Signe Maene
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signemaene.com
Signe Maene
@signemaene.com
3.9K followers 1K following 2.4K posts
Belgian writer of stories inspired by Flemish folklore. Loves spooky woods, fairies, selkies, poetry and pretty shoes :-) BookWormSat with Rachel Deering.🖤 OUT NOW: Flemish Folktales Retold. signemaene.com/links/
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Signe Maene @signemaene.com · Oct 15
The witches of Flanders are everywhere. Their tales may be forgotten, their voices unheard, but they are anything but quiet.

Step into the darkness and help us give a voice to Flanders' witches! 🌙 kck.st/492NqKt 🌙 #WyrdWednesday
Image with the title of the book: The Witch's Child and other Dark Tales from Old Flanders. Also the text: Back us on Kickstarter. Image shows the bookcover in both Ebook and paperback form. Book cover is a dark black and white cover with a witch staring at a field. There is a dog, crow, frog, butterfly and other animals around her. Moon and trees.
signemaene.com
'Witte Wieven dance to and fro,
hear the rhythm of the wild sways
and the murmuring of their speeches
around the witches' bowl.'
-Joannes Reddingius (translated)

🎨Marthe Jonkers
#BookWormSat
Artwork of "Witte Wieven", five ethereal female forms, playing music, standing on a river and riverbank. The background consists of an upward slope, some shrubbery on the top, ending in a cloudy sky. The overall theme is dark and gloomy. Sombre colours.
January 31, 2026 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
beesincampanula.bsky.social
It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life.

The Werewolf
Angela Carter

🖼️ Breugel
#BookWormSat
Pieter Bruegel Hunters In The Snow Winter 1656
January 31, 2026 at 7:50 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
bookwormsat.bsky.social
'Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other's arms.'
-The Iliad

@signemaene.com welcomes you to #BookWormSat!

🎨Gustave Moreau
Painting of a faceless woman standing on rocks. Yellowish sky behind her.
January 31, 2026 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
racheldeering.bsky.social
Now and then, I forget that it’s #FrogForFriday and when I do, I feel remiss. @pogue.omg.lol
🖼️ Frog, Hans Hoffman, C16th.
Frog painting.
January 31, 2026 at 1:39 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
wunderkammertales.bsky.social
Tonight might be one of the last nights of this winter when the the hounds of the Otherworld run with the Wild Hunt – but who makes sure they return to Annwn when winter is over?

We go to the hills of Powys in our 23rd #winterfolklore and find out.

Read the story below.

🎨 Barbara Baldi
January 31, 2026 at 7:01 AM
signemaene.com
Bridge in Mechelen, Louis Dewis (1872–1946).
Artwork of a bridge in Mechelen. Typical Belgian houses with stepped gables in the distance.
January 30, 2026 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
cwreeve.bsky.social
'The Ghost of Clytemnestra Awakening the Furies' (1781), by John Downman.

#PhantomsFriday
An ethereal. glowing figure raises her hand to the air, while several other around her figures cower away.
January 30, 2026 at 11:08 AM
signemaene.com
An interior with a young woman sitting in front of the window sewing, Ludvig August Smith (1820–1906).
Pretty much as the title of the painting says. She's wearing a pinkish dress and a dog is sleeping at her feet.
January 30, 2026 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
racheldeering.bsky.social
Book Cover of the Day:
The Star of the Fairies, red cover with black lettering and gold ornate borders and central illustration of sun and clouds.
January 30, 2026 at 6:49 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
theghostmonk.bsky.social
A clergyman was once bothered in his chamber by the #ghost of one of his host's ancestors - who had been a notorious miser. He presents the ghost with a list of subscribers to a local charity, pointing out that as a long-term resident, he ought to pay up too. This frightens it off!
#PhantomsFriday
An Irving Montagu illustration of the wily clergyman holding out his list of subscribers to the skinflint's ghost, which is wearing Tudor costume and clutching a bag of what would have been sovereigns. The ghost is hurrying away, a sour look on its face.
January 30, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
wunderkammertales.bsky.social
Tonight the karakış, winter’s longest black nights end and so does the time when the Karakoncolos walks, a hairy Winter demon, a riddler, a trickster from Turkish folklore.

We meet him in 1950s' Istanbul in our 22nd #winterfolklore tale, written for poet @lenaozge.bsky.social

Read it below!
January 30, 2026 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
ruinsofdespair.bsky.social
Das Kloster Walkenried

Carl Hasenpflug (1802–1858)

#art #gothic
An oil painting in brown and white hues. Interior of the cloister, showing a Gothic stone arcade with pointed arches and ribbed vaulting. Sculpted corbels and tracery decorate the damaged walls and windows. The passage opens onto what looks like a narrow courtyard, but what most likely is the other end of the arcade. Snow covers the scattered fallen stones. At the far back, a stone cross on a monument with human figures. In the background, bare trees and the remains of a ruined church rise above the cloister.
January 30, 2026 at 10:56 AM
signemaene.com
According to a Flemish folktale, a woman was followed by a ghost while she walked home late at night. The ghost had a skull instead of a head and a white beard. Overnight, a huge tree grew in front of her door. It had to be cut down because nobody could enter or leave.

#PhantomsFriday
Art by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. A skull wearing a wreath.
January 30, 2026 at 10:53 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
racheldeering.bsky.social
Witch Hazel, Winterbloom, Catherine Hyde.
Witch hazel tree with yellow bloom lit in background with bright white sunshine, painting.
January 30, 2026 at 7:08 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
wunderkammertales.bsky.social
“‘Feel not after my clasping hand:
     I am but a shadow, come from the meadow
Where many lie, but no tree can stand.”

(Christina Rossetti)

🎨 Florence Harrison

#phantomsfriday
“Florence Harrison’s haunting vision of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’: A grieving wife, clad in the deep blue of endless night, clutches her chair as her spectral husband—pale as a stray lamb, cold as the grave—stands just beyond her reach. His form is a whisper of what was, his return a bittersweet torment. The room, with its discarded slippers and abandoned book, is a shrine to love’s endurance and loss’s cruelty”
January 30, 2026 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
bookwormsat.bsky.social
‘She looked around, and saw swans come flying through the air’ ~ Six Swans for Grimm's Fairy Tales, 1920, 🖼️ Elenore Abbott.

This #BookWormSat we celebrate the end of Storytelling Week with all and any literature with its foundations in an oral storytelling tradition. Join us!
Illustration of a scene from the fairy tale The Six Swans. The illustration features a young woman wearing a flowing purple dress. She is reaching out towards several large white swans surrounding her.
January 30, 2026 at 7:15 AM
signemaene.com
Departing for the Promenade (Will you go out with me, Fido?) by Alfred Stevens (1823–1906).
Painting of a woman opening the door and looking behind her at a small white dog. Green sofa and portrait of another woman in the background.
January 29, 2026 at 9:42 AM
signemaene.com
'You have witchcraft in your lips.'
-Shakespeare

🎨Henrietta Rae (detail)
Painting title: Ophelia. Painting of Ophelia distributing flowers to the court. White dress. Reddish background.
January 29, 2026 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
wunderkammertales.bsky.social
"Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Love only should one consider"

(Oscar Wilde)

🎨Aubrey Beardsley

#WyrdWednesday #booksky
Black-and-white Beardsley illustration: Salomé, in a long flowing gown with a dark, curved collar and horn-like adornments in her hair, leans forward to gaze intimately at the severed head of John the Baptist she holds between her hands at face level. Behind them, a dense pattern of stylised peacock-like circles fills the left side, while the right side is a stark black void. Below, a flat pool of inky blackness holds pale reflections, a slender lily-like flower, and curling decorative lines, making the scene feel both exquisitely elegant and quietly monstrous.
January 28, 2026 at 4:00 PM
Reposted by Signe Maene
ghirlandia.bsky.social
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.

Isabella or The Pot of Basil 🌿
John Keats

J W Waterhouse #WyrdWednesday
January 28, 2026 at 5:58 PM
signemaene.com
'Oh, what a flight that was through the air; the wind caught her cloak, which spread out on every side like the sail of a ship, and the moon shone through it.'
-The Travelling Companions, Andersen.

🎨Dugald Stewart Walker
Black/white illustration of a woman floating through the air.
January 29, 2026 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Signe Maene
wunderkammertales.bsky.social
“the whitened noble neck (Oh grief!) to the cutting sword,
the heroine calmly extending it to the death blow.”

(Thomas Chaloner “Elegy on the Death of Lady Jane Grey”, 1579)

🎨 Paul Delaroche “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey”, 1833

#wyrdwednesday
In a dim stone chamber, Lady Jane Grey—young, pale, and dressed in a luminous white satin gown—kneels blindfolded, her hands searching uncertainly as she is gently guided towards the execution block. A man in dark clothing with a fur-trimmed cloak supports her at the elbow, leaning close as if giving final directions. Straw is scattered across the floor; the wooden block sits centre foreground. To the left, a woman in rich red-brown garments has collapsed in grief, while another figure turns away with hands raised. On the right, the executioner waits in red hose and a dark tunic, holding an axe, his posture tense in the heavy silence before the blow.
January 28, 2026 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Signe Maene
racheldeering.bsky.social
Goodnight.
🖼️ Owl on a Bare Tree, Caspar David Friedrich, 1834.
The Owl ~ Edward Thomas
‘All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped…’ 🦉
Painting as described, against moonlight cloudy night sky.
January 28, 2026 at 9:40 PM
Reposted by Signe Maene
folkhorrorrevival.bsky.social
#WyrdWednesday In 1584, in Somerset, Margaret Cooper was possessed by the Devil and took to her bed. One night after weeks of torment a phantom headless bear materialised in her room, grabbed her, shoved her head between her legs and rolled her round like a hoop for 15 minutes.
Woodcut from a 1614 pamphlet called A Miracle of Miracles published by John Trundle. It shows a room with a window and a large bed in the middle with a lady (Margaret Cooper) lying in it. Five other people surround the bed reacting in terror at a large black bear with no head and clawed paws menacing them. On the left is a winged angel holding a cross.
January 28, 2026 at 12:47 PM
signemaene.com
'She seized the head by its hair
And washed it clean in a well.'

Heer Halewijn is a murderer who finally gets what he deserves when he wants to murder a princess. He takes his overdress off so that his clothes won't be stained with her blood. She quickly beheads him.

#WyrdWednesday
Art by Henricus Jansen, depicting the princess beheading Heer Halewijn.
January 28, 2026 at 2:18 PM