👀 Spooky season alert!
#360 | Still waters run scary
The leaves are changing colour all over the northern hemisphere, there’s a chill in the air, mornings are misty, nights are longer. The perfect time to curl up in the after-hours with spooky stuff.
As a fundamentally anxious person, horror was ironically always my comfort genre. As a kid, I consumed spooky media because, unlike real life, the ordeal always ended, and the lead actor always made it out of the Gothic castle. It gave me hope. Horror is also traditionally much more accepting of oddities and exceptions, of difference and darkness, of horrific excesses bordering on the comic, plus scathing political critiques that can never be adequately expressed by realist media. As I’ve grown older, I've come to appreciate this versatility more and more.
So here is my thing - if you’ve never heard of the Skeleton Coast with its killer fogs or the underwater caves of Jacob's Well that claimed at least eight human lives you might want to check out the Spooky Lakes series I stumbled upon on Instagram. This series of reels by @geodesaurus feature haunted and scary lakes and other water sources from across the world in delightful, bite-sized videos.
I especially love the darkly funny stickers of drowning figures, skulls and miscellanea she adds to her videos. Plus she rates each of these haunted sites in terms of its spookiness at the end of each video. There’s one video for every day of October.
Go spook yourself!
Mahasweta
Apart from being a doctoral student specialising in contemporary literary ghosts, Mahasweta is also a cat-mom, a flâneuse, a translator, and a compulsive playlist-maker.