Rails thrum with trains that never arrive. Limbs made phantom by branch line butchery become ghost grooves for steam-powered spirits to move across the land. No aspect of what was once modernity is immune to temporal shading, is immune to being haunted. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
November 11, 2025 at 1:04 PM
I like properties where spirits have thrown their ectoplasmic weight around to the point the owners have fled. More so, I adore a property so phantom-plagued no estate agent can find a willing renter. Ghosts that defy the property market are worth studying. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
November 6, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Stately homes, pubs and theatres have commodified their phantoms. Turned them into neat little stories, spectre-magnets to draw in visitors with ache for ghost-glimpse. Then there are the places where shades and their stories are feral. Unowned, uncurated spots. I hold to these. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
October 25, 2025 at 3:11 PM
The perception of ghost oft begins with the story we tell ourselves about it, the language employed. If we think of a place as ghost-burdened rather than ghost-graced, we shape encounter as surely as potter shapes clay. When it comes to spectres, words matter. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
October 21, 2025 at 5:22 PM
A building may change purpose from manor house to rest home to hotel to golf club. Its owners may shift from fag end gentry to a limited company of unbounded greed. However, its golden thread is often more than bricks and mortar, its true persistence is in its ghosts. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
October 16, 2025 at 5:25 PM
There are some ghosts which haunt even though no-one living has seen them. They’ve become psychic cicatrix on the collective memory. They persist – even though they’ve been reduced to the generic names such the Grey Lady – and in this persistence, power. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
October 5, 2025 at 12:17 PM
We must refuse the idea that modernity in any form is a protection against haunting. The ghost is an artefact of our living as well as our dying. The 20th century apartment block as liable to house spectres as the 19th. No style of architecture is spook free. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
October 3, 2025 at 12:55 PM
There are old mooring posts on the River Casta near Ashcourt Docks that seem to remember the ships once tied to them. Dozens report tethered ghost ships which rise and fall with the heave. Phantom brigantines and barques whose tide-strained ropes groan. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
September 30, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Occasionally, one finds a street where time flows a little slower or a mews that remembers its former horses in discarnate sounds of hooves clipping its cobbles. For not all hauntings are psychic stain of violence. We are just as likely to be haunted by absence. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
September 21, 2025 at 10:05 AM
I'll forgo the ghosts of grand house avenues – all driverless coaches, headless horses in finest tack – for lonely lane phantoms. Narrow paths that refuse space for spirit avoidance, routes where the only way home is shade-troubled. This is my haunted hodology. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
September 11, 2025 at 1:37 PM
As an author on ghosts, I am often asked where and who I intend to haunt when I die. Like most sensible folk, my choice of haunt would be bookshop or library. Surrounded by millions of words, I doubt I'd have the time or desire to haunt anyone other than book thieves. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
September 9, 2025 at 11:50 AM
It is important to understand that some places become ghost-soaked not through collecting death, but by the accretion of being lived in. You can call this psychic playback or spirit seepage, you can call it a dozen things, but all of them will still mean haunted. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
September 9, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Personally, I find ghosts of the stairs to be amongst the laziest phantom projections. Such a tepid metaphor for an afterlife where a spirit has not climbed to heaven nor descended to hell. A shade that spends eternity haunting a staircase is suspiciously dull. – #CJosiffe, 1957 #Ghosts
August 25, 2025 at 10:46 AM
An apposite phantom for a manor house – suffocated priest, crying child, grey lady – becomes incongruous when the building transforms into golf club or country hotel. Whether we are the temporal trespasser or they could be asked, but it's certain time makes all things strange. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
August 18, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Those living with a view of the cemetery of St. Mild Undershaft report seeing not phantom folk, but rather floating ghost lights, parading pillars of blue gas. Often these sightings cause a heightened discomfort for the dead dehumanised are revealed as truly distant. – #CJosiffe
August 15, 2025 at 8:49 AM
Those living with a view of the cemetery of St. Mild Undershaft report seeing not phantom folk, but rather floating ghost lights, parading pillars of blue gas. Often these sightings cause a heightened discomfort for the dead dehumanised are revealed as truly distant. – #CJosiffe
Some lanes and tracks hold a feeling of being shadowed on even the fiercest summer days. Shadows due to something more than high hedge and tree. Lanes and tracks that are the territories of temporal shades, thick with the sense of other times breaking through. – #CJosiffe
August 14, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Some lanes and tracks hold a feeling of being shadowed on even the fiercest summer days. Shadows due to something more than high hedge and tree. Lanes and tracks that are the territories of temporal shades, thick with the sense of other times breaking through. – #CJosiffe
Hodology itself may be haunted. We live in a landscape littered with ghost gates remembering where roads once ran. The dissolution of monasteries reduced abbeys to ruin, but they still have phantom pilgrims. Temporal shades who walk under their remaining arches. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
August 12, 2025 at 6:00 PM
The land refuses our easy labels. We call it empty, but we know that isn't true. It roads are ghost-soaked. We can drive and not pass another car for a quarter hour, but still might glimpse a phantom pack pony line or ragged straggle of Half-there folk forever on their way to market. – #CJosiffe
August 5, 2025 at 2:07 PM
The land refuses our easy labels. We call it empty, but we know that isn't true. It roads are ghost-soaked. We can drive and not pass another car for a quarter hour, but still might glimpse a phantom pack pony line or ragged straggle of Half-there folk forever on their way to market. – #CJosiffe
England is a small country. Among its defining characteristics are the density of and proximity to ghosts. City streets or rural lanes, one does not have to walk far to encounter a temporal shade. No wonder the English have measurements such a phantoms per acre. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
July 31, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Folklore walks. Ghostlore is especially peripatetic. The stories behind phantoms gravitate to landmarks. They walk to the local pub, the parish church. It is as if they seek a bigger audience, a grander stage to play at haunting. – #CJosiffe
July 28, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Folklore walks. Ghostlore is especially peripatetic. The stories behind phantoms gravitate to landmarks. They walk to the local pub, the parish church. It is as if they seek a bigger audience, a grander stage to play at haunting. – #CJosiffe
Some roads seem ghost-carved. Part of a haunted hodology. They cross the land joining places together not only in this world, but also in the Empire of the Dead. We may view them as paths of peril or accept them as part of the psychic infrastructure and walk them with a sense of wonder. – #CJosiffe
July 17, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Some roads seem ghost-carved. Part of a haunted hodology. They cross the land joining places together not only in this world, but also in the Empire of the Dead. We may view them as paths of peril or accept them as part of the psychic infrastructure and walk them with a sense of wonder. – #CJosiffe