The Mari Lwyd: Welsh Winter Folk Custom
Explore the Mari Lwyd, Wales’s eerie winter folk custom of procession, poetry, and luck, and discover its meaning in seasonal celebration.
J.C. Aldred
The Green Man in British Folk Tradition
Explore the Green Man in British folk tradition, from church carvings to spring symbolism, and discover why this leafy figure endures.
The Bell Witch of Lancashire: Folk Horror Legend
Discover the Bell Witch of Lancashire, a haunting piece of ghost lore blending curse stories, rural superstition, and local folklore traditions.
The Fairy Roads of Scotland
Discover the fairy roads of Scotland, a haunting piece of Scottish fairy lore tying hidden paths, landscape features, and old local beliefs.
The Green Children of Woolpit
Discover the Green Children of Woolpit, a famous English folklore mystery from Suffolk blending medieval legend, wonder, and village memory.
M.R. James and the Geography of English Ghost Stories
Montague Rhodes James knew Suffolk the way you know a place you have returned to all your life. He was born in Goodnestone in Kent but spent much of his childhood in Great Livermere in Suffolk, where his father was rector, and he returned to the county repeatedly throughout his
The Selkie Myth: Scotland, Orkney and the Seal People
On the island of Westray in Orkney, there is a tradition that certain families are descended from seals. The story runs in various forms across the Northern Isles — Orkney, Shetland, and the outer edges of the Scottish coast — and it is always told with a particular quality of seriousness that
Dartmoor: Myth and Legend on England's Wildest Moor
Dartmoor does not look like the rest of England. It sits in the middle of Devon like a different country — 368 square miles of upland blanket bog, granite outcrops, and ancient weather, rising to over 2,000 feet at its highest points and generating its own climate with apparent indifference
The Wicker Man and the Archaeology of Folk Horror
In the final scene of Robin Hardy's 1973 film, a police sergeant from the Scottish mainland stands inside a giant wicker construction on a clifftop on a fictional Hebridean island, watching it burn around him. The island's inhabitants sing and dance in a circle outside. He
Herne the Hunter: Forest God or Tudor Invention?
He appears in Windsor Great Park, according to local tradition, at times of national crisis. He rides a black horse. He carries a great hunting horn. Antlers grow from his head, or he wears a stag's skull as a helmet, or he leads a pack of spectral hounds