“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.” – Jean Baudrillard
Happy Halloween
The Ghost Road
Between Annan & Gretna Green in Dumfriesshire, just across the Scottish border, lies a 15 mile stretch of the A75 that has a history of unexplained sightings and accidents that date back over fifty years. It’s usually when travelling late at night that drivers of all ages have reported any manner of sightings – from [...]
Spring Heeled Jack
When they finally caught Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, on 2nd January 1981, it was in Sheffield, one of the few cities in the north where he hadn’t left his mark. Before him though, Sheffield had had another mysterious ‘Jack’ to deal with. In the early 19th Century, an entity known as the Park Ghost [...]
Rituals In The Dark
In March 1963, at the site of a derelict church on the slope of Dead Man’s Hill in Clophill, Bedfordshire, a passerby spotted a young child playing with a human skull. The boy had found it impaled upon a spike within a circle of other bones, arranged inside the walls of the old church, upon [...]
Suffer The Witch
In a countdown to Halloween, over the next 5 days I’ll be offering some of my favourite ‘weird tales’, starting with this startling account of suburban sorcery.
It’s 1955 and we’re in Islington in London, at a house used for meetings of the New Isis Lodge. The occult fraternity was a branch of the Ordo Templii [...]
Stop Coming To My House
Here’s the next in my series of paintings based on Mogwai songs. ‘Stop Coming To My House’ is one of their best titles and one of their most overlooked tracks that they don’t seem to play live anymore. Don’t ask me where this image came from, or even what it “means”, it’s one of those that [...]
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes [...]
The Waste Land
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere – Philip Larkin
I first saw George Shaw’s work only recently, but it made an immediate emotional connection with me that I know will last for the rest of my life. This is it, I thought. This is what I’ve been waiting for all these years. No fantastical depiction of [...]
Mogwai Fear Satan
Project Mogwai starts here. I’m planning to paint a series of images based on my interpretation of songs by the band Mogwai. I’ll do as many as I can until I think I’m finished, which could take anywhere from six months to (more likely) a year. It will be the major artistic undertaking of my [...]
Sunex Amures
I remember first reading about Harry Price when I was a kid. My sister had a collection of spooky books, and one of them offered a dramatic overview of the Borley Rectory, with which Price’s name will be forever associated. Price himself looked heavy duty; not the camp frilly-cuffed ponce you saw taking on the [...]
