Tales of Folklore and the Ghosts We Carry

Photography: Anna Goncharova

About Joy Bitgood

Joy Bitgood crafts stories rooted in folklore, grief, and the ghosts we carry, melding dark fantasy with timeless myth. Her work explores the spaces between memory and haunting, always drawn to the mist, the strange, and the quietly powerful.

Photography: The Witching Hour Photography

Model: Self Portrait

Photography: The Witching Hour Photography

Model: Jenn Bottari

Featured Works

Step into creeping horror, folklore, and dark fantasy. Here’s a glimpse at stories that explore the ghosts we carry, and the ones waiting in the dark.

Raccoons

A couple camping in the woods begins to doubt what’s watching them in the dark. Tension rises as yellow eyes close in, silent, patient, and unafraid

“We went to a motel. Told ourselves it was only raccoons scavenging our leftover dinner. We laughed, hollow and shaky and slept with the lights on. But sometimes, as I drift to sleep, I remember those eyes, high and low and closing in…”

Ravenhurst Road

A woman returns to the neighborhood of her childhood, only to find memory and reality twisting around her like moth wings. Has she been here before, or is her past rewriting itself?

“I moved away five, or ten, or twenty years ago. Now I’m back. Where did I take that fall? I walk up and down the street, where was that kiss? I can’t recall.”

Surrender

A gothic meditation on grief, compulsion, and time’s unraveling. Surrender follows a narrator who can witness the final moments of the dead, until one haunting refuses to let go. Both tender and unsettling, this piece spirals into the heart of obsession and loss.

“I move through the stones. Each grave draws me, and I resist the delicate urge to touch. To feel the rough granite beneath my skin. To give in to the strange fabric of the veil. It’s an ache, a compulsion. My whole body yearns to touch. To see.”

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