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Posts by Maps of the Lost

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Delighted to have this new short collection from James Everington drop through the door. If you don’t know James’ work I can’t recommend it highly enough. Out today from Black Shuck Press.

3 weeks ago 1 0 0 0
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Maps of the Lost 32 from inside the not-knowing

A toy owl in a charity shop that, of course, is not what it seems. A motorway corridor where geometry bends. A lost phone that changes everything. This month's Maps of the Lost newsletter: stories, the fiction of not-knowing, and the gaps between what's seen and what can be understood.

3 weeks ago 2 0 0 0
There’s one small street of terraced houses in the north of Dewsbury where you should not buy a house, because you will never have good luck and much in your life will go terribly wrong. So, if you find yourself knocking through a wall in your house, mourning the slow death of your marriage or your troublesome children or your impending redundancy, and buried in the wall find what look like teeth, you have not heeded this advice. Every one of the houses has what looks like misshapen teeth in the walls and worse in the foundations and if you are digging deep in the garden where nothing grows and you find a small wooden box do not open it because what’s inside will come out and look for the rest of itself and will not tolerate anyone getting in the way.

There’s one small street of terraced houses in the north of Dewsbury where you should not buy a house, because you will never have good luck and much in your life will go terribly wrong. So, if you find yourself knocking through a wall in your house, mourning the slow death of your marriage or your troublesome children or your impending redundancy, and buried in the wall find what look like teeth, you have not heeded this advice. Every one of the houses has what looks like misshapen teeth in the walls and worse in the foundations and if you are digging deep in the garden where nothing grows and you find a small wooden box do not open it because what’s inside will come out and look for the rest of itself and will not tolerate anyone getting in the way.

3 weeks ago 5 2 0 0
FIVE NAMES On a small hill overlooking a tidal estuary in Essex, there’s a wooden bench. It’s not often you see anyone sitting on it as the view is all right, but nothing special, particularly when the tide goes out and there’s just mud stretching towards a thin ribbon of silvery sea. The path that runs behind it is used by the occasional walker or someone wandering along while their dog explores the grass on either side. If you stop for a moment to look out over the mud flats, or you sit on the bench to eat a squashed sandwich out of your bag, you might notice the plaque on the back of the bench, like you see on so many others that commemorate the memory of a lost loved one, but this stands out because it’s just a blank brass rectangle. Perhaps it’s just been put on, and the council are going to send someone out to engrave it, you think. But then you think, surely it’s easier to engrave them before you fit them, and the plaque looks weathered. Probably forgot, you think, typical council. Hope no one paid to have it done. And you eat your sandwich, and you look at the shining water, and then you move on. Twice a year, though, on the equinox, if you stop at the bench you’ll notice the plaque has a list of five names on it, finely engraved. When you read the names, they’re all living people. Until the sun sets, anyway.

FIVE NAMES On a small hill overlooking a tidal estuary in Essex, there’s a wooden bench. It’s not often you see anyone sitting on it as the view is all right, but nothing special, particularly when the tide goes out and there’s just mud stretching towards a thin ribbon of silvery sea. The path that runs behind it is used by the occasional walker or someone wandering along while their dog explores the grass on either side. If you stop for a moment to look out over the mud flats, or you sit on the bench to eat a squashed sandwich out of your bag, you might notice the plaque on the back of the bench, like you see on so many others that commemorate the memory of a lost loved one, but this stands out because it’s just a blank brass rectangle. Perhaps it’s just been put on, and the council are going to send someone out to engrave it, you think. But then you think, surely it’s easier to engrave them before you fit them, and the plaque looks weathered. Probably forgot, you think, typical council. Hope no one paid to have it done. And you eat your sandwich, and you look at the shining water, and then you move on. Twice a year, though, on the equinox, if you stop at the bench you’ll notice the plaque has a list of five names on it, finely engraved. When you read the names, they’re all living people. Until the sun sets, anyway.

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
In a reed-shrouded pond in some small woods in Weardale, you might chance upon the sight of six herons, all close together, standing still in the water the way that herons do. The six of them meet there at dawn once a year and wait until the sun sets. If a seventh heron arrives while they are there, then all of them stand for a moment, as if they are committing the water and the reeds and the clouds and the air to memory, and then they take off into the sky, slow wings beating the air, and then so do the smaller birds from in amongst the reeds and then the larger birds from amongst the woods and then all the birds from every field and every tree and the tops of houses and the arches of bridges and the cliffs and the shores and the gardens and the rocks, and every bird flies up, every one, up and out of sight and beyond, as they know that this world is done.

In a reed-shrouded pond in some small woods in Weardale, you might chance upon the sight of six herons, all close together, standing still in the water the way that herons do. The six of them meet there at dawn once a year and wait until the sun sets. If a seventh heron arrives while they are there, then all of them stand for a moment, as if they are committing the water and the reeds and the clouds and the air to memory, and then they take off into the sky, slow wings beating the air, and then so do the smaller birds from in amongst the reeds and then the larger birds from amongst the woods and then all the birds from every field and every tree and the tops of houses and the arches of bridges and the cliffs and the shores and the gardens and the rocks, and every bird flies up, every one, up and out of sight and beyond, as they know that this world is done.

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1 month ago 4 0 1 0
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Terrific time at the UK Ghost Story Festival this weekend. Three days of panels, workshops and performances, lots of inspiration and met some lovely people.

favourite quote from any of the panels was maybe Will MacLean talking about the need to begin ‘reweirding your house’.

1 month ago 3 0 0 0

Myself and @gavcross.bsky.social have been blown away by the response to our first Haunted Book Club episode on The Signalman. Thanks so much to everyone who joined us live and who has watched or listened since.

Please check it out on whatever podcast app you use, and please help spread the word.

2 months ago 13 6 0 0
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How to Make a Homunculus That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit [a pumpkin-like gourd] for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb, or at least so long that it comes t...

With #SmallProphets on everyone's minds, you might be interested in some extra info on Homunculi.
Back in 2017 I wrote this piece: "How to Make a Homunculus" for @dailygrail.com
www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/how-...

2 months ago 46 24 0 2
NOTHING It’s that strange hour when it’s not quite dusk but the day is fading away, and the blue of the fine autumn day has shaded from sky blue into something darker. You’ve been for a meeting somewhere in a part of town you don’t know that well, and decided to walk home as the air is crisp and you like to find new streets, quirky architecture, fading adverts from a hundred years ago just visible on a gable end like a ghost, the neon lines of modern graffiti. You turn a corner down a side street because the big road you were on looks like it curves off in the wrong direction, and you know you need to head towards where the sun is setting. This thought pleases you, as if you are some kind of great explorer who can navigate by moss and the flight of geese. The street you’re now on is a row of mews houses, the occasional car parked up on the pavement, an atmosphere of calm satisfaction and newly painted front doors. There’s only one person on the street other than you. A little further down, a man has stopped in the middle of the road, and is waving his hands up towards the sky. You slow a little, think about turning. You don’t want to be judgmental, but you’ve had some bad experiences. He is smartly dressed, a dark mac over what looks like a blue suit, but all the same, you slow. He gestures with his hands again, and a perfect circle is removed from the sky, as if a hole has been cut in it. The deepening blue is gone, and the blackness within the circle is darker than the dark of night, darker than anything that you have seen or will see again. You stop, and maybe you cry out or maybe you scuff your shoe or maybe he just knows, and the man looks over his shoulder in alarm, sees you there, and quickly waves a hand again and the sky is back, uninterrupted blue. He hurries off, you stand there a little while until an Uber Eats moped swings round the corner on a short cut and nearly runs you over.

NOTHING It’s that strange hour when it’s not quite dusk but the day is fading away, and the blue of the fine autumn day has shaded from sky blue into something darker. You’ve been for a meeting somewhere in a part of town you don’t know that well, and decided to walk home as the air is crisp and you like to find new streets, quirky architecture, fading adverts from a hundred years ago just visible on a gable end like a ghost, the neon lines of modern graffiti. You turn a corner down a side street because the big road you were on looks like it curves off in the wrong direction, and you know you need to head towards where the sun is setting. This thought pleases you, as if you are some kind of great explorer who can navigate by moss and the flight of geese. The street you’re now on is a row of mews houses, the occasional car parked up on the pavement, an atmosphere of calm satisfaction and newly painted front doors. There’s only one person on the street other than you. A little further down, a man has stopped in the middle of the road, and is waving his hands up towards the sky. You slow a little, think about turning. You don’t want to be judgmental, but you’ve had some bad experiences. He is smartly dressed, a dark mac over what looks like a blue suit, but all the same, you slow. He gestures with his hands again, and a perfect circle is removed from the sky, as if a hole has been cut in it. The deepening blue is gone, and the blackness within the circle is darker than the dark of night, darker than anything that you have seen or will see again. You stop, and maybe you cry out or maybe you scuff your shoe or maybe he just knows, and the man looks over his shoulder in alarm, sees you there, and quickly waves a hand again and the sky is back, uninterrupted blue. He hurries off, you stand there a little while until an Uber Eats moped swings round the corner on a short cut and nearly runs you over.

(text version in the alt text, or: substack.com/@mapsofthelo...)

2 months ago 3 1 0 0
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Newsletter out now. An underpass that doesn’t behave, something learning how to be human a word at a time, an odd tune leaking through you into the world, strange labyrinths, thoughts on ghost stories and why it's best to never see the monsters.

mapsofthelost.substack.com/p/maps-of-th...

2 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Ashes There's a grey-looking man who moves around South London, never settling in one place too long. He's thin, with intense eyes. He's grey-looking not just because his hair is grey, or because his clothes began that colour, or faded to it, but because he looks as if a fine layer of ash has settled on his skin. He does have a name, but he's forgotten it. He's nearly six hundred years old, and as long as he keeps feeding will live at least another six hundred more. You might read that and think him a vampire. Maybe he is, of sorts. But he has no interest in blood. The grey-looking man stands at the back of funerals where everyone thinks someone else has invited him, and he will stop and stand nearby if he passes someone being evicted from their house. He sits over a tea in bookies while men around him lose the money they had promised their wife would pay the rent, and he finds a seat in the public gallery of the court at murder trials, as near the family as he can. He browses food-banks without ever taking anything, and he'll wait in a hospice car park, pretending to be on his phone. He will spend evenings waiting to the side of bridges that are notorious for suicides, and he lingers outside coroners' courts, and in the back pew at memorial services. He'll stand by shop doorways where homeless people freeze and despair, and he'll wander that far section of the graveyard that is covered with teddy bears and bright plastic windmills, holding some flowers, drifting close to those sobbing as if their heart breaks again with every breath. He feeds and he feeds and he feeds, and he will never, ever go hungry.

Ashes There's a grey-looking man who moves around South London, never settling in one place too long. He's thin, with intense eyes. He's grey-looking not just because his hair is grey, or because his clothes began that colour, or faded to it, but because he looks as if a fine layer of ash has settled on his skin. He does have a name, but he's forgotten it. He's nearly six hundred years old, and as long as he keeps feeding will live at least another six hundred more. You might read that and think him a vampire. Maybe he is, of sorts. But he has no interest in blood. The grey-looking man stands at the back of funerals where everyone thinks someone else has invited him, and he will stop and stand nearby if he passes someone being evicted from their house. He sits over a tea in bookies while men around him lose the money they had promised their wife would pay the rent, and he finds a seat in the public gallery of the court at murder trials, as near the family as he can. He browses food-banks without ever taking anything, and he'll wait in a hospice car park, pretending to be on his phone. He will spend evenings waiting to the side of bridges that are notorious for suicides, and he lingers outside coroners' courts, and in the back pew at memorial services. He'll stand by shop doorways where homeless people freeze and despair, and he'll wander that far section of the graveyard that is covered with teddy bears and bright plastic windmills, holding some flowers, drifting close to those sobbing as if their heart breaks again with every breath. He feeds and he feeds and he feeds, and he will never, ever go hungry.

2 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Tonight’s watch. No, never blow a whi- oh. Too late.

Decent adaptation of Elizabeth Jane Howard‘s excellent “Three Miles Up”.

2 months ago 0 0 0 0
There's a young dentist, new to practice, working in Rochester. Once every so often, when he is working with patients having a routine check-up, he thinks that he can see a tiny symbol, so faint that it almost might not be there, etched into the molar on the left-hand side, so delicate and tiny it does not compromise the tooth in any way. He's thought about raising it with the senior dentists in the practice but he doesn't because it is so faint that he is not sure whether he might be imagining it, and doesn't want to look ridiculous or prejudice his career. He also doesn't raise it because every time he thinks about doing so he feels cold, as if he has just stepped into ice water, and he has a night of dreams which he can't remember in any detail beyond that they are furious and terrifying. He is also trying very hard to stop running his tongue over his left-hand rear molar.

There's a young dentist, new to practice, working in Rochester. Once every so often, when he is working with patients having a routine check-up, he thinks that he can see a tiny symbol, so faint that it almost might not be there, etched into the molar on the left-hand side, so delicate and tiny it does not compromise the tooth in any way. He's thought about raising it with the senior dentists in the practice but he doesn't because it is so faint that he is not sure whether he might be imagining it, and doesn't want to look ridiculous or prejudice his career. He also doesn't raise it because every time he thinks about doing so he feels cold, as if he has just stepped into ice water, and he has a night of dreams which he can't remember in any detail beyond that they are furious and terrifying. He is also trying very hard to stop running his tongue over his left-hand rear molar.

2 months ago 3 0 0 1
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Reading and watching over the last week, and up next for this weekend, The Turn Of The Screw/The Innocents, The Haunting Of Hill House/The Haunting.

Up next for tomorrow, The Uninvited.

Got to say though, Henry James, end a sentence once in a while, PLEASE. Shirley Jackson’s prose though 😘

2 months ago 2 0 0 0
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Not long to go now - the UK GHOST STORY FESTIVAL ONLINE starts on Friday 6th Feb, with three days of talks, interviews, workshops and more! www.ticketsource.co.uk/ukghoststory... #ghost #ghosts #ghoststories #ghoststory #writing #writers #authors #darkfiction #supernaturalfiction

2 months ago 7 5 0 1

(text is in the alt text, as usual)

2 months ago 2 0 0 0
Next time you’re in a public Zoom meeting with many participants, keep an eye out. It might be a social gathering, a talk or lecture, an educational event or a seminar. Look out in the list of participants for a man named Michael Kilgolfen. He’s easy to spot, with his bright red hair and engaging grin, nodding away as if everything that anyone says is insightful and wise. He won’t ever speak, but there he is. If you’ll see him a second or third time, you’ll wonder if you have mutual friends, how it’s funny you don’t know each other as you have such intersecting interests.⁣ ⁣ You might message him, but you won’t get a reply.⁣ ⁣ If you ever find yourself logging in to two Zoom meetings at once, or three, or four, is that you may see Michael Kilgolfen in all of them, smiling and nodding away. No big deal, you think, after all I’m in more than one meeting at a time, so…⁣ ⁣ Then you realise that the Michael Kilgolfen you see in each of these meetings is nodding and smiling at different times, and one of them scratches his head for a moment, and the others do not, and as you realise this all of the Michael Kilgolfens stop smiling and look very intently into their cameras, as if staring at one person.⁣ ⁣ Which indeed they are.

Next time you’re in a public Zoom meeting with many participants, keep an eye out. It might be a social gathering, a talk or lecture, an educational event or a seminar. Look out in the list of participants for a man named Michael Kilgolfen. He’s easy to spot, with his bright red hair and engaging grin, nodding away as if everything that anyone says is insightful and wise. He won’t ever speak, but there he is. If you’ll see him a second or third time, you’ll wonder if you have mutual friends, how it’s funny you don’t know each other as you have such intersecting interests.⁣ ⁣ You might message him, but you won’t get a reply.⁣ ⁣ If you ever find yourself logging in to two Zoom meetings at once, or three, or four, is that you may see Michael Kilgolfen in all of them, smiling and nodding away. No big deal, you think, after all I’m in more than one meeting at a time, so…⁣ ⁣ Then you realise that the Michael Kilgolfen you see in each of these meetings is nodding and smiling at different times, and one of them scratches his head for a moment, and the others do not, and as you realise this all of the Michael Kilgolfens stop smiling and look very intently into their cameras, as if staring at one person.⁣ ⁣ Which indeed they are.

2 months ago 7 2 1 0
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The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism In the past two months, I’ve found myself thinking back to an essay Ursula K. Le Guin posted on her blog in November 2016. It was one of her last long essays, and she wrote it at a time when she—li…

When I wrote this a year ago I had no idea how bad things would get. Today, eight years after she left us, I'm trying to follow Ursula's advice: write and worry. Write and act. Worry and keep writing.

lithub.com/the-way-of-w...

2 months ago 390 149 9 17
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Three weeks to go until we present a packed line-up of ghost story goodness, all happening online so you can join us from the comfort of your own home! And some line-up we have incoming too... www.ticketsource.co.uk/ukghoststory... #onlineevent #onlineevents #onlinefestival #onlinefestivals

3 months ago 2 1 0 1

If you enjoy it and think your followers might too, please do share it.

2 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Maps of the Lost 30 ...from the path to the deep dark woods

A footpath best left alone, directions to places that don’t exist, gifts from birds who know too much, a man with far too many names, books that aren’t ghosts but haunt you anyway, a ghost story festival, and why you never want to meet Ash Francis.
mapsofthelost.substack.com/p/maps-of-th...

2 months ago 1 0 1 1
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Spooky season will be going into overtime in 2026, with the UK GHOST STORY FESTIVAL ONLINE running from the weekend of 6th-8th February! Let us bring the hauntings to you for the weekend... www.ticketsource.co.uk/ukghoststory... #ghosts #ghoststory #ghoststories #hauntings #gothic #gothicfiction

3 months ago 7 6 1 0
Avebury Cove stones from a frosty tree. #StandingStoneSunday

Avebury Cove stones from a frosty tree. #StandingStoneSunday

Avebury Cove stones from a frosty tree.
#StandingStoneSunday

3 months ago 199 30 1 0
Dressing Up Dogs

Dressing Up Dogs

Dressing Up Dogs: https://www.cartoongravity.com/dressing-up-dogs/

3 months ago 6 1 0 1
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Home 2026 DATES NOW CONFIRMED! 6th-8th February 2026, Online via Google Meet Pick up your tickets here 27th February-1st March, In-person at QUAD, Derby Pick up your tickets here

Very much looking forward to going to this at the end of February.

www.ukghoststoryfestival.co.uk

3 months ago 1 0 0 0
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'SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES' CLOCK

Huge thanks for all of yesterday's orders for our new 'Schools and Colleges' clock. Last few available in the shop for shipping in February.

hiddenbritain.bigcartel.com/product/scho...

3 months ago 91 25 5 0
What appears to be a giant praying mantis wandering a corn field is actually a normal sized praying mantis that's actually sitting on my windshield

What appears to be a giant praying mantis wandering a corn field is actually a normal sized praying mantis that's actually sitting on my windshield

Timeline Cleanse: Please enjoy this photo of a praying mantis that was sitting on top of my car windshield, but the angling and lighting were so weird it looks like a giant praying mantis wandering a corn field in Iowa.

3 months ago 6198 1898 108 128
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But it’s not the sound of a crying baby. It’s the sound of the thing that the soldiers who buried the bones in the walls were trying to keep out.

(2/2)

3 months ago 3 0 0 0

Excavations at the Roman fort at Reculver found a number of skeletons of babies within the foundations and the walls. Local legend has it that the fort is haunted by the sounds of a crying baby. If you visit on the right night, you might hear it.

(🧵1/2)

3 months ago 3 0 1 0