The cover of The House With a Clock In Its Walls, by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey. A silhouette of a Victorian mansion looms over a small boy, with a ghostly face surrounded by clock numbers imposed over it.

I recently reread this childhood treasure--

"From deep within the tomb came a sound. Boom! A deep hollow sound. The iron doors jolted, as if they had been struck a blow from inside. The chain rattled, and there was a clunk on the pavement. The padlock had fallen off..."

Pure Victorian gothic.

Graveyard ghosts. A man lays in a swoon across a grave; a shovel lays by one hand. In the air above the graveyard, multiple ghosts hover in despair and torment. A dead infant dangles from the arms of a weeping woman ghost. A male ghost grips the timbers of a scaffold. Illustration from THE MYSTERIES OF THE COURT OF LONDON, 1849.

#PhantomsFriday

Graveyard ghosts. From THE MYSTERIES OF THE COURT OF LONDON, 1849.

Painting. A young man sits up in bed, seemingly startled. The curtains of his bed are parted and before him stands a lady in bridal clothes. An open door in the background shows a winding stair. More about this painting. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-speak-speak-n01584

'Speak! Speak!'
by John Everett Millais

#PhantomsFriday

Anonymous cartoon from 1895 satirizing the whinging of the upper classes over their claims of impoverishment. The ghostly figure is presumably the spectre of hardship they imagine looming over them - but he's clearly making fun of them.
#PhantomsFriday #satire #posterart #Victorian

Artwork of a gloomy forest of pine trees with straight trunks. Lurking amidst them half hidden is a lady wearing a dress with her hands folded.

#PhantomsFriday 'A Ghost Among the Trees' by Wilhelm Keller, from Jugend magazine, April, 1896

Very moody!

A dense hillside covered with thousands of crosses of all sizes and materials, many adorned with rosaries, beads, and small religious items. A narrow wooden walkway runs through the middle, where several visitors walk and pause to look around. In the foreground, a large weathered wooden cross stands prominently, while the background is filled with an overwhelming forest of crosses rising under a cloudy sky.

Around 11km outside the city of Siauliai in northern Lithuania, an old, earthen mound hunches under the weight of thousands of crosses. As the wind blows across the fields of rural Siauliai County, ornate rosaries clink against metal

#PhantomsFriday 🧵

Hooded statue of a monk stands solemnly in the foreground, against a snowy backdrop of medieval stone walls and round towers, conveying a mysterious tone.

A cloaked figure ascends stone steps between aged, ivy-covered buildings, evoking mystery and intrigue in a sunlit, medieval setting.

The most well-known ghost of Tallinn, Estonia is the Black Monk, who lives in the Short-Leg Gate Tower. He likes to tease the people living in the tower, pull their toes and punch them in the ribs. Sometimes he likes to scare people with blood running through his face.

#PhantomsFriday 🧵

Aerial view of a historic castle with red roofs, surrounded by lush greenery, a river, and a quaint village, under a clear blue sky at sunset.

Dundaga Castle, one of the oldest in Latvia, has a chilling reputation. It’s said to be haunted by the ghost of a young woman who was bricked up alive in one of the walls. Visitors have reported hearing unexplained noises,

#PhantomsFriday 🧵

Ground red pepper and a wooden spoon to pick it up, in a black bowl on a gray-brown wicker table

For fear of Japanese ghosts that wander the streets of Seoul from colonial occupation, semi-modern Korean folklore states women should carry ground red peppers to deter the pepper-fearing unquiet colonizers. #PhantomsFriday

A Victorian woman stretching her hand across a table and a ghost, here a person in a sheet, reaching out while looking at the viewer. The curtains around them look like hands. Unknown artist, taken from BBC Radio 4.

A central part of the Spiritualist movement was the inclusion of spirit guides, which primarily consisted of the dead or some animus attempting to impart wisdom to the living. While a medium might speak to many spirits, they had a primary guide helping navigation. #PhantomsFriday

A black-and-white drawing from a Stephen Fabian art collection book. It was originally used as an interior illustration for The End of Days (1976/77) by David C. Smith. A man's arm holding a sword is in the foreground. A robed figure with a cowl, empty except for glowing eyes, is in the background.

Six lines of poetry from Shadows from Yesterday by Robert E. Howard. It was an untitled draft unpublished in his lifetime. The source of the title is unknown. Poem text: From: Shadows from Yesterday Down through the years strange phantom fears haunted my restless soul, Strange whisperings like the far off sweep of the sea upon a shoal. For the dim ghost came when the sun had set and shadows dusked the lea; I heard the tread of the vengeful dead and his eyes would gaze on me. And grim they blazed when the stars were hazed by the fogs of the silent night, And dim they gazed when the dawning raised, in the silver lifting light.

#PhantomsFriday

Art and poem credits in alt text.

Another truly extraordinary location!

Hardback copies of 'Haunted Inns', left, and 'Phantom Britain', both by Marc Alexander.

Marc Alexander was one of the top collectors of #ghost accounts in the 1970s. These two beauties date from 1973 and 1975 respectively. I'm pretty sure the inn pictured is The Bird Cage in Thame, #Oxfordshire, which was supposedly haunted by a leper.
#PhantomsFriday #haunting #BookChatWeekly #pubs

Sisters With a Dark Secret

Artist: Jakub Dominik Krzewniak

#phantomsfriday

"The Ogre's ghost is sometimes said to appear in the form of a sawn tree trunk and haunts Brede and the Groaning Bridge at Stubb's Lane, Brede."
#PhantomsFriday #Brede #Sussex

I love the story of Brede Place: it's one of the most gruesome in folklore. But I've never seen this before.

Patrick Stewart by Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons

Sir Patrick Stewart has stated he's experienced spooky goings-on from the age of 12. Most famously, he saw a #ghost on stage at the Haymarket Theatre in 2009, playing opposite Ian McKellen in 'Waiting For Godot'. He believed it might have been of Victorian actor-manager J B Buckstone
#PhantomsFriday

Three children in Victorian clothing are posed by and on their mother's grave, while the ghostly mother stands behind them. Stereoscope card, 1889 "The Orphans at their Mother's Grave."

#PhantomsFriday #InternationalHaikuDay

He killed me for her
Now she mistreats my children
See how she shivers.

#TheVictorianBookoftheDead
The Orphans at their Mother's Grave, 1889, Stereoscope card by Melander & Bro.
www.loc.gov/pictures/ite...

Ooh, that is creepy.

Fairyland by Edmund Dulac by forgottenbeauty | Redbubble This illustration was done for the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

1/7 In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair & stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/3327... #PhantomsFriday #bookchatweekly #poem

The Evil Bird in Gera

Plague spirit often appear as a strange blue mist that can be imprisoned... for some time.

#PhantomsFriday
wiki.sunkencastles.com/wiki/The_Evil_Bird_in_Ge...

#PhantomsFriday

#PhantomsFriday

It's also supposed to be haunted and in one piece of modern folklore - used at one point by Alan Moore - that it was haunted by every single person ever shot with one.

A grotesque skull with bloodshot eyes and skeletal hands peeking through the pulled back mosquito netting over some unsuspecting people we cannot see

The Phantom of Kohada Koheiji by Katsushika Hokusai popping in to say "Hi!" this #PhantomsFriday

Link to history of legend/artist:
getdailyart.com/en/18453/kat...

RP @roger1952.bsky.social Surreal or #ghostly, I'm calling this a #PhantomsFriday worthy post! 😀

"The #Ghostly Coven of Branden Farm" via strangeco.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-... on X. #PhantomsFriday

RT @skionar.bsky.social #PhantomsFriday