The Two-headed Ghost That Terrorised a Welsh Community
The Victorian newspaper archives are full of unusual ghost sightings, but there aren’t many as unique, or with a more gruesome origin story, than the Welsh spectre which gained a second head.
A Californian Krampus
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.
A ghost story that caused a riot: the strange case of Maude Carew
In February 1862 a riot broke out in a Suffolk churchyard over a ghost story. Margaretta Greene, the story’s author, originated an enduring legend of the ghost of a nun, Maude Carew, who haunts the ruins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds. But the story of Maude Carew, and the riot she inspired, raises intriguing questions about the origins of folklore and beliefs about the supernatural.
Cars, Coins and Cursed Colours: A Brief Introduction to the Folklore of Vehicles
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.
Psychogeography & Landscape in ‘Spirits of Place’: An Interview with Contributors
Spirits of Place is an anthology examining the relationship between place and narrative: how stories, folkloric or historic, become embedded in a location.