Hello, I'm a paranormal/horror blog. I will mainly focus on supernatural related horror (cryptids,ghosts,haunting ect) don't expect too much true crime.Disclaimer: I DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING I POST HERE.
Any YouTube video or photo or audio that is associated with curses or bad luck upon viewing or listening.
*** I don’t take requests and just find something that is interesting or that I had recently heard about, I do have to admit that I don’t cover these topics because they either make me very disturbed (the murder cases) or my give me serious anxiety (Peggy and NDE). My followers are free to look up these things but the two murder cases are very triggering and I do not recommend.
Ghost legends in England: The "Grey Lady" of Weltham Manor has been sighted for six centuries. She's a lady wearing grey. Though Weltham Manor burnt down in 1904, she haunts the ruins, and is said to wail over her fate.
Ghost legends in Japan: The "Nails-Hand Lady" haunts schools in Japan. If you are in a bathroom and hear nails running along the other stall - stay still. The Nails-Hand Lady is coming for you. If you tell her she's beautiful, she'll make you a Nails Hand Lady. If you say she's ugly, she'll kill you, with her nails in her hands. If you say you think all women are beautiful, she'll thank you for respecting women, before killing you, with her nails in her hands.
Ghost legends in America: The old bar in Icetown, Michigan gets cold sometimes, even when it's only -13F outside. This is theorized to be the previous owner, or perhaps the tragic victims of the incident in the early 1900s where the bar exploded and killed like fifty people, whose fates were not reported in any newspaper. Sometimes they lament their fate by tossing over ashtrays
The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.
Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.
It is not in English.
Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.
...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.
So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.
I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.
Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.
And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.
I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.
I mean, 'appropriation' sounds like absolutely the right word to me, especially in regard to that last paragraph... If we were talking about a tradition that comes from somewhere outside of Europe, people would be absolutely howling the A word, but it doesn't necessarily ping on their radar in this case because Welsh folks are white and not as obviously a minority group to most of them. Which.... is its own can of worms with potential for some pretty gross takes in it, unfortunately (said as someone in a field that has to cope with neo-nazi types trying to misappropriate from it on the daily). It is awesome that the world is learning about endangered cultural traditions and are more keen to embrace them rather than condemn them as other and weird as was done in the past, but the key word in that should be learning. Good on you, OP, for calling this out.
You may be right. Though funnily enough, I actually think a lot of the acceptance of the Mari Lwyd in recent years is actually because of her being seen as Weird and Other, in counterpoint to your last point - that's why people like her. And like... sure, she is weird, I guess. But in a very mundane "now let's get drunk" kind of way.
I think it possibly varies by case - for example, as I say, I actually do love a lot of the Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art, I recognise that it's an evocative image, and it's fun to explore. One of my favourite pieces is this one:
Here's one from Shoggoth.net, where she is literally a cryptid:
And this is a fairly common motif:
And to be clear - I love all of these! These are great!
But equally, each of these is part of this overall make-her-a-cryptid trend. She's a creature in her own right; she's sinister; she represents the creep of untameable nature, the dead come to life, something that wants to get in. She has antlers in that last one, something horses do not have, but they feel... idk, correct? This is evocative of the Old God imagery, so she gets antlers. I have seen many antlered Mari Lwyd pieces at this point. It's a semi-common theme.
And if you google Mari Lwyd images, or even if you look in the Tumblr tag, this is the kind of artwork you get. Ancient, wild, untameable, sinister, thing-that-wants-to-come-in. It's fun! I do enjoy many of them!
But
There's a Welsh artist, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and he has produced some amazing Mari Lwyd art over the years. Some of that is sort of cryptid-like, too. But he grew up as a child afraid of his dad doing the Mari and having nightmares about it, so is coming at it from an insider perspective, and I think you can tell. Most of his pieces make the human component clear:
And I think even the more nightmarish and abstract ones still, at their core, retain the idea that this isn't a magical creature from the woods of Annwfn but something constructed out of an actual horse and actual people:
Compare that to most of the Mari Lwyd art on Tumblr, and it's all "dark and wild creature representing the Old Gods"; because that's increasingly how she's known and seen.
And like. It's a hedonistic pageant figure who wants cheese and fun. She's not here to eat your children. She's here for fun and also fermented produce to get her bladdered. She is supposed to be silly. Her attendants - never mentioned, by the way, that's another thing - are fucking Punch and Judy characters. The pwnco isn't high art, it's not a faerie spinning riddles - those insults become "So's your FACE" type insults. It's supposed to be ridiculous, and stupid, and fun.
So it gets weird to me when people present her as a Dark Christmas alternative. Not appropriation necessarily? But certainly projection; she looks like an Old God kind of figure because she has a skull for a head, and she sings to come in, and if you phrase it like that, it can sound sinister and therefore like a very familiar type of aesthetic. I suppose it's then easy to project that aesthetic on, without even realising it. Plus, I think a lot of people like to try to reject the trappings of Christian culture including the iconography - things like Krampus and Mari Lwyd seem to run counter to them, so they get gleefully seized upon as anti-Christmas icons.
That said I would legit be much happier with all of the Sinister Old God shit if every artist who did it wrote the words "Wel dyma ni'n diwad gyfeillion diniwad, i ofyn am gennad..." in the air around their cryptid to include the Welsh. Like, that would genuinely go a long way to help the issue. Still weird! But much more respectful.
This is getting away from me! I shall finish by showing you all the absolute best Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art I have seen recently on Tumblr, though, which is this one:
There was a good paper about intercultural communication and performing stories from other cultures that I read in my comms studies undergrad, and I think its framework might be useful here. It's called Performance as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance by Dwight Conquergood.
The basic idea is that respectful performance of another culture's materials involves balancing two axes: Identity-Difference (i.e. how similar you treat the other culture's materials to your own) and Detachment-Commitment (how hard you try to faithfully reproduce that culture's materials). Going too far along these axes creates four "pitfalls" that the paper discusses.
In the case of Mari Lwyd I think you're getting a variety of positions. You're obviously getting the people who don't really want to look into it and just borrow the surface elements to make it a cryptid; they're detached from it, and viewing it as generically similar to their own culture, which Conquergood calls "The Custodian's Rip-Off".
However, I think you're also seeing the effects of people having the right amount of commitment -- wanting to treat it as its own specific tradition rather than just a cryptid -- but are still going wrong on the Identity-Difference axis in some way. Going too far into Difference is how you get people acting like it's ~spooky~ and impossible for foreigners to learn properly, so it simply has to be observed by outsiders; this is "The Curator's Exhibitionism". On the other hand, someone who goes the other way can overshoot into "The Enthusiast's Infatuation", which generally looks like the over-eager newbie who doesn't realise that there are certain cultural practises which are closed to them or take time to learn, and who doesn't acknowledge the differences between the culture they're meeting and their own.
(For completeness, "The Skeptic's Cop-Out" is the classic faux-anti-appropriation "oh it's never appropriate to engage with other cultures, even if the materials are being willingly shared" thing).
Shane doesn’t understand the anxious mind when Ryan told him he could have scared him enough to jump off the lighthouse. When I was a kid I was so scared a bee would sting me I almost jumped off the Grand Canyon.
A really important thing to understand is that victims of witch hunting are not any neopagan or modern-day witch’s “ancestors”.
They did nothing resembling what they were accused of. Despite older historical claims that they were probably mostly cunning-women/doing folk magic, or that they were midwives or abortionists or whatever else, the fact is that they usually they did nothing at all, and their worst “crime” was some trait or past action which got them targeted for blame when something bad happened independently to another person or community (someone falls ill or starts behaving very strangely; your crops fail, especially because of bad weather/hail; your animals die; your wife miscarries or dies in childbirth, etc…).
Those things could be any combination of, or in addition to,
Being viewed as antisocial/against the community, mean-spirited, or ‘power-hungry’ in some way
Being socially outcast
Being elderly (& a woman usually)
Being unmarried or widowed
Being an (accused or real) adulterer, divorcee, someone who’d engaged in unmarried sex, or otherwise considered sexually “tainted”
Having had a lot of family members die (especially repeated miscarriages or dead babies)
Being disabled
Being a religious minority
Being a foreigner
Being an ethnic minority
Sometimes accusations were made up over personal vendettas; sometimes they were completely random because they originated from things like torture or pressuring children to come up with answers; and sometimes they were knowingly invented for profit or social clout by a professional ‘witch hunter’. Often they were led or further-fueled by secular or religious authorities figures who believed in conspiracy theories about witches being present as a secret, underground sect of devil worshippers trying to create as much chaos and suffering as possible before the Second Coming of Christ. The more powerful the person in charge who believed the accusations, the higher the death toll typically.
Accusations often resulted in collective paranoia and a cascading effect of attempting to locate multiple witches, particularly in areas where it was believed that witches always met and worked in groups—therefore if you have one witch you must have more in hiding nearby.
Admissions were almost invariably gathered through torture, coercion, and/or gaslighting people to the point where they questioned the severity and cause of their own ‘actions’. The fact that sleep deprivation was common for interrogation meant a LOT of people likely hallucinated what they admitted to, and at the time nobody knew that lack of sleep could make you see things that weren’t real or considered it a form of torture.
Salem-specific details under the cut if anyone’s interested. TL;DR the contributing factors in Salem included most of the things I mentioned.
In Salem ca. 1692 there were:
A degree of social unrest and fear generated by recent wars with indigenous people
Two influential preachers (Increase and Cotton Mather) having written about and preached against witchcraft in recent years, which disseminated and reinforced beliefs in the conspiracy theory
A bunch of pre-existing internal conflicts between residents of Salem (who were “supposed to” be living in an ideal Christian society where everyone got along, priming people to view conflict as un-Christian and sinful) which led to both vendetta-based accusations admissions of “guilt” which came from people… basically attributing being pissed off at their neighbors to demonic influence, when under duress to confess
Several of the initial false accusations from children/teens attributing (real or fabricated, it’s not 100% clear) health issues to witches’ curses (who later admitted the charges were faked)
One of these accusations was in part based on the initial accused (enslaved, indigenous) woman’s race/‘foreignness’ to the Puritan English culture, and a resultant lack of understanding of cultural practices she might have been witnessed engaging with (Tituba)
Tituba then accused a destitute, socially rejected woman (Sarah Good) and a woman met with scorn over a marriage viewed as inapproriate (Sarah Osborne)
Good’s four year old daughter Dorothy was then accused because she gave four year old level answers to questions about her mom which were treated as credible (holy McMartin Preschool…)
After that the cascade effect I mentioned really started—once two upstanding, covenanted women were accused, pretty much anyone became fair game…
So yeah. None of these are things that could be reasonably treated as “witchy” in any way shape or form. There’s nothing scary here except the capacity of humans to be cruel to each other in conditions of suspicion, paranoia and fear.
I had a dream last night that I ran away from fascists and ended up at this farm that was full of this weird but very large prehistoric animal that was like a fluffy Tapir and I want to know if it actually exists. It was about the size of a Dairy Cow.
In Welsh mythology, Annwn or The Otherworld, is a land of paradise and eternal youth. It’s ruled over its king, Arawn, the God of death and traversed by Welsh gods and goddesses like Rhiannon.
Annwn is guarded by Cwn Annwn, the hounds of the otherworld, who are a part of the wild hunt, whose hunting grounds are said to be the mountain of Cadair Idris.
“The howling of these huge dogs foretold death to anyone who heard them".
It’s said that there are a number of entrances to Annwn across the Welsh landscape.
When we talk about "inherited trauma", we are talking about descendants of slavery, genocides, war atrocities, crimes against humanity, natural and man-made disasters.
Not you think you are descended from a line of hypothetical witches who were executed because you call yourself a witch in the 21st century or you believe that in a past life you were a supposed witch who was burned at the stake.
You don't have a "witch wound". For some reason you want in on persecutions that didn't actually happen to your people.
What happened in the European and American witch hunts were deeply awful. It was a dark time of history. All those innocent people who died horrific deaths are not for you to exploit for clout.
