While holly, ivy and mistletoe might be the most obvious Yuletide plants, there is one more that bears a festive name – the Christmas Rose. Only it’s not a rose at all. It’s a hellebore. A black hellebore, to be precise. Black hellebore is actually named for the colour of its roots, not its petals […]
folklore
Conifers and Christmas: The Folklore of Pine, Spruce and Fir Trees
Put ‘christmas trees’ into Google and it returns about 1,350,000,000 results. They’re an intrinsic part of the festivities, yet you actually have three main types of conifers to choose from: pine (Pinus), fir (Abies), and spruce (Picea). Oslo has sent a Norway spruce to London every Christmas since 1947, displayed in Trafalgar Square (Woolf 2020: […]
Folklore of Tunnels: Hidden Networks and Lost Pipers
Tunnels seem to accrue more folklore than most. Perhaps it’s because we can’t see where they go when we can only see the entrance. Or perhaps we’ve been so primed by fiction to believe tunnels must lead somewhere that we love the idea of a secret world beneath our feet. Some tunnel legends are common […]
Catacombs Folklore: Ghosts, Vampires & the Holy Grail
The concept of catacombs dates to first-century Rome, where the catacombs provided underground tombs. The Romans didn’t permit burial within the city walls, and while pagans cremated their dead, the Christians had to find other solutions. Jewish communities already used the catacombs and Christian communities adopted them in the 2nd century. They’d fallen out of […]
Wizard’s Cave or Smuggler’s Cave: Treasure in Tynemouth!
Tynemouth Castle and Priory stands on a lonely promontory intruding into the savage North Sea. Legends tell of underground passages and dungeons below the Castle and Priory site. Among this network lies a cave, often known as Jingling Geordie’s Hole, Jingling Man’s Hole or the Wizard’s Cave. The entrance apparently lay on the north side […]
4 Weird Ghost Stories Direct From Real Life
Halloween is a perfect time of year to tell ghost stories. Lord knows I have enough weird ghost stories among my free short stories. But I ran a poll on Twitter, and a whopping 90% of the respondents on Twitter wanted me to talk about my own weird experiences, rather than explore a traditional ghost […]
