Talltall tales tales

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

This month’s story, ‘The Surrogate’ by Tessa Hadley, is a study of two men through the eyes of one woman. The title suggests that one man is a surrogate for the other, but is it as simple as that? As

An old man lives at the bottom of my garden. His name is Robert Barkus, or Bakehouse, or Bagust. Nobody is quite sure. But I often sense him around when I’m gardening, and I’ve found out a fair bit ab

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

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

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