Fishing with the Living and the Dead: The Sáiva Lakes of the Sami
For the Pre-Christian Sami people who inhabited parts of modern-day Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia, fishing was a livelihood.
Gruesome Folk Healing: The Curious Cures for Warts and Wens
These remedies, many of them fairly gruesome to our ears, were recorded only 100 years ago by Mrs Ella Mary Leather at the beginning of the 20th century, from the towns and villages of Herefordshire. Here are the folk memories of people who remembered these remedies being used and, what’s more, being efficacious. They are […]
Fact or Fiction? The Fate of the Witchfinder General
here is no name from the period of England’s witch trials more infamous than that of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled witchfinder who was instrumental in the witch-panic that swept East Anglia in the middle of the 17th century.
Tales from the Medieval Crypt: Walking Corpses, Devils and Haunted Shoemakers in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium
De Nugis Curialium is a strange book in which history, religious debate and court satire are interwoven with a tangle of mythology, folklore and eerie supernatural tales.
The Pit of Ghosts: Exploring the Haunted Mines of Victorian Wales
Welsh miners of the nineteenth century held strong superstitions in supernatural elements, which they believed existed deep in the mines.