In dark and uncertain times such as these, it’s easy to wish you could see into the future. You might easily turn to fortune-telling practices to try and navigate the potentially choppy waters ahead. The idea of divination as a whole lies beyond the scope of this post. It’s not just fortune-telling, it’s more a […]
folklore
Who was Spring-heeled Jack, the Victorian scourge of London?
Spring-heeled Jack sits in the centre of a weird Venn diagram. It features urban legends, ‘penny dreadful’ serial fiction, theatre plays, and modern folklore. The last sightings of him were in the early years of the 20th century. Yet Jack still makes appearances in contemporary popular culture, including: True, in these later adaptations, he’s part […]
Inviting Sin-Eaters to a Funeral: Fact or Folklore?
There are few areas of human existence not touched by folklore and superstition. Unsurprisingly, burials and funerals come with a whole raft of beliefs and practices. Some of them persist to this day, while others, like sin-eaters, have largely died out. Despite the practice apparently lasting from the 17th to the early 20th century, there […]
Cemetery superstitions: How to avoid bad luck in a graveyard
Cemeteries are either fascinating monuments to social history, or eerie gardens populated by the dead. The decline in the popularity of burial and the relocation of post-death practices to undertakers rather than families has created an aura of mystery around death, particularly nowadays. Cemetery superstitions still hold sway, even now. But earlier eras had a different […]
Premature Burial: Lived Once, Buried Twice
Fear of premature burial reaches that primal part in all of us that Sigmund Freud surveyed in his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’. Edgar Allan Poe explored the horrors of premature burial in his 1844 story, ‘The Premature Burial‘. Stephen King even skirted the edges of the fear with his short story, ‘Autopsy Room Four’. In it, […]
Moths in Folklore: Bringers of Death and Letters
Moths aren’t exactly popular insects. Within folklore, they’re typically viewed as either messengers from the dead or symbols of death. Some of the symbolism crosses over with that of the butterfly. It’s easy to see why they get muddled up. Both butterflies and moths belong to the Lepidoptera family. T. R. New points out that […]
