FRANKMINTED
The cover of FRANKMINTED: The Linnet’s Wings — Halloween 2026 features Old Mother Autumn, a mixed-media artwork of a woman moving through dry autumn growth, accompanied by a small dark animal.
旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る |
Poetry: West
West’s poems offer a steady passage between our darker brackets. In “Flat Land”, he steps into Escher’s disciplined wonder, where pattern becomes paradox and the mind learns to doubt the floor beneath it. “Kissing Stones or Lost in the dark” brings us into Irish stonework and pilgrimage, rising from the dungeon-dark to the bright folklore of blessing. And “imminent exits” closes with a quiet seasonal turn — that late-summer knowledge that change is already at the roadside.
Poems by Bill West |
 Art/Photo Wall from our Print Magazine |
 They Tunnel of Hope, Sarajevo, 2026 |
Translations by Michael Wooff
Two translations by Michael Wooff bring different kinds of darkness into FRANKMINTED. In the mountain village, the story of Old Casca blurs folklore and fearful memory; in Renaissance Florence, plague exposes the passions and choices of those who believe themselves beyond its reach. Both tales ask what people become when death draws near.
Casca |
 Anno Pestis |
Le Fanu and Longfellow (Classic)
Two nineteenth-century poems meet in this display: Le Fanu’s meditation on memory and the joys we carry from the past, and Longfellow’s assurance that difficult days belong to every life—and do not last forever.
A reflective poem by Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, in which a sound on Killarney’s shore awakens echoes of the past. Though memory holds grief as well as joy, the speaker cherishes it for the happiness that lives on in recollection. |
Poetry: John C, Mannone
John C. Mannone’s three hybrid works bring ghosts, uncanny art and a storm-haunted flight into conversation with science, memory and myth. Moving between prose and linked verse, they test the boundary between the explainable and the supernatural, with wit, imagination and a keen sense of dang
Ghosts |
 Smiles Trapped in the Imron Glaze |
 Prince of the Air |
Micro: Susan Tepper
Susan Tepper’s micros return to a woman and the soldier Petrov, whose lives are shaped by war, separation and grief. Through winter hardship, a lost child and questions that have no easy answers, the pieces give intimate voice to the endurance—and longing—for a life beyond conflict.
After The Winter Before |
 Announce |
 Never |
Poetry: LindaAnn LoSchiavo
LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s poems turn to the histories and legends of witchcraft: the Salem trials, the laws that condemned women, and the enduring superstition surrounding Macbeth. Together, they examine how suspicion and power shape the image of the witch—and how women’s voices and mysteries continue to survive.
“Villanelle: Salem, Massachusetts, 1692” — LindaAnn LoSchiavo |
 “Secrets of the Spell” — LindaAnn LoSchiavo |
Essays: Stephen Zelnick
These two essays examine the stories a society tells itself. One turns to Orwell and the machinery of political power, language and belief; the other finds cultural anxieties in the monsters and nightmares of pre-Code Hollywood. Together, they invite us to look beneath familiar narratives—and notice what they reveal.
Orwell’s World |
 New Horror Reviews |
Poetry: Joslin and Kirchner
“An Early Encounter with Death” — Oonah Joslin |
Unyield” — Craig Kirchner |
“Now And Zen And The Continuum” — Oonah Joslin |
“All Saint’s Eve 1970” — Craig Kirchner |
Classic: — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
This display pairs Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House with Mari Fitzpatrick’s editorial, “What the House Keeps.” Le Fanu’s story gathers unsettling fragments—a shadow, a red light, unexplained footsteps and a buried bone—while the editorial considers how those fragments invite us to imagine the missing whole. Together, they explore haunting, memory and the mysteries a house may hold.
A family settles into a cheerful seaside house, only for unsettling reports to emerge from the bedrooms, passages and servants’ quarters: a woman glimpsed in the night, a shadow crossing a wall, unexplained knocks and a mysterious visitor. Le Fanu presents the incidents as a carefully gathered account, leaving the reader to weigh supernatural haunting against a more earthly explanation. |
 Returning to Le Fanu’s An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House, Mari Fitzpatrick follows the story’s fragments: a shadow without a visible figure, unexplained footsteps, a red light and a buried bone. Bringing Le Fanu into conversation with Jung and Picasso, the editorial explores how what is hidden may return in images—and how a haunting can remain powerful when its mystery is never fully solved. |
Rich in Monsters
frankminted (adj.) — rich in monsters; abundantly supplied with strange, uncanny, grotesque, or supernatural beings; coined for The Linnet’s Wings Halloween 2026 issue.
Archive Search
Jingle
As soon as the coin
in the coffer rings,
a soul from
purgatory springs.
Cover for our Halloween 2026 magazine.
Image Old Mother Autumn, 2026
Mixed Media on Card, Artist, Marie Fitzpatrick
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For permission requests, email the publisher at: thelinnetswings@gmail.com
Ghosts & Other Presences
Thirteen pieces from across the archive explore the things that refuse to disappear. Ghosts walk beside memory; old stories carry supernatural bargains and strange encounters; graveyards, autumn skies and haunted landscapes keep their own company. Some of these presences belong to folklore, some to grief, and some simply to the uneasy knowledge that the past is rarely as absent as we imagine.
18 Sep 2026 · Mari Lynam Fitzpatrick
I took the first of these photographs in Sarajevo, beside the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral, in the old part of the city.
You can’t miss the sign on the wall adjacent to it. High above the street is a poster calling attention to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Exhibition. In it, an elderly face looks down over the square, and beneath are four words:
You Are My Witness.
Faery Gold
Irish folklore opens a door onto a world in which gold, enchantment and supernatural beings remain perilously close to ordinary life.
The Pact
Family history and Nordic folklore meet in a story of inherited secrets, strange beings and a supernatural bargain whose presence reaches across generations.
The Equilibrists Over River: Symbols of Resilience, Hope, and Unity. They were created by Enes Sivac in 1993 to hang over the main river, created in a time of war and grief and carved from energy found in the darkest days.
Mari Fitzpatrick, Sarajevo 2026
A Shadow of Doubt
Ghostly encounters draw past and present together as memory, regret and reconciliation move between an older woman and a younger generation.
Cassiopeia's Hair
A mysterious book, superstition and an unexplained death disturb the familiar world, suggesting hidden connections between stories and the lives of those who read them.
Every Stick
A scarecrow inhabits an eerie, desolate landscape in a haunting little tale of isolation, fate and the strange life we sometimes grant to familiar things.
Ghost
Loss leaves its own presence behind. Memory enters the quiet spaces of absence until remembrance itself begins to resemble a ghost.
Adventures of a Dead Body
A funeral procession encountered at night becomes, in Don Quixote's imagination, an adventure populated by phantoms, danger and all the splendid errors of chivalric romance.
Fumus Autumnus
Squirrel, hazelnut shells, Halloween twilight and bonfire smoke gather into an autumn poem in which the familiar season acquires a faintly unsettling edge.
Poe-ish
Wet mist, deadwood, wipers and crow-haunted roads create a brief Gothic journey where weather and memory seem to summon ghosts of their own.
Death / Leaving
Burial, grief, seagulls and memory meet in a graveyard meditation that holds farewell beside the continuing presence of the dead.
In Bellaghy Graveyard
Sycamore, winter stone, silence and wren-song surround a grave in a quiet meditation where grief and memory leave room for hope.
Cut Loose
A grieving father becomes a kite and asks his child to release him into an October sky: a strange and tender transformation of loss into letting go.
The Ghosts of Devon
From the Archive
A woman prepares the dead with practised care in Karen Jones’s unsettling Halloween story, where ritual, intimacy and the possibility of return draw steadily closer.
Martin Heavisides considers the theatrical legacy of Peter Barnes, whose inventive dramatic forms challenged convention and enlarged the possibilities of the modern stage.
Annette Volfing addresses a grandmother across absence and time in a poem of memory, change and the enduring influence of family.
A wolf’s unlikely encounter with human technology leads into music, birds and comic mischief in Lisa Cihlar’s playful short story.
A familiar Aesop fable revisits disguise, deception and the moment a borrowed appearance gives way to a revealing voice.
Seen from an aircraft window, sunrise unfolds across wing and sky in Lark Beltram’s poem of colour, movement and the recovered pleasure of travel.