Noble

 Simon and Schuster

 Waterstones

 and all good bookshops - in the high street or online

 

 Images:

Flame Tree Press

Shutterstock

Witch Bottles - No Home Should Be Without One

In my collection, The Crow Witch and Other Conjurings, you will meet a selection of sorcerers and wise women and in one story in particular - The Malan Witch - the witches are a powerful, evil force to be reckoned with. If you had been living anywhere near them, you would have been glad you had walled up a dead cat, hidden away a written charm or two, a horse’s skull and some (preferably children’s) shoes. As a cat lover of major proportions, I was relieved to discover that the walled up cats I had read about were, in almost every case, already dead when they were inserted into a cavity in the wall. They were certainly a common enough occurrence. Many medieval houses in need of restoration have revealed a little feline mummified carcass among the wattle and daub.

Even with all this protection, you might not be completely safe If you fell ill inexplicably and suddenly, your crops failed, or your animals got sick and died. You would know that somehow or another you had upset a witch and he – or more likely she – had put a curse on you. Then, most assuredly, you would need your own witch’s bottle.

Witches’ bottles have been found in both the U.K. and the United States, indicating that the practice travelled across the Atlantic with the earliest British settlers.

Although they have most certainly been around since Elizabethan times - if not earlier - one of the first mentions of such a bottle occurs in 1681 in Saducismus Triumphatus, or Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, written by Joseph Glanvill. The author gives a description of how such a bottle would be created. A man whose wife is sorely afflicted is told to, “Take your Wive’s Urine… and Cork it in a Bottle with Nails, Pins and Needles, and bury it in the Earth; and that will do the feat.” We are told, “The Man did accordingly. And his Wife began to mend sensibly and in a competent time was finely well recovered.”

The ‘cure’ worked well for her – but had another effect, for across town, a wife complained that someone had killed her husband. It transpired that he was a known “Wizard” and must have put a curse on the woman whose husband was wise enough to equip himself with a witch’s bottle. So, these bottles not only had the power to counteract the magic, but were able to turn it back on the perpetrator.

So, what did they look like? Usually they were constructed of brown or grey salt-glazed stoneware. Some – known as Greybeards or Bellarmines – were embossed with a bearded face. Bellarmines also had the dubious distinction of being named after a particularly obsessive Catholic Inquisitor. Some weren’t buried, but deliberately destroyed as part of their function. Some people believed that you should throw the witch’s bottle on the fire and when it exploded, it would break the spell and kill the witch.

By the early 19^th century, witch bottles were constructed from glass bottles, vials and other containers. Traditionally – and perhaps ironically – it took a witch to prepare a really effective bottle. As described above, into the bottle went the victim’s urine, hair or nail clippings, and some red thread taken from a ‘sprite trap’ (a device used to trap troublesome spirits). Other ingredients historically included blood, glass, wood and bone. Witch bottles are still with us and more recently, these unsavoury ingredients have largely been replaced by rosemary, needles, pins and red wine.

Once prepared, the bottle is then buried in the house, under the hearth, at the furthest point of the house, or some inconspicuous other place. It is believed that the bottle will capture the evil, and impale it on the pins and needles before drowning it in red wine and sending it on its way, using the rosemary. As long as the bottle remains hidden and unbroken, so its power will endure.

These days, there are a range of alternative ingredients for making up a witch bottle. These include: sea water, earth, sand, stones, salt, knotted threads, vinegar, ashes, coins, oil, feathers, shells, herbs and flowers.

Two witches, burned for their evil centuries earlier, now hell-bent on revenge.

A woman who seems to step out of an old Hollywood movie, and a castle with a murderous past.

A seer whose deadly prediction was hidden away for a future generation.

A mysterious portrait that is far more sinister than mere paint and canvas.

An old woman only the foolish would ridicule, for she knows the secrets of the land and how to harness its power.

All these and more conjurings abound, and you would do well to remember, my dear reader…

When the seeds of revenge are sown, beware the harvest!

Available from:

Amazon

Weird House Press

Waterstones

and other online and high-street retailers

Images:

Shutterstock

Weird House Press

Life Before Computers Gave us Anchovy and Claptrap. Part Two

A Play Shakespeare Never Knew He’d Written

 

I went through three generations of manual typewriters before the glorious day when I bought an electronic one that would store a line of type and let me preview it before I let it actually print on the page. Wow! What a breakthrough. However, not long after that I got my first computer. Well, word processor really.

I opened my heart to an Amstrad PCW9512 and my world changed. But, as I’ll explain, some things remained the same for a long, long time and cost a small fortune because, while the age of computers had arrived agents and publishers preferred the old methods…

But for now, here I was with this wonderful bit of kit on my dining room table. It came with a monitor, daisy wheel printer (you’ll still need that older friend/relative you borrowed in order to understand the finer points of part one of this saga) and something called a floppy disk. This was always confusing because it was a square-shaped piece of hard plastic. Not floppy at all. Some years later, I saw that in fact the disk split apart and inside was this floppy disc-shaped thing. The scales fell from my eyes.

Anyway, without too much ado, I inserted the floppy disk into its designated slot on the monitor and, lo and behold, it loaded up the most basic of programs. Of course, being all-new, this seemed wonderfully sophisticated and incredibly technical. Before long I was ready to create my first file in a way not dissimilar to what we do now. Well, up to a point. I couldn’t select whether I wanted 10 point, 12 point or whatever.

That was all down to which daisy wheel I decided to put in my printer. The pack came with one and you could buy others in different styles. Oh. The wonder of it!  I couldn’t choose Garamond, Georgia or anything else for that matter as that too was all dependent on which daisy wheels I had bought – and there wasn’t a lot of choice. I seem to remember Courier was one everyone used - the Times New Roman of its day. But never mind. At least if I made a mistake I could correct it without a load of hassle and wasted paper. Right?

Yes. Right. Absolutely. The Amstrad 9512 did indeed have a dictionary built into its limited brain. Now, I don’t know who had helped write that dictionary but I am betting at least one person with a medical degree was involved as the Amstrad would offer perfect renderings of the most complex medical terminology when asked to check spelling. But I am equally convinced that no one with an English degree had come anywhere near it. And the thing was that once you had accepted its proffered alternative to a spelling it had queried, it would automatically proceed to alter every repeated instance of your apparent mistake. This led to some hilarious (and not so hilarious) bloopers. 

One has always stuck in my mind and, funnily enough, it wasn’t one that happened to me although plenty did. I read an article in what was then Writer’s Monthly magazine. The author had been writing an article relating to that well-known play by William Shakespeare called, Anthony and Cleopatra. The only snag was that every Anthony had been rendered ‘Anchovy’ and every Cleopatra ‘Claptrap’. He had inadvertently accepted the proffered correction. This was all too easy to do as the Amstrad seemed to believe it was infallible and that if it didn’t recognise a word, it couldn’t be correct. Only words in its dictionary were possible, or so it believed. An early instance of the arrogance of artificial intelligence perhaps? Whatever the reason, unless you stopped it from doing so, it would correct every word it didn’t like by inserting one it preferred unless you stopped it from doing so.

This kind of stroppy behaviour led me to abandon the spellchecker for many years, up to and including my early ventures into working with a ‘proper’ computer. I simply didn’t trust it, you see.

Aside from that minor inconvenience, my little Amstrad was a godsend. I could now copy my precious story onto floppy disks (you needed something like half a dozen for a novel) and I could keep these in various locations as I was always wary of the house burning down and taking with it the only copy of my novel. 

A tip from author Judith Krantz had led me to wrapping my top copy of any manuscript and putting it in the freezer on the basis that it was usually the last bit of equipment to succumb to the flames. Now I could carry it round me with me if I wished to. And I did until I realised this was a silly idea. What if I was mugged? The robber would have my manuscript and could sell it as his/hers. You can see a state of paranoia underlining this, can’t you?

Anyway, onto the printing itself. The daisy wheel printer was a noisy thing that vibrated a lot and was programmed to print off a line when it detected it was coming to the end of a sheet of paper. (Don't ask me why it did that, but it did. I think it was purely for aesthetic reasons, although as this practice inevitably devoured a fair amount of printer ribbon, there may have been other, ulterior, motives. Who knows?) It would then repeat this exercise at the top of the new page. The noise of the same key repeatedly hitting the ribbon resembled rapid machine gun fire (imagine spending a night in an active war zone) but at least I could set it printing and only have to return when, either it had finished that chapter, run out of paper or run out of ribbon. Printing a 400-page novel was, as a result, noisy and expensive (those ribbon cartridges weren’t cheap) but so much less hassle than my now-abandoned typewriter.

Then it was time to try and get someone interested. In my case, at that time, I concentrated heavily on finding a suitable agent. The targeting process wasn’t unlike today’s except that there was no internet so you referred to a physical copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.

I would send out half a dozen query letters at a time. Each carefully targetted and personalised (some things don't change) and all utilising what we now call 'snail mail' – we then called it ‘the mail’ because there was no other. You had to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope and obey the individual agent's instructions which might mean you also sent out a sample chapter or two. Postage had to cover the return of whatever you had sent. This could prove expensive but at least you could fit everything into an envelope – usually an A4-sized one. 

The process meant a trip down to the Post Office, armed with your letters, sample chapters and envelopes. The assistant would weigh each one and hand it back to you, along with stamps. You moved away from the counter, stuck them on appropriately, sealed your envelopes, with the return, stamped, addressed envelope safely inside each one, prayed to your deity of choice, and mailed them.

Then you waited. 

If you were really lucky, one agent out of four or five might request chapters or the entire manuscript. In the latter case, you cheered and groaned in equal proportion, printed out a new copy of the manuscript or looked for the least creased one, and then marched down to the Post Office once again. This time, you were equipped with brown wrapping paper, paperclips to attach the required postage to the letter, adhesive tape, scissors… 

You waited in line. The assistant weighed everything, multiplied it by two for the return postage, added on the required extra for Recorded Delivery in case the parcel got lost, handed everything back to you, and off you went to find some quiet corner to assemble your precious package.

Once safely sealed, you once again joined the back of the line because, of course the package was too large to go through the mailbox. I have spent many Saturday mornings thus engaged.

Then it was back home to wait.

And wait…

And wait…

Then one day, weeks later you returned home from work to find the mailman had attempted to deliver a parcel. Your heart sank and you asked yourself if it was worth all the effort and considerable expense.

You wept bitter tears. 

On Saturday you went and collected the slightly battered parcel containing the dog-eared, expensively produced manuscript that would never be able to be sent anywhere else (who wants to receive a manuscript that looks like a golden retriever tussled for it with a somewhat over-excited poodle?) You found the agent's letter or, worse, the scribbled note on the front page of the submission.

“Sorry, not for us.”

You sighed, poured yourself a drink, picked up the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, and started your search for an agent all over again.

Because that’s what we did, back in the days before the internet made it all so easy…

 (In case you missed it, you can find Part One of this article here)

 Images

Shutterstock

public domain