Haunted Castles Quotes

“Beneath the haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell or paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, as a torture chamber- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: dread of the superego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched.”
― Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

“The Forbidden Place by Stewart Stafford

Bypass the chateau on the hill,
For, as dusk falls, horrors creep,
Griffins and gargoyles fly and flay,
And grotesque statues come alive.

Badinage becomes shrieks and roars,
Shrill warnings for the straying and foolish,
Cats as big as panthers stalk and slay,
As their homicidal master flogs their fur.

Wandering werewolves fetch human bones,
A savage rampage beneath a Hunter's Moon,
As the dawn routine reasserts its dominance,
Denizens of night bathe in darkness's arms.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Just because my ancestor built a flipping castle in a place like Wisconsin, this is the kind of attention we get?"
"It's not the only castle in the Midwest," Cleo offered, hoping to diffuse the situation.
They stood around Stasia's car, no one getting in. Dave leaned against the trunk of his own vehicle parked ahead of Stasia's.
"No. It's not," Stasia agreed. "There's one in Ohio. Built by German immigrants.”
― Jaime Jo Wright, The Vanishing at Castle Moreau