April 2020 – #FolkloreThursday

From Medicine to Murder: How the Apothecary Garden Found Its Dark Side

April 30, 2020 by Icy Sedgwick

There’s something about the concept of a poison garden that either titillates or terrifies, depending on your preferences.
The UK’s most famous Poison Garden is at the Alnwick Garden. Its influence is so far-reaching that if you Google “poison garden”, it dominates the first several pages of results. So much so that I assumed the poison garden was an established concept in horticultural history. Not so, it turns out.
Yet it does descend from a historical gardening ideal – the physic garden.
You and I are going on a voyage of discovery in these gardens. Just be careful not to touch anything…

Clown Panics and Computers: Chaos Manifests in the Age of the Internet

April 23, 2020 by Steve Toase

This article is about clowns. If you have clourophobia you might want to look away now. Not many forms of entertainment have their own phobia, yet there seems to be something about clowns that gets deep into our psyche.

The Grotter & the Strange History of Shell Grottos

April 16, 2020 by Thom Burgess

Shell grottos have a certain murky ambiguity to their history and folklore. This for me made them all the more enticing to use as the basis for a ghost story in my tale, ‘The Grotter’ in Nyctophobias. Especially with my roots as a Whitstable native in Kent, where grottos are still primarily lit once a year as part of the Oyster Festival celebrations. These grottos are usually stacked in a ‘beehive’ style pyramid, held together with wet sand and illuminated by a short candle.

Hunting for Unicorns

April 9, 2020 by Lari Don

Scotland is one of the few nations to have chosen a mythological creature rather than a real one as her national animal, and probably the only nation to have chosen an animal that no one believed actually lived there…

A Spot of Easter Violence, Anyone?

April 9, 2020 by Melanie Warren

Easter customs of old were many and varied but who would have expected so many of them to be nothing short of violent? Some believe Easter is named after the pagan spring festival celebrating Ēostre or Ostara; historically known as the spring equinox, this might explain why the date of Easter is calculated by the cycles of the moon. It falls on the Sunday following the full moon after the first day of spring — nothing Christian about that calculation! One would have thought the dates of Christ’s death and resurrection would have been more definitely commemorated but, no, we stick to celebrating the coming of spring. Compared to this oddity, some of the bizarre customs associated with Easter stop seeming so bizarre. The violence involved in some of them, though, is a little harder to explain…