Year after year, poor Mummel-Liesel the ex-nixie is forced to return to her pond in the Black Forest to report doom and gloom to her master, enthralled by his spells.
Read more of Liesel in our 45th #DarkSpringtide tale below.
🎨 unknown, unfortunately
Something old had nested in the numerous caves of the Apuseni Mountains in Western Romania and the people had their own peculiar rituals to keep it up there and out of their villages.
Most didn't work particularly well, though.
Read more in our 44th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Abigail Larson
The dark side of the moon. We have seen it at all now. Pink Floyd did before us. And before that? Once upon a time, a girl found and egg and what hatched from said egg...
Read more about a very peculiar moon flight in our 43rd #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Ohara Koson
The Reverend Julian Graves (dec.) never learned how to end things. And so he returns to St Bride’s library every April to write poetry. Since more than 300 years.
Read his story below in our 42nd #darkspringtide tale.
🎨 Mike Mignola
Everyone, god and his mother might feel slightly hungover after an abundance of festivities and observances and since olden times, there are Silent Days strewn in... like today.
Days you might meet a Silent One in the woods... like the one in our 41st #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Martin Ball
Sometimes they come back. Not as draugr, as they are called up North, but as... something else, the unjustly slain.
Our 40th #darkspringtide tale tells of boat burials, flowers and payback.
Read it below.
🎨 Howard Pyle
Today is Hana Matsuri in Japan, a flower festival celebrating the birth of Buddha... but amidst all the beauty of the cherry blossoms - be carful what you wish for. Something might actually listen and grant it.
Read more in our 39th #darkspringtide tale below!
🎨 Utagawa Hiroshige
On the day after the Easter, the monks of Saint-Pierre d’Autun did a strange thing, back in 1282. Out of sheer boredom, probably, but... what they did had consequences!
Read what that was in our 38th #darkspringtide tale below!
🎨 Canis Albus
In Ireland, Easter Monday is a date when people go on pilgrimage to holy wells in the countryside and some of those spots are ancient sites of worship.
Read our 37th #darkspringtide tale below and find out what happens when the worshipping is, in some way, ancient as well.
Wash you face with dew and eat eggs stained red with onion skins, but if you find you find yourself travelling through Picardie on Easter Sunday, do not turn around when a fourth bell rings from the steeple
... and read more about it in our 36th #darkspringtide tale below!
🎨J.M.W. Turner (detail)
Harrowing of Hell and Silent Saturday... the day before Easter Sunday and Resurrection was a quiet one and only the church bells rang for Easter Vigil.
But in the Far North, someone went underground to dance, in our 35th #darkspringtide tale - read it below!
🎨 Jan Pienkowski
Once, there was no dancing on Good Friday, any place they spoke German. But, as the story goes, there was a girl in the woods of Anhalt who did...
Read our 34th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Anne Anderson
On the eve of Maundy Tuesday, all of Denmark's magpies fly with the witches to Tromsø for the annual sabbath. Sankt Skadeaften they call it, St Magpie's Eve.
Our 33rd #darkspringtide tale deals with a girl who was left behind, though - or was she?
Read her story below!
🎨 Tuesday Riddell
Hihi... well, all the #darkspringtide tales are more or less made up - actual folkloric or historic background and I usually take it from there and run with it :-)
The Wednesday before Easter is known as Spy Wednesday and there is a tree on the northern Bank of Llyn Cynwch in Gwynedd that lays an egg on every Spy Wednesday that makes you... spy.
Our 32nd #darkspringtide story is an egg-shaped #WyrdWednesday tale - read it below!
On Holy Tuesday, they laid down the Wheat Child in the first furrow they ploughed, but one year it suddenly spoke - and had nothing good to say.
Our 31st #darkspringtide tale brings us to the wheat fields of Burgenland in the east of Austria in the year of 1529 - read it below!
🎨 Rosalie Lettau
"... and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away." (MT 21:18)
A canonical Holy Monday story - but our 30th #darkspringtide tale from ancient Bactria is different, with a fig tree bearing Dionysian fruit.
Read it below!
Today we have a tale for you, of west wind and daffodils, a salty one, on the Feast Day of St Woolos the Bearded, patron saint of Newport smugglers and pirates, like infamous Henry Morgan.
Come aboard the “Blodeuwedd“ and read our 29th #darkspringtide tale below
🎨 François Bourgeon
Nobody likes being woken up too early, ancient death goddesses are no exception - and what might happen if one of those pesky calendar reforms play havoc with your seasonal rituals... well, read it all in our 28th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 missupacey
Every year, on #worldtheatreday, they perform the same play in Český Krumlov's other Baroque theatre... with the same cast... well... almost. Some do join every now and then.
And who doesn't love a haunted theatre?
Visit one, in our 27th #darkspringtide tale and follow the link below.
🎨 F. Hamel
Good Friday and Old Lady Day rarely coincide and 25 March was the day they executed Margaret Clitherow, for harbouring Catholic priests in 1586.
When the three dates align something strange happens in York's Shambles. Death and the scent of Daisies.
Read more in today's #DarkSpringtide tale below
What do you do when it’s #TolkienReadingDay, #WaffleDay and the Feast Day of St Dimas the Good Thief at the same time?
Right… you tell a story about waffle-eating thieves in Middle Earth.
Meet Sifrið of the Dales in Tharbad, in our 25th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Angus McBride
Does old architecture really carry memories of past events?
We find out, in our 24th #darkspringtide story which takes us to Ostia, on the anniversary of the Sanguinaria, the days of blood and the resurrection of Attis - along with bull sacrifices.
Read it below.
Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old / Nature, the great renewer, fashions all”
(Ovid)
Our 22nd #darkspringtide tale brings us the early days of Přemyslid Bohemia, a thousand years ago, and we meet a girl that chose to become a birch rather than a queen.
Read her story below
🎨A. Scheiner
Fading funeral roses are all that remained of creature of legend in the ancient region of Mysia when times and beliefs changed. And a girl named Alke under Bear Mountain, buried, but sometimes whispering, none the less.
Read more of her in our 21st #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Rachel Ruysch
Marafonas, Portuguese faceless cloth dolls, play an important part during the Festas de Santa Cruz in May.
But what if one wakes early, on the eve of the Spring Equinox?
We go to the Portugal's Castelo Branco district and find out, in our 19th #darkspringtide tale.
Read it below
🎨 bloodborne
Mrs St Pats? Seriously? Today is Sheelah's Day, the day that once celebrated the wife of St Patrick.
Does she echo something older? Sheelah-na-gig maybe? Or was the snake-dispelling saint proxy married to an ancient goddess?
Read our 18th #darkspringtide tale below - a true #wyrdwednesday story!
Today is St Urho's Day - celebrating a saint who banished the grasshoppers and saved the vineyards.
The Finnish North American community's tongue-in-cheek reply to a famous Irish festivity, St Urho is remembered in Minnesota, Ontario and our 16th #darkspringtide tale.
Read it below!
All kinds of horse-shaped water spirits frolic in freshwater pools across Northern Europe once they are ice-free.
They all have one thing in common: Being malevolent to their spiritual core.
We meet one In our 14th #darkspringtide story, a Glashtin from the Isle of Man - read their story below.
Progress famously stops for no one and usually it comes at a price, as the Bellera family from Catalonia learned in the 1860s when they angered the aigües, the water woman of the Riu Llobregat.
Read what happened in our 13th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Joan Brull
