The big picture

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

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

Keepers at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia have noticed a fashion trend spreading among groups of chimpanzees living there – sticking strands of grass in their ears or rectums, and just le

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

→ When the Tudor poet Thomas Tusser wrote of “Turkey wel drest” as part of a Christmas feast in 1573, he was in fact taking part in a trend new to these shores. Turkeys, those red-necked birds who gob

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 “