Frau Perchta, sometimes known as “the Belly-Slitter” for the trademark punishment she’s said to inflict on disobedient or lazy children, is figure of Alpine folklore of Austria and Germany in many ways similar to the Krampus. “Perchta” is only one spelling or name for this figure, who may also go by Pehrta, Berchte, Berta, and …
Our seasonal look at butcher lore begins with the slaughter of an immense ram as related in the centuries-old English song, “The Derby Ram” (AKA “The Darby Ram”). In the lyric, a butcher and his boy assistant are “washed away in the blood,” giving us our episode’s title. The song is roughly enacted in an old …
This Halloween we have five stories of witches from all the way back to around 1125AD to the 1960s. Some of them are actual historic personage, some seem more purely folkloric. It’s a somewhat longer episode for which I”ll provide somewhat shorter show notes here. So, I won’t going into the details of each story, but just …
Here’s a short bonus show celebrating Halloween. It’s a bit different format. Whereas most of our shows look at folklore and incidents happening centuries ago in Europe or further afield, in this one we’re staying in the United States looking at how Halloween was celebrated, for better or worse, from the turn of the last …
Goblin lore from old folk tales, literature, ancient and modern legends is our topic this time around. We begin with the poem from which we take our episode title, James Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie” in which the poet remembers his childhood nanny and her “witch tales” and threats about goblins coming. Next, we take a …
Hear how notions of Purgatory influenced medieval ghost stories, the tradition of All Souls’ Day, and a Neapolitan “cult of skulls.” We set the scene with a clip from “The Lyke Wake Dirge,” a 14th–century British song sung or chanted as a sort of charm over the body of the deceased in the night before …
This episode explores the connection between vampires and disease, beginning in 19th-century New England with a strange graveyard ritual involving the exhumation of the bodies of Mercy Brown and family members in 1892. The gruesomely ritualistic destruction of Mercy’s body parts was spurred by a belief that those who succumbed to tuberculosis might live on …
This episode explores the Russian witch, the Baba Yaga, tales in which she appears, possible origins, and regional variations on the character. We begin by retelling one of the skazi (folk tales) in which she’s particularly well-definined, “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” a version recorded in the mid-1800s by the folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, Russia’s answer to the …
The werewolf (Fr: loup-garou) epidemic of 16th-century France forms the core of our show, but we also include some medieval French werewolf tales as well as the legend of a figure connected to both werewolves and Bluebeard. In our last episode on Bluebeard, I promised to recount a legend that may have inspired Charles Perrault’s …
Bluebeard and his bloody chamber full of murderous secrets is widely known as one of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but it’s part of a larger family of folk tales and ballads we examine in this episode. Our show begins with a brief summary of this tale in which a young woman is courted by the …