Samhain greetings! To get you in the mood for your turnip-carving, we’ve had a rummage in the cobwebbed corners of the Caught by the River archive in pursuit of the eerie, the spooky and the wyrd…
Junior Homemaker magazine, October 1972
Why not revisit:
Dean Hassell’s Halloween on the River Chelmer
Nina Lyon’s walk from the Witches’ Pool
Stephen ‘Spoonful’ Parker on William Arnold’s pumpkin portraits
The duskily-lit October instalment of Laura Cannell and Kate Ellis’s These Feral Lands EPs, featuring dead-of-night field recordings by Chris Watson
Matthew Shaw on his grandmother Mona’s recollections of Pendle Hill
Katy J Pearson’s reimagined Wicker Man soundtrack
Nina Hervé’s interview with Museum of Witchcraft and Magic director Simon Costin
Adam Clitheroe’s photographs of ‘the English eerie’
Mark Hooper’s encounters with devils and aliens in Wiltshire
Peter Fiennes’s glimpse into the worlds of Wilkie Collins and Ithell Colquhoun
Adam Scovell’s visit to the eerie East Anglian childhood home of the ghost story writer M. R. James
David Keenan on the automatic art and writing of Madge Gill, and her presiding demon, Myrninerest
Christopher Josiff on Gef, the talking mongoose/man-weasel of 1930s notoriety
Ethan Pennell’s map of Dartmoor folklore
Gareth Thompson and Justin Hopper’s musings on the magick, manuscripts and legacy of occultist poet Victor Neuburg
Rebecca Tamás’s poem ‘spell for Lilith’
Kenn Taylor on vast cemeteries in Liverpool and Bradford
Benjamin Myers on ghost farms and fled-cottages
And finally, a cornucopia of offerings from our resident expert on all things seaside, psychedelic and strange: Michael Smith on noble rot, liberty caps, and mulchy forest floors — or a terrifying night spent in Whitby — or his upcoming document of the magickal ‘thin place’ that is Hastings.