moranion:

funereal-disease:

thesegoddamnpancakes:

gomifunex:

theouijagirl:

breelandwalker:

gayantlers:

swynwraigh:

witchy-woman:

ancient-absent-goddess:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

thesegoddamnpancakes:

dduane:

elocinneem:

superindianslug:

ohmeursault:

false-dawn:

queer-femme-romulan:

evaunit-05:

Irish people; The faeries aren’t real

Irish people; No fucking way will I go in that faerie ring

#look#you don’t go in a fairy ring and you don’t fuck with a stone in the middle of a field#these are just facts#nobody does it#fairies will fuck you up#Ireland#folklore#fairies (Via @false-dawn)

Look, I don’t believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. That’s just common sense.

Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.

My general rule of thumb: you don’t have to believe in everything, but don’t fuck with it, just in case.

^^^ that part

This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.

The Southwest is like this in some ways. You don’t go traveling along the highways at night with an empty car seat. Because an empty car seat is an invitation. You stick your luggage, your laptop bag, whatever you got in that seat. Else something best left undiscussed and unnamed (because to discuss it by name is to go ‘AY WE’RE TALKING BOUT YA WE’RE HERE AND ALSO IGNORANT OF WHAT YOU’RE CAPABLE OF’ at the top of your damn lungs at them) will jump in to the car, after which you’re gonna have a bad time.

If you’re out in the woods, you keep constant, consistent count of your party and make sure you know everyone well enough that you can ID them by face alone, lest something imitating a person get at you. They like to insert themselves in the party and just observe before they strike. It’s a game to them. In general you don’t fuck with the weird, you ignore the lights in the sky (no, this isn’t a god damn night vale reference, yes I’m serious) and the woods, you lock up at night and you don’t answer the door for love or money. Whatever or whoever’s knocking ain’t your buddy.

^ So much good advice in this post right here

I live in the south and… you just… don’t go into the woods or fields at night.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

Shit’s wild and I sound fucking crazy but I swear to god it’s true.

Every time this post comes around, it’s my favorite to open up the notes and read the stories. Probably shouldn’t have since I’m sleeping alone tonight, but you know, it’s fine. 😂

Austrian girl here who has lived in Ireland for 5+ years. This shit is LEGIT. I’ve seen it with my own two Catholic eyes. 

Sure, visit during the day. That’s alright as long as you’re respectful. But you couldn’t PAY ME ENOUGH to go there at night. These are also the last places where you wanna start littering. 

I grew up in southwest Pennsylvania which is a weird mixture of American cultures and environments. I was in the heavily forested mountains (northern Appalachia) but had lots and lots of corn fields and cow pastures. Like the Smoky Mountains and fields of Kansas combined. And being so cut off from a lot of the world, we had our fair share of ghost stories.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I was walking to a friend’s house one night. It was about 20 minutes down a dirt road with forest on one side and a cornfield on the other. I’ve walked past it many times and wasn’t really concerned. My main worry was coming across a skunk or porcupine. I didn’t have a flashlight because the moonlight was bright enough and I knew the walk really well. Then I saw the eyes. I immediately averted mine (because for some reason that’s how to not annoy it) but they kept wandering back. They were still there, watching. I heard rustling and saw the eyes come closer and I took off running. I got to my friends without a scratch, but I was terrified. I mentioned it to my friend and that’s when I found out it was A Thing. Her parents agreed and shared their stories. I brought it up more and almost everyone knew what I was talking about. It was a phenomenon a lot of folks around town experienced but never mentioned. To this day, I don’t linger around poorly light cornfields at night. 

Faeries and Wee Folk and Liminal Spaces, oh myyyy…

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

But if you know what’s good for you, DON’T FUCK WITH IT.

For my followers that ask about Fae stuff.

I grew up in the southwest as well and being native this shit is everywhere, scared places, taboo things, seeing things that just seem so hard to believe but they’re real.

One time when someone was trying to hurt us through bad means and witch craft things my mother had to put this scared stick we had near the window for protection. When I feel asleep I had a nightmare that something was trying to get in the window and I kept trying to avoid the windows but they were everywhere. When I woke up I looked on the floor and the stick had fallen, the area where my mother placed it was a flat surface, the possibility of it rolling off and falling wasn’t possible and I’ll never forget how terrifying that dream was.

In honor of me ending up on my own dash for the first time, story time.

If you’re traveling north from Albuquerque, fill up before you leave. There is very little between there and Cortez, Colorado. It is not a short trip. I was coming home from up north, and had made the mistake of not filling up back in Colorado. I also had terrible phone service, so if my GPS needed to reroute? Good luck, buddy.

It was long about 02:30, dark as a tar roof out. I’d taken a wrong turn, and ended up amongst the numerous two lane roads that populate rural areas, complete with utter lack of lighting aside from the absent moon and dim, distant stars. I finally, finally find my way back to the highway, having burned a good half hour looking. As I turn on to it, I notice that I’m damn close to empty. Thankfully, my then-friend who I’m helping to move here hadn’t noticed yet. Around ten minutes later, I hear a “Pancakes, we’re almost out of gas,” from the passenger seat. That calm, even tone you’d point out a rabid bear approaching with. Well, shit.

Luckily, a few hills later, we roll up on to the set of a Supernatural spin-off. A gas station, closed, with pay at the pump. Nothing surrounding it, nothing nearby. Just open scrublands far as the eye can see. Flat as it is here, that’s disconcertingly far. I get out and begin filling up. All seems largely fine.

There is a unique feeling that cannot be described unless you’ve experienced it, and because of poor choices when I was a teenager, I’m quite capable of describing it. That unmistakable feeling of someone staring at you with every intent of killing you flooded my senses, cut with odd interest. Strangely amused malice. I know, deep in my soul, if I look behind me? I will die. So will my friend. We will be a news tidbit turned urban legend turned metal song inspiration source. The pump is putting gas in my truck at the speed of tea kettle.

Right at that point, a dog appears, close enough I can make out detail in the flickering blue florescence, but too far to be a bite risk. Some kind of heeler mix, I think. Now, when I say appeared, I mean I looked off to the side, saw nothing, looked at the pump for a second, and looked back to see instadog, just add water. If a dog can look disappointed, this one did. The purest >:| I have ever experienced. A look of “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Why are you out here at this hour? Are you stupid?”

The dog was never hostile. Never once barked, or even growled. Had no collar. But it always remained within my field of view, and never broke eye contact with me. Like it wanted me to keep looking at it, to have something to focus on. The pump clicks done, and I hang it up. The dog stares. As I get back in the truck, the feeling subsides, and the moment the door clicks closed, the dog trots off in to the night. I swear to whatever deity you want, I think I saw it shake its head. Like a disappointed aunt watching her nephew try out for Jackass.

There was enough residual light from the station and stars that I could see beyond the fence across the road pretty easily when I pulled in. As I was leaving, I looked over to speak to my friend. It was like someone had hung a taut sheet of vantablack a few feet beyond the fence.

I don’t travel that road at night anymore.

I’m from rural northern Vermont. Decidedly Olde New England, but the Green Mountains are part of the northern wing of the Appalachians, so we’ve got some of that too.

Fun fact about Vermont: everyone thinks of it as this quintessentially green place, but it actually used to be largely farmland. Most forests are new growth, deliberately cultivated in the past hundred years or so as farming was scaled back. So in pretty much every backyard woods, you can find the remains of old farmsteads. Sometimes it’s just a well and the remains of a cellar; sometimes it’s entire foundations. Point being. Don’t fuck with them. And by god don’t reach into the wells for literally any reason.

Tell me more weird shit PLEASE, I won’t sleep but I feed on this like a fucking ghoul. Tell me more.