So let us visit a few of these recently published novels:

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

Alice, a trans woman in her twenties, spends her life in her small apartment, stumbling through a fog of anhedonia ever since she entered a haunted house with her two best friends, but only one friend made it out with her alive. However, neither Alice nor her former best friend/occasional lover made it out unscathed. Alice has a scar gouged into her forehead, the miasmic ghost of Morrissey haunting her room’s wall posters, and nightmare-tinged occurrences that follow everywhere she goes as she tries to make sense of what happened inside the House.

This is a breath-holding, breath-stealing novel that is simultaneously brutal and tender. Although you witness the characters falling down dangerous rabbit holes of retaliation and ideologies that correspond with Britain’s rising wave of fascism and gender-critical feminism, you cannot help but empathize with the characters as they flail between rage, pain, and futility.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Irina, a female photographer who had once known small-scale fame but now struggles with feeling irrelevant and only having anonymous, seedy clients, scours the streets of Newcastle for strange-but-compelling looking men and boys to photograph. These garage studio photoshoots include nudity, bizarre props, and an air of exploitation that moves from the sphere of make-believe to pure, gritty realism as the novel progresses. Irina has no consideration for other people. She takes advantage of the best friend who is secretly in love with her, the local supermarket cashier who never had a girlfriend before her, as well as other people’s goodwill and generosity. But despite her self-obsession, she also engages in self-sabotage, including starving herself, putting herself in dangerous or uncontrollable situations, and eventually realizing that her brain is keeping something terrible from her. Something she has done that is impossible to be undone.

Irina struggles to leave her mark on the world, but even as she tries to fracture the world apart, it never seems to consider her a threat because of who she was born as.

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha is a creative writing scholarship student in a hyper-exclusive New England MFA program. She attends weekly Workshop with the Bunnies, a group of nauseatingly twee rich girls that wear kitten- and rainbow-patterned dresses and use catchphrases such as ‘I love you, Bunny/Bunny, I love you’ spoken as a creepy hivemind choir. Although Samantha feels derision toward the Bunnies and initially keeps her distance (while simultaneously objectifying them), she soon finds herself caught in her classmates’ destructive but all-encompassing orbit.

No one seems to be getting any writing done in the program, but not to worry! The Bunnies have a tradition of creating Drafts (also known as Darlings). These are rabbits stolen from the campus grounds, then sacrificed in a darkly hilarious sequence of spontaneous combustions to create Drafts—also known as Boys. The only problem is that these boys are rough drafts. They never seem to fully develop the necessary human anatomy and behavior (or be the romance heroes the Bunnies expect them to be), which leads to them often getting the axe (no, literally, those Darlings are Killed, and often). Until Samantha joins the Bunnies, and the draft-making process changes for good.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The titular Eileen is a disturbed young woman growing up in the early sixties. Living with her erratic, alcoholic father in a grimy house, she works in a correctional facility for boys, and spends her time lost in dark fantasies, shoplifting, and stalking those who catch her interest. One of her objects of obsession soon becomes the facility’s newest counselor, Rebecca. Their friendship soon evolves into something far more sinister, as Eileen spirals into a sinkhole of toxicity and complicity. This is a character study of a highly unlikeable, but also highly vulnerable, female protagonist. She becomes both recipient and perpetrator of misogyny and stifling oppression, and acts in ways that cannot fully place her as either the hero or the villain of her own story.

Sometimes this reversal of gender roles deconstructs and examines patriarchal and other societal structures, other times it recreates them uncritically—but, admittedly, in entertaining, often gory and absurd ways. It looks like the “melancholy, amoral woman protagonist” trend is here to stay (as it should).

A possible answer to the above question is, quite literally, poison. Poison was practically everywhere and readily available during the Victorian era, from grocery shops to apothecaries, to people’s own homes.

Arsenic was particularly common as it was used in everyday items, especially ones containing pigment (Scheele’s green). Alcohol, sweets, candles, household pesticides, clothing, even children’s stuffed toys were also manufactured using materials that contained arsenic. A person’s home could be wallpapered entirely in significant traces of arsenic and they wouldn’t even know it until it was too late and low-level poisonings were already a common occurrence. This brings to mind the 1892-published short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman suffering from an “affliction of the nerves” becomes obsessed with her room’s wallpaper, believing it to be malignant, ill, and hiding a trapped woman inside it. Even William Morris, whose vibrant wallpapers of birds and flowers are famous to this day, had painted those artworks originally using green paint with arsenic compounds. Photographers also used cyanide to produce their daguerreotypes (as well as mercury fumes emitted during the process).

With the easy availability of arsenic and other lethal substances for household uses, poisoning became an art that was almost impossible to trace—or the poisoner’s culpability to prove. Examples of famous poisoners were women like Adelaide Barlett, who used chloroform to poison her husband, a death surrounded by an air of mystery that intrigued the press and public, since the autopsy showed liquid poison in his stomach, but no traces in his mouth, esophagus, or lungs. Madeline Smith used arsenic to poison the man she had had an affair with after he threatened to show her fiancé the erotic letters she wrote addressed to her illicit lover. The odorless arsenic had been poured into a cup of hot chocolate. And, of course, called Britain’s Mass Murderess, Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned four of her husbands with arsenic to get their life insurance money, as well as several of their children. She was young and well-regarded, and at times worked as a nurse which gave her a good standing in the community, as well as an alibi. Despite that, a doctor grew suspicious of her activity, and a while later she was tried, imprisoned, and hanged.

Eventually, laws were introduced to limit the ease of purchasing poison. This was in the form of the poisons register, in which anyone who bought arsenic, strychnine, and other substances had to sign their name. By then there was a certain glamor and sensationalist element around the use of poisons as a murder method, but also as medical gaslighting—convincing a loved one that they are sick in mind or body, when you yourself control that sickness through the administering of the toxic substance.

Books written around that time often features female figures that were labeled as “madwomen,” locked away, thought to be suffering from hysteria and paroxysms of bad judgment, loosening morals, hauntings or possession. You have women that kill their family members, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Madeleine murders the brother who deprives her of the outside world, artistic expression, and socialization. You have women locked in attics (such as in Jane Eyre, where Bertha is revealed to be the “mentally disturbed” first wife of Mr. Rochester). And you have the gothic tradition of increasing malaise, supernatural phenomena, ghost hauntings, and muddled faculties that appear as pervasive, all-encompassing, and intangible manifestations throughout the narrative.

The connection of the gothic tradition (particularly the disturbed woman and the unseen haunting) to the prevalence of poisoning in the Victorian era is not easily provable. You could argue that the vampire novel is inspired by a fear of poison, or that the poison itself is a metaphor, a fear of change, of the Other; a bigotry suffusing the upper echelons of society. But no matter the interpretation, Victorian-era literature is rife with depictions of malaise and madness, spreading slowly and thoroughly like a trickle of poison through the bloodstream, or inhaled like air blighted by an arsenic-laced wallpaper.

In Lowry Poletti’s “The Dead Return in Strange Shapes” (Fantasy Magazine), an orphaned young man named Thais can see the souls of the departed, who live a second half-life on earth in the form of various animals. He is haunted by a lone wolf, a dead warrior who speaks to his own loneliness, but he cannot bring himself to embrace what the wolf means to him. In that way, Thais’ inner world is also reflected in the solitary, ignored, restless animals. Thais goes on a journey with a strange man—god, creature—who too is haunted by the tiger draped around his neck who is ghost and familiar, hated and beloved. A lot of Poletti’s stories revolve around animals who are eerie and human-like in their passions and devotions, while the roles of predator and prey often get mixed up and reversed, with philosophical repercussions.

Meanwhile, in Kel Coleman’s “I Wear My Spiders in Remembrance of Myself” (Apparition Lit) and S. Qiouyi Lu’s “Anything Resembling Love“(Tor) people contain insects inside them—in the former story, spiders and in the latter, centipedes. In both worlds, it is taboo to mention the insects in polite company; to acknowledge that human bodies can produce those insects when triggered by an emotional stimulus. The stories work in conversation with each other: both center young characters trying to navigate the rules of their worlds, then rejecting them as unfair, and learning to name that unfairness. Other themes include dealing with bigotry, rigid societal norms, rape culture, and breaking the binds of propriety when it is used to conceal and excuse heinous things.

Tamara Jerée’s “A Serpent for Each Year” (Strange Horizons) is a small story that packs a big emotional punch. “Our relationship is almost a year old when I ask Nal why she is covered in snakes.” The narrator learns that the reason why Nal wears these snakes is because her mother put them on her body to protect her before she died. The snakes speak of survival, but also grief, concealment. The story of two new lovers and the way their bodies—and cultures—operate is both tender and melancholy (also a bit grotesque) in the best combination possible.

Snakes also make an appearance in Priya Sharma’s “Fabulous Beasts” (Tor), a dark, devastating story about escaping familial abuse and embracing monstrosity—in the self, and the other. Animals appear often in Sharma’s horror short fiction, another notable example being “The Crow Palace” (The Dark). It is a story about sisters and, as the opening line informs us (“Birds are tricksters.”), about feathered, wily things. Julie, a successful, determined woman, must return home after the death of her father, who had built a palace for Corvidae in his backyard. There, she must reckon with the past—her and her twin’s conception and true nature—as well as the town’s increasingly erratic behavior toward her and her family. Most of the stories in Priya Sharma’s collection (All the Fabulous Beasts from Undertow Publications) feature the animal kingdom in a meaningful, and often chilling, capacity.

Lastly, in Alyssa Wong’s “Rabbit Heart” (in the late Fireside), an underground scientist uses rabbit stem cells to illegally revive the dead so they can fulfill the family expectations they failed to meet in life. As the story progresses, it becomes clear how much the characters match the rabbit’s elegance, and the rabbit’s cowardice.

Animals can often represent monstrosity, but also our innate human nature pushed to an intriguing extreme. It allows for stories and characters to be viewed through a lens removed from conformity to societal norms. Symbolism arising from, and merging with, animal traits and behaviors can open new storytelling windows, especially when it comes to horror and dark fiction.

Let the Right One In

The Swedish film (based on the novel of the same title) follows Oskar, a preteen boy growing up in Stockholm’s suburbs in the ‘80s. It is a tale of loneliness and alienation: Oskar has a superficial relationship with his divorced parents, is being relentlessly bullied by his school classmates, and harbors secret fantasies of violence he can only play-act on his own, in the dark. Oskar meets Eli, his mysterious neighbor who appears to be around his own age, at a snow-covered playground empty of other children. Soon, he finds out Eli is a vampire, turned centuries ago when they were young, then later maintaining their child-like wonder while manipulating unscrupulous adults into providing them with the blood necessary for their survival. Oskar is drawn to Eli, who is also lonely and at odds with their surroundings just like he is. Despite the blood, bleakness, and violence of the film, the love story between the two characters is a tender exploration of melancholy, gender, and early sexuality.

Only Lovers Left Alive

The depressed rockstar vampire movie. Adam and Eve are a vampire couple that has been married for a large part of human history, but choose to live apart across the world as they each follow their creative pursuits. The two reconnect when Adam, a famous musician and composer disillusioned with modern living, expresses his suicidal thoughts to Eve while on the phone. Together again, Adam and Eve attempt to rekindle their love for human art and meaningful connections, until Eve’s younger sister arrives. Another vampire, Eve’s sister wreaks havoc on the couple’s carefully constructed habits of finding blood donors and human patrons to help their vampirism remain undiscovered.

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To

An older brother and sister spend all their time cooped up inside a deteriorating house where a Christmas tree remains decorated year-round, and their younger sibling lives in need of extensive care and attention. This indie movie is a slow burn take on vampirism as chronic illness. Thomas, the younger vampire brother (although the word ‘vampire’ is never used by the characters to describe his condition) is a relatable character, one who craves to be let out of the house and join other people his age, but is limited by his fatigue and muscle weakness that drinking human blood can’t cure, only momentarily improve. Thomas’ older siblings also face constant seclusion and pressure to bring blood home to their brother, while being prohibited from building any sort of human connection with the outside world, in case those connections end up hurting the brother dependent on them. The family ties fray by the scene, reflecting the siblings’ fraught emotions which not even the perpetual fairy-lights and festive gift exchanges can soothe.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

An urban fable shot in black and white. As the story unfolds, A Girl… becomes populated by characters struggling with feeling adrift through their lives, striving for a tether, for connection. Arash is a young Iranian man who must work hard to earn a living and take care of his addict father. He meets a woman skateboarding by herself at night, a vampire who takes him to her apartment, where they connect through music but she resists the urge to drink from his exposed neck. Later, the two characters become further entangled as they navigate the night and its human monsters and monstrous needs.

Thirst

Sang-hyun is a Catholic priest who, despite his parish’s dedication to him, often finds himself under fits of sadness and divine doubt. When he gets infected by what is known as the Emmanuel Virus and finds out he has unwittingly become a vampire, he struggles even further with his faith and his new, all-encompassing need to consume human blood. Meanwhile, Sang-hyun becomes attracted to Tae-ju, his old friend’s wife. The two engage in a mutually destructive relationship as well as in acts of vampirism. Sometimes it’s not clear to the characters whether they want to hurt themselves, or each other—or, even, if the reason they are hurting each other is because they wish they could be hurting their own selves. This codependency continues, as does the thirst for blood, to a calamitous conclusion.

Vampirism can represent illness, loss of self-control, being shunned by one’s community, experiencing unpredictable changes to one’s body (which can often be a metaphor for gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia, or even for mental illness that distorts one’s perspective of the self in relation to the other). If we consider all this, it makes perfect sense for vampire films to be this melancholy, but also this cathartic.

Poltergeist

A loud, angry ghost. The word poltergeist comes from the German poltern which means “to rumble, make noise or cause a disturbance” and Geist, which translates to “spirit.” The poltergeist is a type of supernatural entity of the deceased that can manipulate its environment. It can make objects move and cause a ruckus, disturb the physical realm, and interact with the humans the poltergeist haunts. Occasionally, this rumble escalates into harm coming to the humans within the haunted house as a direct result of the poltergeist’s force on the physical realm.

Shade

In the original Greek: σκιά / shadow, and umbra in Latin. Shades were the ghosts of the deceased that resided in the Underworld. The name shade refers to the fact that these ghosts are not what they once were. Only extant echoes of everything they desired and held dear on Earth while they remained alive. When Odysseus descends into the Underworld, the dead he meets are shades, including his own mother. So are the dead in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the spirit of Eurydice that Orpheus is tasked with leading out of the Underworld. These spirits do not move on, but rather stay there in a forever liminal state of shadow.

The Common Specter

In some cultures, a house’s mirrors are sheathed in black veils after a death in the family, to avoid having the spirit trapped in the mirror forever. In other instances across the spectrum of ghost lore, haunted houses are sometimes plagued by mysterious phenomena. Most commonly, a vortex of cold wind or displaced air in certain parts of the house where disaster struck in the past. That way, the ghost, or what remains of it, is making itself known to the house’s new occupiers, although it can be an involuntary process on the spirit’s part. Ghosts also tend to appear in the shape of ectoplasm, particularly when seances are involved. According to occultists, ectoplasm is a thick substance of magical or supernatural origin exuded when a spirit is near during a summoning.

The Revenant

Opinions vary as to whether the revenant (the one who returns) is a ghost, ghoul, or animated corpus. In some stories of European origin, the revenant haunts the graveyard they are buried in, acting as a deterrent to the invasion perpetrated by tomb raiders and looters of fortunes and body parts. In other myths, the revenant wanders, walking aimlessly as long as they have unfinished business with the living that keeps them from the quiet of the grave.

The Doppelgänger

A wraith and portent of doom, this “double goer” can assume a person’s shape and size, copy their facial features in perfect imitation. This apparition can fool others into thinking it is you as it walks through your life, turning you into the metaphorical, and literal, ghost instead. To see your own double is to face an imminent death or doom. According to various myths and legends, all living beings on earth have their own spirit double, but rarely do the two meet.

The Hungry Ghosts

Ghosts whose desires were never spoken while they lived, or whose needs were never met. Spirits with unfinished business, with a bottomless ache to devour, often the psychic energy of the living. These ghosts can be spiritual leeches in some cultures, while others, particularly in a Buddhist context, regard hungry ghosts as beings of such emotional cravings they lose sight of who they are and all that remains is that insatiable hunger. When they die, they are reborn as beings of need, of hunger.

The Headless Ghost

Just as several cultures have stories of hungry ghosts, so are the headless ghosts often found in oral and written tradition. Queens beheaded while their former subjects cheered on and hanged witches and heretics whose necks broke as they dropped from the gallows, headless horsemen and riders of the apocalypse. The Dullahan, for example, is an unseelie being who rides a black horse through the Irish countryside, carrying its own severed head, as well as a whip made out of a human’s skin.

These are only a few types of ghosts or spirit-like creatures found in mythology and incorporated into popular culture. Perhaps the existence of such an extensive list of beings is related to all the many, different ways human beings know to express the fear of death and the inescapability of loss. If not two humans love alike, then not two humans grieve alike, either. The ghostly spectrum explored above is proof of that.

Is it any wonder such strange myths and legends arise from the drowning deep?

Here are some of them from Greece:

The Yiousouri Tree

According to Greek folklore believed by sailors and fishermen, there is a tree growing from the floor of the sea—though it would be more accurate to call it an animal, since it is a living organism—and that darkwood, fragrant tree of twisting spires and digging roots is capable of providing the cure to all ills. The yiousouri can even change or inhibit the natural process of life and death—but supplicants must catch the tree sleeping, or risk being impaled by its sharp branches when they dive to steal a piece of the miraculous yiousouri wood.

The Cetus

Best known from the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, the Cetus is a giant sea monster (interestingly enough, in modern Greek, the word “ketos” refers to any sort of marina mammal, most commonly the whale) summoned by Poseidon. Andromeda was a young princess meant to be sacrificed to the sea beast after her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than a sea nymph. Perseus slayed the beast and saved Andromeda from the rock she was chained to surrounded by sea water. Another interesting fact: this happened right after Perseus had beheaded Medusa, the mythical hero killing one female figure, and then going on to save another.

Ghosts of the Drowned

Greek islands such as Kalymnos in the Aegean sea used to have a prosperous economy selling sea sponges across the Mediterranean. Before the invention of protective suits and oxygen pumps, divers used the skin-diving method: they fell into the water naked, sunk to the bottom with the help of the skandalopetra (a heavy stone weighing them down), and cut the sponges loose with their knives for as long as they could hold their breaths. The profession was a dangerous one, which led to many accidents underwater. Later, once the diving suit was used, it introduced a newer complication: decompression sickness, also known as diver’s disease, which made the sponge collectors more prone to drowning. Legend has it, their spirits still lie entangled underwater with the sponges and seaweed.

Scylla and Charybdis

Best known from Homer’s Odyssey, each monster occupies one side of a strait, acting as each other’s counterparts. Scylla was said to have once been a beautiful water nymph before she was turned into a monster by bathing in poison. Her counterpart Charybdis inhaled and exhaled large amounts of water, which created whirlpools that drowned passing ships. Scylla and Charybdis have a symbiotic relationship as they hunt together: if a ship moves along the strait to escape Scylla, the vessel comes within range of Charybdis, and the opposite.

“Between Scylla and Charybdis” is a phrase synonymous with “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” which both arise from a marine metaphor, solidifying the historical danger of sea travel faced by both sailors and their vessels.

The Mermaid Madonna

Sailors are a superstitious sort. As a result, the numinous and the esoteric couldn’t be missing from a life touched by the sea. Superstitions of monstrous constellations, patron saints guiding sailors home, and maidens who live in the water and lead ships astray are numerous. A rarer manifestation of a local, niche folk figure is The Mermaid Madonna (η Παναγιά Γοργόνα). There is a tiny chapel in Lesbos, set upon a steep rock facing the sea. Inside, a mural of the Virgin Mary has been painted by an unknown artist centuries ago. That mural depicts Mary as having a scaly mermaid’s tail.

Ichthyocentaurs

Literally: fish centaurs. These mythical creatures had the head and upper torso of a human, the legs of a horse, and the tail of a fish (although sometimes they were also portrayed having the claws of a crab or lobster). The name ichthyocentaur was given to them much later, but the creatures appeared in Classical mosaics and sculptures for centuries without proper classification. The two best known sea centaurs are Aphros and Bythos, which are the personification of sea foam, and of the deep. It’s unclear whether the creatures were considered dangerous sea demons, or apotropaic deities during the creation of their mosaics.

Often, the sea and its mysteries inspire more awe than even the idea of space exploration itself. In that aspect, sea and space are very similar: they remain vast, and every effort to cartograph them is only a single drop in an abyss of possibilities.

So it makes sense for humans to want to populate that abyss with legends of monsters and ghosts, in an effort to understand the impossible, salt-stained and waterlogged.

Gello

A female demon who is said to be capable of causing infertility, miscarriages, and high rates of child mortality—in later versions of the story even devouring infants. A Gello has twelve and a half names and is said to grin or grimace during her visitations (possibly because of the Greek root gel-/γελ-). In the Byzantine times especially, women faced trials and exorcisms if they were suspected of being plagued by, or collaborating with, a Gello. Even Sappho mentions Gello in one of her fragments, as a boogey that was used by parents to scare their children into obedience.

Kallikantzaros

Similar to hobgoblins, a Kallikantzaros is a subterranean creature that spends most of the year in underground warrens, trying to chop down the tree that keeps the worlds apart with their axe. But on the twelve days of Christmas, just before the tree falls, Kallikantzaroi are summoned to the surface, while the veil between worlds is thin and permeable. Earthside, Kallikantzaroi spread chaos, steal festive treats, and harass humans, especially Orthodox priests who try to exorcise the creatures with holy water. On the day of the Epiphany, the Kallikantzaroi are compelled to return underground, where the tree that keeps the world below and the world above from merging has healed in their absence.

Gorgona

A mermaid, and the sister of Alexander the Great, who drank the waters of immortality and now wanders the seas, especially near the Aegean. When she meets a sailor, the gorgona will ask them if her brother is alive. If the sailors reply that he is dead, then she will drown them, then mourn their deaths and the destruction of their ships. If the sailors reply that the king is alive, his sister will let them and their vessel go unharmed. When she sings her laments and plays her lyre, the sea breaks into storm.

Neraida

The Greek name for ‘fairy’, possibly related to the naiads of antiquity, though the neraides are not limited to bodies of water. In fact, they often dance in the forest among tall trees. If passersby manage to sneak up on the fairies and steal the gossamer shawls they have left on the grass, then the humans can charm the fairies to follow them home to the human world. Most often, the fairies become wives and give birth to children known as alafroiskiotoi—they of weightless shadows, who can move easily between worlds.

Drosoulites

An optical illusion observed in Sfakia, Crete between late spring and early summer, the Drosoulites are men made of shadow that appear in the morning mist. Those walking shadows are connected to a 19th century battle in the valley near the medieval castle known as Francocastello. During that battle, the Greek soldiers were obliterated by Ottoman military forces. Folk stories revolve around the Drosoulites being the unquiet spirits of the defeated soldiers whose blood spilled upon the valley under the castle’s shade.

Vourdoulakas

Closer to a ghoul than a vampire, the vourdoulakas (also known as vrykolakas) is a dead person with unfinished business. The vourdoulakas does not drink blood, but feeds on liver. They can only leave the grave under specific conditions. The day on which the vourdoulakas can walk among the living varies among local legends. Although not exactly a vampire, the revenant is also present in several Greek folk ballads (paraloges), the more prominent one being “Of the Dead Brother”, where a mother’s curse makes her dead son come to life so he can bring the family’s last remaining child, the youngest daughter, home from foreign lands before the mother succumbs to illness.

Savvatogenimenoi

Those are the children born on a Saturday, a time associated with witchcraft. If you have been born on such a day, your wishes and curses become potent, giving you power over others. The Saturday-born, as well as other kinds of witches, have been linked, in the Greek folk consciousness, with having blue eyes. A color that makes sense considering the evil eye (mati) is also blue. Therefore, being born on a Saturday and having blue eyes was considered a sign of the child being not entirely of this world, a magic practitioner, or perhaps even an elf or other fairy-like creature.

A lot of the beings mentioned in this list were first introduced during ancient times, then cemented themselves into the rest of Greek history, superimposed over a mix of Orthodox and pagan beliefs, baskania (superstition), and interacting with Greece’s tumultuous journey toward its Independence and beyond. Greece is best known for its ancient myths, but the oral tradition of the Greek countryside and islands (especially the remote rural areas that use their own unique dialects) has become endangered, with few folklorists documenting the stories in written form, and those alive to remember them slowly fading.

But beyond fictional storytelling, food, drink, and the unusual customs or circumstances associated with both can be found in the realm of human history as well. And those real-world stories can be just as strange, macabre, and marvelous.

The Ortolan

A small songbird traditional in French cuisine, whose popularity made the species go nearly extinct. The ortolan is consumed whole, but before that it is marinated in brandy and spices, while still alive. Eating an ortolan was considered a “decadent and disgraceful act.” As a result, patrons ate the bird while hiding their heads under a tablecloth, to avoid their shame being witnessed by “the eyes of God,” a practice that was popularized by a priest in a ritual of nearly pagan undertones.

Powdered Mummia

Also known as ground human remains from mummies that had been either embalmed or desiccated. This substance was exported from Egypt and sold by apothecaries as a miraculous panacea that could improve all aspects of a person’s life by imbibing it. In Victorian times especially, the mummia was a popular cure-all reserved for those with the means to purchase it. The rich were also known to nibble on small pieces of mummy flesh in social gatherings, also known as ‘unwrapping parties,’ to channel the mummy’s supernatural properties into themselves. Another category of mummy preservation was called “mellification.” Humans were steeped in honey, then eaten as a healing treat throughout history.

Snake Wine

Drunk in shot glasses and characterized by a high alcoholic content, this rice or grain beverage is made by infusing whole snakes through wine. In traditional practice, venomous snakes are preferred, as they are thought to contain the most therapeutic properties. The venom usually dissolves in the alcohol, but sometimes it might still be harmful to humans if the wine is drunk from the bottle too soon, although the envenomation is different than a direct snake bite. Similar elixirs can be made from steeping scorpions or even sea horses.

Ergot-Infected Grain

Ergot is a fungus found in rye and other crops that can cause ergotism in humans, a poisoning that occurs through ingestion. There is a theory that the dancing plague of 1518 was caused by ergotism. During that time, a village in modern-day France was overtaken by the irrepressible desire to dance wildly and without pause for several weeks. Historians can’t agree how many of those affected by the plague danced themselves to death. It has been proposed that, other than ergotism, other possible causes include mass hysteria and religious mania.

Figs

A natural process gives fig trees a macabre history inherent in the creation of their fruits. When fig wasps pollinate the fruits, they crawl inside the figs, until their bodies become trapped. An enzyme called ficin helps break down the wasp’s body, so that it acts as a fertilizer helping the fig to grow. The fig absorbs the wasp inside it, so by the time the fruit is ready to pluck, fig and wasp have become an inextricable whole.

Ambergris

Also known as grey amber or floating gold, it is a wax-like, but solid material created in the digestive system of sperm whales. Traditionally, it has been used in perfume-making because of its aromatic properties, especially as the ambergris ages. But ambergris, partly because of its value and rarity due to its difficult extraction, has also been used in food and drinks by the rich. King Charles II of England considered ambergris part of his favorite meal, combining it with eggs. During the Black Death, ambergris was thought to be able to ward against the sickness if carried close to its holder’s nose. As a result, plague doctors sometimes wore the substance inside the beaks of their avian masks so they could inhale its scent.

Feasts of the fantastic and the unexplained play an important part in the storytelling traditions of every world culture. But real-life foods and drinks are not lacking in strangeness compared to their mythopoetic counterparts.

These are a few examples of such places:

A small clearing in Mount Penteli, Attica, located near the former Palace of Tatoi, where royal family members were buried in their private cemetery—including the last King of Greece, Alexander who died of sepsis on the palace grounds after being bitten by one of his pet monkeys. Meanwhile, an old sanatorium lies abandoned nearby, once housing mistreated patients, now left to the wild animals and trespassers. The mountain burned several times due to heatwaves and arson, and out of the burned trees, humanoid sculptures now emerge from the ground in a circle to honor the lost souls of the sanatorium patients and the burned animals. Deer are known to visit the Playground of Souls, to graze on new grass.

Known as a “ship graveyard,” this central Pacific coral reef holds in its bottom the wrecks of almost fifty Japanese ships and thirty American aircraft, which sunk the year 1944 in an offensive campaign known as Operation Hailstone. The underwater scenes truly look like a graveyard of metal covered in algae and eroded by salt, the bones stripped clean by aquatic life as the atoll claimed man and man-made craft in its depths.

The first university of Scotland, and one of the country’s most spiritually charged places. The University of St Andrews is said to be inhabited by several ghosts, from spectral monks roaming its towers and cathedrals, to The White Lady, who was allegedly one of the ladies in waiting of Mary, Queen Scots. After her lover’s violent, untimely death, the Lady too succumbed to grief, haunting the sanctified grounds of St Andrews.

An abandoned island off the coast of Venice, where those infected with the bubonic plague were quarantined and, once their situation failed to improve, left to die. As a result, the island soon became a mass burial ground. Later, in the early 1900s, the remote island was used as a psychiatric hospital to keep mentally ill patients away from polite society, and conceal the injustices committed by the hospital’s staff.

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Entry to the fort is prohibited in the inter-spaces between sunset and sunrise. It is a place that, through the intricate architecture woven between old ruins, inspires visitors with feelings of paranoia and a paranormal sense of dread. Those who stay overnight don’t come out in the morning according to local legend. The 16^th century fort had been cursed in the past by a sage who had used the fort’s grounds as meditation space. The king had asked for the hermit’s permission to build his fort in the area, and the hermit replied he would only give his approval if the fort’s shadow didn’t touch him and his dwelling. But the king added tall columns to his fort, breaking his promise. The hermit cursed the fort and the nearby village, so that its structures even now stand roofless and ruined.

The Bermuda Triangle of Romania is a forest whose heart cradles a large, circular bald spot ringed by trees. Those trees don’t grow in straight lines, but twist and curve in eerie configurations. A shepherd and his flock of 200 sheep disappeared one day while visiting the forested area, never to be seen again in the vicinity or beyond. In the crooked nucleus of Hoia Forest, the strange trees are said to guard a portal to other, stranger worlds.

The Colorado hotel that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. The Stanley’s owner was a “lunger,” who originally built the hotel as a summer resort to aid his recovery from tuberculosis. A gas leak killed the hotel’s head maid in 1911 after she brought an open flame into the room, which made one of the hotel’s wings explode. The boiler scene in The Shining is directly inspired by that tragic event.

Witches were said to meet inside this cave during the 17^th century to summon entities and practice their dark magic together as a coven. A lot of those witches, once caught, were accused of violating the rules of man and nature, and eleven of them were sentenced to burn at the stake. Were these rituals simple folk healing practices, or did they have a darker undertone? The cave walls that stand unchanged can’t speak their story, but the wind still whistles through the passages like a witch’s sigh.

The chapel of bones took its name from the stacks upon stacks of human skeletons that line its walls in grotesque decorative patterns. During the church’s construction by Franciscan friars in the 1800s, the bones were disinterred from nearby cemeteries when they became overcrowded. The skulls built shallowly into the interior look as if they are trying to emerge through the stone and break free of their binds.

Perhaps this fascination with haunted places found throughout human history has to do with memory. The fear of being forgotten, therefore wanting to believe your life experiences is capable of seeping through a structure or deep into the soil; lingering, long after you are gone.

Present in paintings, pottery, and murals throughout history, Death has appeared as a dancing skeleton, a winged psychopomp, and a berobed, scythe-carrying figure. Death, personified, couldn’t be missing from films and books, either.

Based on the classic short story by Edgar Allan Poe, plot follows a village infected by a mysterious deadly plague known as the Red Death. A masked figure wrapped in a red cape rides around the village. Meanwhile, the village’s rich rulers lock themselves in their castle, where they party and feast in excess and extravagance. There, they dance unbothered by the dying, starving villagers, who get killed after they beg for entrance outside the castle walls. During the ball, a mysterious figure, masked and cloaked in red, enters the castle, infecting the crowd of the dancing nobility. The figure is a personification of plague and calamity, the Red Death themself.

In the comics and TV series, Death is one of the Endless, and the older sister of Dream. Like her other siblings—Destiny, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium—the Endless are human concepts and phenomena made manifest. In Death’s case, she embodies the intangible force of the cessation of life. She is a personified entity that represents an inevitability but there is no malice behind her actions, only necessity as she visits the humans who are about to die and guide their souls into the realm she rules. Death meets each human twice: at birth, when she breathes life into them, and at the end of their natural life. When the Earth stops turning, Death will be there to “turn off the lights.”

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First published in Portuguese, José Saramago’s novel positions death as an anthropomorphized character of his novel. She, death, insists on her name being written in lowercase, while the book uses unconventional punctuation and stream of consciousness to recount the tale of the end of death. How, one day, the residents of an unnamed country woke up and realized they had stopped dying, although they kept growing older and more infirm. This sudden occurrence forces people to rethink societal structures and support networks, as everything threatens to collapse under this newfound lack of death. As the epigraph warns, “We will know less and less what it means to be human.” And death, shapeshifting into a woman’s form, will have to learn this lesson also as she mingles with humanity.

Light Yagami, a genius but amoral student, finds a notebook that belongs to a Shinigami—a death demon/deity that guides humans into the world beyond life. Bound to Light, the Shinigami Ryuk—humanoid but baroquely grotesque—watches as his new human learns how to use the lethal notebook he misplaced. A notebook that can kill people from afar, provided its holder knows the human’s name and visualizes their face. Light appoints himself as a new god conducting vigilante justice through the death notebook, blurring the lines between human and Shinigami. Ryuk, who had been plagued by boredom, finds the human world interesting again, watching the chaos unfold.

This stop motion animated retelling of Pinocchio brings the classic Italian fairytale into the realm of dark fantasy, in a film full of monsters and marvels (with del Toro’s signature flair for interesting stylistic design and characterization). After a bomb kills his son during WWI, a woodcarver gets drunk and tries to resurrect his boy years later by using the wood from his grave. The Wood Sprite (based on the Fairy with the Turquoise Hair in the 1883 story) brings the wooden puppet to life. The personification of Death appears in the form of the Wood Sprite’s sister, voiced by Tilda Swinton. Death is a winged, horned Chimera who embodies the traits of several animals and reigns over the afterlife. She meets Pinocchio since, as a resurrected/immortal puppet, he belongs to an in-between space, watched over by the Wood Sprite and her sister Death alike.

An impressive feat of stop motion animation is the dark fairytale film Blood Tea and Red String, created by artist Christiane Cegavske. Gaining cult-classic acclaim since its 2006 release, Blood Tea took Cegavske more than a decade to film and create the characters, scenery, storyline, even the puppets and their outfits, by herself. Only the musical score (haunting folk music of flute and accordion) was created by Mark Growden. The film has no dialogue, so all the emoting happens through the stop motion puppets, which offers the story an added layer of mysticism through non-verbal communication. The film’s creator even plays a meta role at the beginning and end of the film, reminiscent of a traditional fairytale’s narrator.

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In Blood Tea, a coven of aristocratic white mice dressed in old-fashioned finery commission the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak to handcraft a life-sized doll girl for them. The artisan creatures do so in their woodland cottage, but soon they find themselves enamored with their ragged creation. When the white mice come to take the doll home, the Oak Dwellers follow, witnessing a feast of blood-stained teacups and the red string of fate woven through the doll’s hands, binding her to the mice and their debauchery. The Oak Dwellers decide to steal the doll back, thus beginning a long and mystical journey of destruction and renewal, through fields of skull-faced sunflowers, giant spiderwebs, and mythical forests.

The inanimate doll that becomes the object of the characters’ obsession and affection represents the sublime. She is simultaneously a Jesus and a Virgin Mary figure, as she bears stigmata in her palms and is strung up in symbolic crucifixion, while containing inside her fabric belly an immaculate conception: an egg that, once hatched, becomes a bird with a girl’s face; a harpy. The doll’s body turns into a reliquary for life and death, as she becomes the messianic prize in the war sparked between the aristocratic mice and the forest creatures. Greed, tenderness, and possessiveness are themes that are tightly woven through the film like a red string, making for a breathless, beautiful rendition of the traditional folk-tale quest.

Jan Švankmajer is another director who uses a mix of stop motion and live action—including several weird cloth puppets and clay creations—in his short and feature-length films. He is the creator of Alice (1988), a retelling of the classic Lewis Carroll tale made even more whimsical and nightmarish through childhood toys turned into amalgamations of found objects and bare bone. The White Rabbit that sets the events of the film in motion is a taxidermied animal who breaks his own glass display case and escapes into Wonderland’s domestic dreamscape, only for young Alice to follow. Many Švankmajer short films (freely available on YouTube) are shot exclusively using the stop motion technique. Inspiration is drawn from fairytales, classical paintings, and philosophy, while the various shorts feature food, insects, childhood memorabilia, and humanoid figures struggling to connect with, and escape from, each other.

Written and directed by David Lynch, Rabbits is another series of interconnected short films where the abstract and the bizarre is given literal shape through malleable material (though each scene was originally shot live action). Three anthropomorphic rabbits play house as father, mother, and daughter. A family drama unfolds through domestic and mundane tableaus, accompanied by haunting music, a laugh track at inappropriate moments like a funhouse mirror image of a traditional sitcom, and sparse, unsettling, dementia-like dialogue, each character’s lines out of sync with the others’. The rabbit family sits on the sofa of a middle-class living room, staring at the spot where a TV should have been—directly toward the viewer, as the lines between stage and home, observer and object of observation, become blurred.

The traditional sitcom scene is interrupted by ritualistic summoning of entities, burning wall clocks, and spontaneous singing possessions, images that blend horror and haunted house elements into the already psychologically fraught sitcom. Despite those interruptions, the rabbits continue to go through the motions of their comfortable lives with an incrementally creepier undercurrent. Is it a purgatory loop or a normal existential-dread night in with the family? The question remains unanswered, and all the more eerie for it. Rabbits is a Lynchian movie, through and through: alienation, automation, absurdism, and a family of puppets falling apart at the seams.

For Tumblr in its heyday, the go-to hashtag used to be #vultureculture, a tag that refers to the collection and preservation of animal remains in the form of taxidermy, bone jewelry, and wall art.

On Instagram, the feed of “oddities and curiosities” is like a digital capsule mimicking the feeling of walking through an old cabinet of curiosities, full of bizarre findings such as strange gemstones, wet specimens, and allegedly cursed artifacts.

Pinterest is full of aesthetic mood boards of bones and decay, while on Etsy, you can browse through a virtual marketplace displaying a variety of jewelry, statues, and collectibles made from things that were, at some point in the near or distant past, alive.

All of the above is proof that people love admiring and collecting the morbid and the macabre. But this isn’t a modern phenomenon.

Let’s walk back to the cabinet of curiosities mentioned earlier. Curiosity cabinets (Wunderkammer in German, which literally translates to “wonder rooms”) were a popular phenomenon in the 16th and 17th centuries among academics and aristocrats (and other gatekeepers/members of the elite). Those cabinets—which could be either a room or a large piece of furniture—looked like miniature natural history museums, featuring organic and inorganic oddities: rare or deformed plant and animal fossils, minerals and bezoar stones, human remains, and arcane or esoteric texts and antiques of the occult. Some of those artifacts were formerly exhibits of anatomical museums that had to close to the public and redistribute their contents to private collectors. Other artifacts came from the Global South during trips or “expeditions.” In both of those cases, there was a strong element of ableist objectification (when collecting and reselling, for example, conjoined twin skeletons) or exoticization, in the case of amulets or holy relics brought from overseas to shock and entertain the rich.

Later, Victorian British society was fascinated with death’s shadow and the dead’s remains. Some mourning jewelry contained pieces of the departed’s body. Lockets held a curl of a child or spouse’s hair, rings were set with baby teeth (in correlation with the high infant mortality rates of the time), and sometimes even a mix of animal fur and claws could be found together with the human loved one’s. The deceased being kept close to the mourner’s body—in the case of the locket, literally nestled over the heart—makes sense if we consider how prevalent the concept of memento mori was, a phrase that means “remember that you must die.” Besides mourning jewelry, the Victorians were also enamored with a more titillating approach to death: conducting parlor seances where ectoplasmic ghosts were being summoned, collecting objects with strong iconographies of skulls and hourglasses in which time is running out, and studying anatomy and art through human cadavers and anatomical Venuses.

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The end of the previous millennium brought the rise of carnival and sideshow attractions featuring a voyeuristic view of bodies deemed bizarre and divergent. Such bodies were put on display, the sideshows taking on the role of a living, interactive cabinet of curiosities—this time, with a cheap admission ticket, making the sensationalism easily available to the public. The people put on display typically had visible disabilities and congenital differences, which the show spun wild, exaggerated backstories to explain. When in previous years audiences needed to visit a museum or private collection to inspect “rare human specimens,” the popularity of the so-called freakshow meant regular people could sate their morbid curiosity in the flesh—literally and figuratively. Those carnival attractions were a reminder to audiences that life and death, ability and disability were fluid concepts, with viewers leaving the shows content in their privilege and their place in the “normal” world.

Even in modern times, there is an undercurrent of exploitation to be reckoned with when engaging in the appreciation of “oddities and curiosities.” Although there are a lot of small creators who make sustainable, ethically sourced accessories by foraging for organic material in forests and roadsides instead of harming live animals for their bones, horns, and teeth, the human remains industry has a much less conscious, ethical footprint. Some collectors might claim they responsibly sourced human skeletons from medical and anthropological departments or secondhand antique shops, but the truth remains that a lot of those relics belonged to poor or marginalized people, whose bones made their way into the hands of scholars and collectors through unethical means. The good news is that more and more enjoyers of the macabre are interested in ethical, death-positive practices, so the demand for human remains is being phased out of social media accounts and modern physical collections alike.

But why do bones, teeth, and other strange and wondrous remains have such lasting popularity among personal collectors, artists, and digital enthusiasts? The memento mori principle still applies all those years later. People like to stare the inevitability of decomposition in the eye, to hold death close, find comfort and awe in the beautifully bizarre will of nature. The fact that bones are impressive conversation pieces and a source of artistic and aesthetic inspiration also helps!