In 1838, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne, London was bedevilled by a clawed, fire-breathing, shape-shifting demon popularly known as Spring-heeled Jack. A rather haphazard creation of local gossip, newspaper reports, and penny dreadful fiction, this urban legend, once largely forgotten, is now being revived through a contemporary interest in steampunk and reimagined […]
What unites bikers, punks, feminists and sewing? Scott Malthouse explores the social history of battle jackets.
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!
Relentlessly sunny and known for a love of trend over tradition, Los Angeles is an unlikely home to a new incarnation of the old Alpine devil. It helps, perhaps, that make-believe is serious business in my town, and that it’s filled with creative people prone to see in an old tradition of folk Catholicism a revolutionary way to shake up the holidays.
Cars and motorbikes have been with us for over 130 years. In that time they’ve gathered superstitions and urban legends around them like exhaust fumes.
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