141. beyond black shuck

I’m sceptical about news stories you sometimes read of big black cats roaming the countryside. I was, however, tempted to don my boots for a hike I found on the internet titled In the Footsteps of the

You might be surprised to learn that there are more ghost sightings on Christmas Eve than there are at Halloween, so what better time for a ghost hunt? The festive season has always been favoured by l

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

It was a hot day in one of the hottest and most uncomfortable summers of recent years. I was standing in a small upstairs bedroom of a house on the outskirts of a modern estate in the borough of South

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

The weekend of 5-7 September marked the inaugural Strange Days Festival of Forteana. Organiser Matt Page’s promise of ‘The most extraordinary weekend of your life’ was spot-on. Strange Days took place