The Winged Demoness of Death: Vanth and the Etruscan Underworld
On the walls of a 300 BCE Etruscan tomb, Vanth, a winged demoness of dark and stern gaze, flanks a door to the Great Unknown.
Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghostbusting, German Folklore-style
While less well known than their priestly counterparts, German folklore also had plenty of “secular” exorcists who resorted to magic to drive unruly ghosts away. The following tale from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has a closer look at this profession, along with its associated hazards.
Top 5 Feminist Ghosts
Articles about female ghosts are scattered across the Internet, each one more compelling and nightmare-inducing than the last. Stories of lonely, ferocious, and tortured ghosts of women haunt our imaginations across cultures, tapping into our deepest anxieties and fears to make us shiver…and behave.
Here we examine five female ghosts from around the world through a feminist lens. Each of these hair-raising spirits arise from a context just as frightening as the ghosts themselves.
The Werewolf Panic of the 1970s
In the autumn of 1972, numerous Swedish newspapers described how werewolves were causing people to panic in a town in a town in southern Sweden. According to the articles, fearsome werewolf attacks caused a “werewolf panic”, children were “paralysed with fear”, and one article even said that the following concerning the werewolves, “three school children killed!
The Six Creepiest Creatures from Scottish Folklore
Scottish lore contains some of the darkest and strangest figures in folkloric history: shape-shifters, blood-suckers, monsters without skin.