Folklore
Monsters, ghosts, and the stories people told before they had another explanation.
FolkloreBefore the Pumpkin: The Victorian Halloween of Turnips, Witch Marks and FairiesBefore the pumpkin took over, Halloween light came from a hollowed root vegetable — and the season was guarded by marks, stories, and fairies.
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FolkloreBefore Dracula: The Actual Vampire the 18th Century Was Afraid OfThe real history of the vampire, before Bram Stoker: Serbian revenant trials of the 1720s, the Mercy Brown case of 1892, and the physiology that explained most of it.
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FolkloreWhy the Victorians Went Ghost Mad — A Short History of Victorian SpiritualismThe Victorian ghost story mania: the Fox Sisters of 1848, the Society for Psychical Research, mourning culture, and why respectable people took spiritualism seriously.
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FolkloreA Brief, Annotated History of the WerewolfWerewolves were, for about four centuries, taken seriously by European courts. Four hundred people were tried as lycanthropes. The records reveal more about human history than they do about wolves.
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FolkloreThe Fairy Tales the Grimms Cut OutThe edits between the 1812 and 1857 editions of the Grimm brothers' tales are a history of what a growing middle class needed to forget.
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FolkloreWhat the Sailors Said They Saw: A Short History of the Sea MonsterA history of sea monster sightings: the Kraken, Leviathan, the 1848 HMS Daedalus serpent, and the marine biology that quietly explained most of them.
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