ST 55 - Opening 6
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1w ago
Fathoming the Pyramid Timothy Granville Robin raised his eyes to the encrusted ceiling. In the gloom it took him half a second to realise what he was staring at. “Bit OTT?” asked Georgie. “I like it. I think.” “Good. I think I like it too.” They were standing at one end of a small room with a red and white chessboard floor. The light filtering through the narrow windows overhead revealed the walls and domed ceiling were covered in shells, masses of bivalves foaming around huge conches and cones. “It could be awful, couldn’t it?” said Georgie. “Like some monstrous suburban garden feat ..read more
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ST55 - Opening 4
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1w ago
The Lord is my Shepherd Tom Johnstone ‘CARNIVOROUS’. That was all it said. At the time, Sarah Dyson didn’t connect it with the Grey Lady or the River Wellsbourne. Just now, her preoccupations were more mundane: finding some way of removing the graffito from the sign outside the church near Preston Manor. The gardeners would have a solution for removing it. There was one of them who was always flirting with her. Bernard, his name was. Once, he complimented the coat that matched her orange-red lipstick. He wasn’t the only one. Her manager Geoff had the tiresome habit of saying, “You look li ..read more
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ST 55 - Opening 2
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1w ago
Porcupines Carole Tyrrell  I needed a pen and stationery cupboards aren’t what they used to be. First day as Head of Finance and Brewsters wanted figures quickly. But the laptop wasn’t ready yet according to IT. So, I had to enter the sarcophagus-like silence of Head Office. I collected a temporary ID at the front desk from a security guard and took the lift to the fifth floor. The lift doors automatically opened and ahead of me were two double doors. A sign attached to the wall beside one of them helpfully announced that this was the Finance Department. I pushed one of the doors open ..read more
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ST 55 - Opening 1
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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2w ago
The Rock Statue Mark Falkin “What does any individual, terrestrial life or death matter when seen from a galactic perspective? Yet, we still throb.” —Marilyn Nelson On the way there, they each notice the hawks perched on the expressway lights. Sabrina thinks they look like finials. She wrist-drives as she talks to her mother loudly on hands-free. Morgan is at ten and two listening to an audiobook with an annoying narrator. Janice steers with her right hand low on the wheel, left hand out the window ruddering her car’s wake. Karen grips the steering wheel’s middle bar and listens to NPR. War in ..read more
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Read an AI generated ghost story
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1M ago
I gave MS Copilot the following prompt, which is not complex and you can see where problems arose.. Please write a ghost story in the style of M.R. James set in Edwardian England at Cambridge University. It should be 3,000 words long and feature a mysterious book with a Latin title, a professor in his mid-forties who wears glasses, and a young woman reporter. The book tells how to contact spirits of the dead. The professor wants to use it to discover buried treasure somewhere in the grounds of the university. The Book of Shadows Professor Arthur Langdon was a respected scholar of ancient lan ..read more
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'The Swing'
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1M ago
The next story in Peter Bell's new collection, Hauntings, is in fact 'The Tunnel'. But that story first appeared in Supernatural Tales (issue 17, many years ago) so I hardly need to add that I found it more than acceptable. I'll move on, therefore, to a short tale that first appeared in the second Brian Showers anthology in his Uncertainties series. As you might expect, this is a tale that offers the reader a choice - how much to believe? The time is that unspecified period a few decades ago, with the 'slight haze of distance' recommended by Dr. James. A group of boys are hanging out at a frie ..read more
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'The Curator of Souls'
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1M ago
  A middle-aged academic falls for a student twenty years his junior. Dr. Slade is unwise but infatuated. Laura is beautiful, erudite, and mysterious. She vanishes periodically, refusing to say where she has been but sending Slade postcards that sometimes bear enigmatic messages. Eventually, after introducing Slade to many and varied erotic experiences, Laura takes her lover to meet another professor, whose studies mirror certain episodes in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. This story bears an epigraph from 'The Oval Portrait', but Laura is very reminiscent of Ligeia and Morella. Peter ..read more
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Next issue - cover and contents
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1M ago
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'The Cry of the Curlew'
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1M ago
 'Anxiety is never a good counsellor'.  In this story from Peter Bell's Hauntings a retired teacher returns to her deceased aunt's house in rural Aberdeenshire to find things changed. Fiona's girlhood memories are a mixture of the idyllic and the disturbing. Devoting her time to studying earth mysteries and related matters, Fiona sets out to investigate the area with an adult, informed eye. Instead, she gets lost in one of the vast conifer plantations that were created after the notorious Clearances, and stumbles upon some ruins that arouse feelings of unease. This is a relative ..read more
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'Ragnarok'
The Supernatural Tales Blog
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1M ago
This story from Peter Bell's new collection Hauntings (Sarob Press 2023) jogged my memory. The protagonist ventures to another one of those remote rural churches, this one containing a remarkable hybrid monument to Christianity and Norse mythology. I think I visited the same church with Peter during an excursion arranged by A Ghostly Company. And the cross in question is fascinating, with Odin and other Scandinavian hairy types getting equal billing to Jesus and his entourage.  The idea of a 'blended family' of deities is here taken a little further, though. The cross is decorated not mer ..read more
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