Once I thought I glimpsed her high up in a bush, like dirty rags in a gale. Not that so far there has been any gale, or even any wind. The total silent stillness is one of the worst things.\nYes, it is a battle with strong and unknown forces that I have on my hands.\nFrom the shorelines, hills and towns of ancient lands, tales of twisted creatures, sins against nature and pagan revenants have been passed down from generation to generation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklore from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man inspired a new strain of strange short stories, penned by writers of the weird and fantastic including masters of the form such as Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton and Robert Aickman.\nIn this volume, Johnny Mains dives into the archives to unearth a hoard of twenty-one enthralling tales imbued with elements of Celtic folklore, ranging from the 1820s to the 1980s and including three weird lost gems translated from Gaelic. Together they conjure uncanny visions of eternal forces, beings and traditions, resonating with the beguiling essence of this unique branch of strange fiction.

Stories of witchcraft in Scotland go back to the real Macbeth in the tenth century. The 1600s in particular saw a frenzy of witch hunting. Backed by a cruel law and exhorted by fanatical preachers, neighbour turned against neighbour, decimating whole families and villages. Many innocents perished, facing prosecution, torture, and execution. Leonard Low reveals the stories of these cases. In his personal and accessible style, he examines the circumstances and outcomes of over thirty witch trials, sees the petty jealousies that often led to horrible results, and visits the handful of monuments that commemorate the victims of superstition. The author draws on his extensive collection of primary sources, letters, diaries, and authentic instruments used to extract confessions. If you are interested in the real stories of witch trials, Scottish history, or curious how peaceful communities could descend into violent oppression, this book will show you how it happened. This book is filled with illustrations and photographs of the actual sites and instruments, and contains a list of names of those prosecuted in Fife.

These are damnable tales, selected and beautifully illustrated by Richard Wells. This richly illustrated anthology gathers together classic short stories from masters of supernatural fiction including M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Arthur Machen, alongside lesser-known voices in the field including Eleanor Scott and Margery Lawrence, and popular writers less bound to the horror genre, such as Thomas Hardy and E. F. Benson. They stalk the moors at night, the deep forests, cornered fields and dusky churchyards, the narrow lanes and old ways of these ancient places, drawing upon the haunted landscapes of folk-horror. These twenty-two stories take the reader beyond the safety and familiarity of the town into the isolated and untamed wilderness of unholy rights, witches' curses, sinister village traditions and ancient horrors.