In the 21st century we are still haunted by ghosts from the past, scared by creaking floors in the middle of the night, afraid of monsters lurking in the shadows. We also face more tangible dangers: we have become collectively scared of the expansion of viruses and technological advancement, represented by zombies and the rebellion of the machines in the popular imagination from an Apocalyptic perspective. Similarly, there is a constant terror inspired by the sexual violence and the constant insecurity of women in public and private spaces. Women are, still today, afraid of violence in public and private spaces. These and other dangers have brought along the gothic appropriation of the witch as an empowering figure which, from ecofeminist practices, has been linked to the loss of natural spaces and the climate emergency.

Folklore and the Gothic share a common ground based on the experimentation of fear, both in the natural environment and in enclosed and claustrophobic spaces. In these manifestations, terror materializes as extraordinary entities (Bouyer 1985; Fontea, 2008; Montaner, 2014), which are deeply ingrained in the cultures and historical moments in which they appear. The concept folk horror, coined in the 1970s, defines the fear and terror experienced by local communities though ritual (Eamon Byers, 2014). The Gothic, on the other hand, has evolved since the writer Horace Walpole added this term as subtitle in The
Castle of Otranto (1764). Since then, readers have engaged with tragic stories which repeat the same Gothic formula: the presence of the heroine, the villain, the landscape and an unresolved mystery. The presence of the Gothic in Postmodernity (Catherine Spooner, 2006; Maria Beville, 2009; Abigail Lee Six, 2010; William Hughes, 2012; Fred Botting, 2013; Maria Purves, 2014; Ann Davies, 2014) and its global scope (Byron 2013; Punter 2015) demonstrate its vitality and its ability to adapt to new realities. In the last decade, the study Ecogothic helps bring together ecocriticism and the Gothic, establishing a direct relationship between fear and the effects that humankind has on the environment (Smith and Hughes, 2013).