A.L. Butcher's Blog, page 18

Halloween 2024! Brainzzzz

Here Be Zombies

https://books2read.com/HereBeZombies-Bundle

Brainsssss! The dead are walking, hungry and brains taste so good…

12 Tales of zombies and zombie hunters.

1. “Alice’s Adventures in Underland” by DeAnna Knippling
2. “I Hate Zombies” by Shantnu Tiwari
3. “Zomopolis” by Russ Crossley
4. “Zombie Ever After” by Carl S. Plumer
5. “Zombee A Go-Go” by Rebecca M. Senese
6. “Zombie Girl Invasion” by De Kenyon
7. “Life Among the Dead” by Rebecca M. Senese
8. “Usher Falling” by Sandra Seymour
9. “My Zombie Prince” by Russ Crossley
10. “A Chat Before Dinner” by Michael Kingswood
11. “The Island” by Will Overby
12. “Dragon Rising” by Russ Crossley

https://books.apple.com/gb/book/here-be-zombies/id1533584872?

Amazon.com https://amzn.to/36fTOxx

Amazon UK https://amzn.to/3mWwScN

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/here-be-zombies?

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/here-be-zombies-a-l-butcher/1137764224;

Halloween 2024! – Vampires – Excerpt – So Many Nights, So Many Sins

Do you like vampires? I love them, but only the gothic type – not the sparkly ones.

I have a story about a cynical vampire – Wolfgang – he’s old, he’s grouchy, he’s scary.

Here’s an excerpt…

So Many Nights, So Many Sins (c) A. L. Butcher

Battles had been fought, lives taken, lost and even given and through it, all the Cavern stood in one form or another, and its fire burned. Creatures who lived in the twilight world of the undead were drawn to this place. Perhaps it was the blood, perhaps there was something special here. Life was a lure, to those who possessed a parody of it, but in truth, no one really knew or dared to discover. It was the sort of place no one asked too many questions or expected honest answers and so those patrons with things to hide and enemies aplenty caroused in The Cavern in an uneasy truce. The fire saw all, and so did its current keeper. For now, both the fire and The Cavern had Wolfgang’s undead patronage, and both knew it.

Wolfgang Feuerleiben turned his bright hazel eyes despondently towards the blaze and shivered; as usual, he could not seem to get warm even close as he was to it. This place, generally, was cold, as old buildings often were, even with the impressive blaze. Wolfgang had no internal heat, nor did any of his kind; but habits are hard to shake and even a vampire likes to be warm. Bodies with no inward heat found themselves stiff and slow and it wasn’t like a vampire could bask in the sun. Wolfgang surmised it was a throwback to his human past. Memories faded, became corrupted or were forgotten; it was a curse and a blessing – an elder had told him. Wolfgang considered this – ‘memories went with morality. One could not be haunted if one had no memory of past sins and past transgressions’ the Elder had said. Yet almost all his kind suffered nightmares – or rather daymares and the Vampire Scholar who’d propounded his theory had died raving in a fire of his own making. Driven mad by the guilt of split blood. It was hard to be a monster. And much, much harder to be a monster pretending to be a man.

****

Read the expanded story in Dark Tales and Twisted Verses

https://books2read.com/DarkTalesTwistedVerses

And the first incarnation in Nightly Bites

Universal Link https://books2read.com/b/bQBDB0

Paperback http://amzn.to/2FRNBI1

Nightly Bites II – Meet Wolfgang and his undead companions in this medley of vampires

Halloween 2024! – Ghosts – The Grey Lady

Do you believe in ghosts?

I’m not sure, I think a lot of sightings are misinterpreted, and can be explained rationally, some are just plain fakes, but others? Well I am not sure. I don’t believe in an afterlife but I do think now and then something occurs to trap the essence of a person somewhere.

Years ago I worked in a shop that was built on the site of an old farm, in which the farmer had killed himself. I didn’t know this until a few weeks after I started, but there were rumours the site was haunted.

The warehouse was, frankly, creepy as hell. It was always cold (although it was a ventilated prefab type building so that’s not surprising), but more than that, stuff moved. Items would fall off shelves, from the back of the shelf, there was a ‘feeling’ in there. Odd, unsettling and unhappy. The manager swore she could hear someone jangling keys when there was no one else in there, and a lot of staff refused to go in there alone at night.

There were CCTV images (apparently) of trollies moving by themselves….

I’m not sure about that place – you were told about ‘the ghost’ so I think people heard odd noises or thought they saw stuff, forgot where they left things etc and so your brain filled in the blanks.

The story below is one, however, I do believe.

The Grey Lady and the Royal Victoria Hospital

The Royal Victoria Hospital was a military hospital in Netley, Hampshire in the UK, an imposing building from 1856 and demolished in 1966. During the Second World War it was 28th US General Hospital. There was some controversy about the design of the hospital when it was built, and did not receive the approval of Florence Nightingale – the champion of the wounded soldier. It was the largest British military hospital of its day.

In the late 1950s my father was serving in the Royal Army Medical Corp at the hospital, after he was wounded in action and flown back to the UK. It was a grim place, foreboding and sombre. At that time it was in use to treat Army and Navy personnel suffering from psychiatric problems, STDs (Dad didn’t tell me that), and addictions. The rear of the old hospital was the psych unit. It was badly designed, badly ventilated and a grim place to be sectioned.

My late father was a storyteller and imaginative – I’m certain some of the tales he told us had a little embellishment here and there. That said one story he’d tell us he swore was true – the time he saw the Grey Lady – the Ghost of Netley Hospital.

My father was not a man to particularly believe in an afterlife, or ghosts in general but he swore he’s seen an apparition. There was, he said, a ledger in the hospital of sightings and strange occurrences. It was not just your average squaddie – higher-ranking officers, medical staff and civilians had seen a ghost. He was skeptical, but there were a lot of entries in the ‘ghost book’ and many hospitals had stories of apparitions.

One night, when Dad was on patrol with another soldier they passed a corridor, containing a locked door. It was always locked. Always. As they passed the door opened and a woman clad in an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform walked past them… and disappeared. They had seen the Grey Lady. Dad told me he’d never run as fast in all his life. He swore it was true, they’d certainly seen something – and it wasn’t a living woman.

So, who had she been? There are mixed rumours – a nurse who’d accidentally killed a patient and committed suicide from remorse, or, as my father believed, a nurse who’d fallen in love with a patient and went mad with grief when he returned to the war and then was killed in action. She walked the grounds, and some said her appearance heralded a death – but in a hospital that’s not unlikely.

Another notion is the nurse’s lover was also seeing another woman, and so she killed him and then herself.

Other people within RAMC and QARANC (Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps) had also seen her.

Since the building’s demolition the ghost has not been seen. Do I believe my father saw a ghost? I believe he thought so.

There’s also the ghost of an old blind monk, said to guard some hidden treasure in the chapel (which still remains). The treasure is believed to be concealed at the end of a long tunnel – and an explorer was literally frightened to death by what he found there.

There are several books about the hospital and its ghosts.

Learn more here

https://www.qaranc.co.uk/netleyhospital.php

https://www.hants.gov.uk/thingstodo/countryside/news/rvcp-october2017

https://www.netleyabbeymatters.co.uk/hospital-waiting-room

Halloween 2024! Black Dog Myths

Britain is a land of myth and legend, from giants and dragons to St George and Headless Horsemen.

Black Dog spectres are nocturnal apparitions, often foretelling deaths and sometimes linked with Satan, although some are protectors. From Grim, Padfoot, Barguest and Shuck, these nocturnal hounds walk the byways and lanes of Britain. Appearances differ – although they are always large, some have no head, a human-looking head, fiery eyes, chains or blooded fang; they walk in silence and howl with spine-chilling cries.

Old Shuck

Variously known as Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock or Shuck (a name derived from the Old English word for fiend), a ghostly hound is believed to haunt the coastline and countryside parts of Britain. Documents from the 16th century record ‘sightings’ of this horrible hound, but records are believed to go back at far as the 12th Century.

The most notorious reports of Shuck come from Bungay and Blythburn in the county of Suffolk, in England (1577). The great devilish hound is said to have burst through the church doors during a storm, killed a man and child and causing the steeple to collapse. There are, apparently scorch marks still remaining on the door to this day. He then appeared in a separate church in the village of Bungay, killed some more congregants before disappearing.

Title page of the account of Rev. Abraham Fleming’s account of the appearance of the ghostly black dog “Black Shuck” at the church of Bungay, Suffolk in 1577: “A straunge, and terrible wunder wrought very late in the parish church of Bongay: a town of no great distance from the citie of Norwich, namely the fourth of this August, in ye yeere of our Lord 1577.” ( Public Domain  )

In 1850 Revd Taylor of Ormesby wrote that he’d heard the tale of Shuck from many people in East Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The great hound was described as ‘a black shaggy dog with fiery eyes, who visits churchyards at night’ (From Lore of the Land – Westwood and Simpson). The dog started at Beeston and walked Overstrand churchyard at twilight and his route crossed what is now Cromer railway station – and a local street was known as Shuck’s Lane. Another preacher heard from an elderly local parishioner that Shuck ran nightly over Coltishall Bridge. A local man had kicked at a large dog acting aggressively, the man’s foot when straight through the dog….

Shuck has now firmly become part of local folklore with manifestations of ‘Old Scarf’, ‘Old Shock’ and the ‘Shucky Dog’. A spectral dog known as Chuff was seen as late as 1980. Old Shock sometimes manifested as a calf, or had the head of a donkey, a goat, or even a ‘shug monkey’.

He is portrayed in many forms – including as a shapeshifting bogey beast. Headless or saucer-eyed creatures are traditional signs of the supernatural, and such beasts often had ‘skeffy’ or shaggy coats.

‘Shuck’ is derived from an Old English word – scucca –meaning fiend, ‘shucky’ is a Norfolk dialect for shaggy.  In Europe, a sixth of all dog demons are black poodles (Patricia Dale Green Dog 1966). Shuck’s ancestry may be hinted at from an account from St Margaret in the late 12th century, called ‘Alde Shuke’ – an ‘unwight’ who appeared in animal form, and calls himself a ‘bitter beast’.

Some accounts state meeting Shuck means a death within a year, oral tradition does not always support this. Shuck and the Black Dog of Bungay myths have merged, out of 74 sightings only seventeen could be connected with death or a misfortune.

Other accounts have the Black Dogs act as guardians, escorted women along lonely lanes at night.  In 1998 one man recounted having to get out of the road at night due to a huge hound with flaming eyes standing in his way. This prevented him being run down by a car with no lights.

The Black Dog of Newgate

What is the Secret of Blossom Rise?

When a young nurse takes a job at an old military hospital she finds the answers to an old family question – what is the secret of Blossom Rise Hospital? Who is the long-dead man who walks the grounds?
#Ebook #Audiobook  #Paranormal #Ghoststory

https://books2read.com/SecretBlossomRise

 

Stone of Lust – Blog Tour #Timetravel #ParanormalRomance

 

She finds true love in the past, but is his love worth risking herfuture?

Stone of Lust

Stones of IonaBook 3

by Margaret Izard

Genre: TimeTravel, Paranormal Romance

  

She finds true love in the past, but is his love worth risking herfuture?

 She dreams of aViking warrior with Fae-blue eyes and a God-like body that makes her heartpound like no other. Trying to save her kidnapped sister-in-law, Ainsliefollows her back to the Vikings of Scotland, where she faces the very man whohas haunted her dreams.

 When Jarl, RannickMacRaghnaill meets the alluring Warrior Woman who helped steal hiswarship, she dresses in clothing so strange that every curve teases his senses.But is she, as she claims, a woman from the future or an irresistible lyingthief?

 She’d risk herlife to save her sister-in-law. He’d risk his honor to win her heart. Can bothhardened warriors save the realms from the evilest of Fae’s minds combined withthe most dangerous of humans?

  

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**Don’t miss the other books in the series!**

Find them on Amazon!

Margaret Izard isan award-winning author of historical fantasy and paranormal romance novels.She spent her early years through college to adulthood dedicated to dance,theater, and performing. Over the years, she developed a love for greatstorytelling in different mediums. She does not waste a good story, be itmovement, the spoken, or the written word. She discovered historical romancenovels in middle school, which combined her passion for romance, drama, andfantasy. She writes exciting plot lines, steamy love scenes and always fallsfor a strong male with a soft heart. She lives in Houston, Texas, with herhusband and adult triplets and loves to hear from readers.

  

Website * Facebook * X * Instagram * Bookbub * Amazon* Goodreads

Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!

Stone of Lust SwagPack (US only),

$20 Amazongiftcard (WW)

– 1 winner each!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Το μυστικό της Ανθοφορίας

Όταν μια νεαρή νοσοκόμα δέχεται δουλειά σε ένα πρώην στρατιωτικό νοσοκομείο, ανακαλύπτει ένα οικογενειακό μυστικό και βρίσκει τους φασματικούς ενοίκους λιγουλάκι υπερβολικά οικείους.

Μια σύντομη ιστορία φαντασμάτων

https://books2read.com/BlossomRiseGreek

#Φαντάσματα, #Παραφυσικό, #Τρόμου, #Διήγημα

What is the Secret of Blossom Rise?

When a young nurse takes a job at an old military hospital she finds the answers to an old family question – what is the secret of Blossom Rise Hospital? Who is the long-dead man who walks the grounds?
#Ebook #Audiobook  #Paranormal #Ghoststory

https://books2read.com/SecretBlossomRise

 

Check out the Light Beyond the Storm Chronicles for a sizzling sorcery adventure

Looking for an audiobook or awesome read? Check out The Light Beyond the Storm Chronicles – Book I

In a dark world where magic is illegal, and elves are enslaved a young elven sorceress runs for her life from the house of her evil Keeper. Pursued by his men and the corrupt Order of Witch-Hunters she must find sanctuary. As the slavers roll across the lands stealing elves from what remains of their ancestral home the Witch-Hunters turn a blind eye to the tragedy and a story of power, love and a terrible revenge unfolds.

18 rated (for adult content).

Available Amazon, Audible, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Google Play, Scribd, Angus and Robertson, and more on the link below – hardback, paperback, ebook and large print editions.

#Fantasy or #FantasyRomance #Darkfantasy #Sexnsorcery Universal Link
https://www.books2read.com/Lightbeyondstorm1

Devil in the Desert – Blog Tour #Historical #Horror

 

In 1942, Major RayHawkins must assemble a unit of civilians and military to keep the Nazis fromreleasing a desert djinn against the Allied forces in North Africa. They willhave to employ conventional warfare and unconventional witchcraft to accomplishthe mission.

Devil in theDesert

Office ofSupernatural Directives Book 1

by Russell James

Genre: HistoricalHorror

It is 1942 and asecret group within the Nazi SS is on the hunt for objects of the occult,hoping to harvest their power for wonder weapons to win the war. Its leader,Gruppenfuhrer Karl Weitz, has more than military might behind him. He hasrecruited the Ochre Witch, an Eastern European sorceress capable of adaptingwhat they seize to serve the Reich’s needs.

Only one team can stop the Axis powers from winning World War II.

Army Major Ray Hawkins is tasked with creating the Office of SupernaturalDirectives to stop these fanatics. He assembles a team that includes a femaleWASP pilot, an enlisted man with a passion for language and puzzles, amysterious American ex-pat from the French Foreign Legion, and a young Romanywoman who will need to embrace the mystic Gypsy teachings she’s spent her lifedespising.

Their first mission unfolds in Tunisia, where Weitz and the Ocher Witch plan torelease a djinn the locals call the Devil in the Desert. It wields the power tospread debilitating fear. If Major Hawkins and his band cannot stop the djinn,it will sow panic among the Americans and Rommel’s Afrika Korps will crush theinvasion force. But Hawkins’ new team has many weaknesses, and Weitz and theOcher Witch will exploit every one of them to win.

  

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RussellR. James was raised on Long Island, New York and spent too much time watchingChiller, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Dark Shadows, despite his parents’warnings. Bookshelves full of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe didn’t makethings better. He graduated from Cornell University and the University ofCentral Florida.

Afterflying helicopters with the U.S. Army and a career as a technical writer, henow spins twisted tales best read in daylight, including horror thrillers DarkInspiration, Q Island, and The Playing Card Killer. He authored the GrantColeman Adventures series starting with Cavern of the Damned and the RangerKathy West series starting with Claws. He resides in sunny Florida. His wifereads his work, rolls her eyes, and says “There is something seriouslywrong with you.”

  

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Followthe tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!

$10 Amazon

a Rafflecopter giveaway https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js