From clowns to kayaks: a history of fear and loathing

Reading Laura Mauro’s “Japanese Toilet Ghosts” [FT459:30-35], reminded me of a less well known fear in the Western world, which –according to the modern rabbinical Internet resource site TheTorah.com

The SAS (Special Air Service) make routine use of sleep-deprivation exercises in their selection process, and these often feature in later training. Hallucinations during such exercises are very commo

I read recently that scientists allegedly agree that there is no increase in extreme weather events and conditions. If that’s so, the journals I checked must not yet have got the memo. The German Helm

While the original National Folklore Survey from the 1960s was unscientific and open ended, simply asking random people “what do you know to be true?”, its 21st century successor is a very different b

With Hallowe’en out of the way, Christmas is the next big ghostly occasion in the UK traditional calendar. But what, one may wonder, of the rest of Europe? Ghost hunter Peter Underwood called Europe “

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the