Why we’re still living in the age of the witch hunt

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For 11 or 12 days in 1654, Anna Trapnel, a self-styled prophet from Poplar, lay in a stupor in an inn near Whitehall. With her eyes shut and her body unmoving, she spoke and sang prophecies to the cro

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me

Do older people see more ghosts? In the 1985 film version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a character refers to the tendency of older people to believe in ghosts, remarking “that it’s difficult, a

Ayoush Lazikani The Medieval Moon A history of haunting and blessing 272pp. Yale University Press. £20 (US $30). Something fundamental changed in our relationship with the moon when we realized we cou

“Welcome to the 19th century,” began Jeremy Harte, introducing the Folklore Society’s Legendary Weekend examining ‘Lying in Legend and Tradition’. Gathering at Carlisle’s Tullie House Museum over 6-7