The bestiaries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were books describing animals (some recognizable and others fantastic) in terms borrowed from classical texts and framed by Christian teachings. In this episode, we examine a few of the stranger beasts and strange customs and beliefs associated with them. Here’s a brief look at the animals we’ll …
Walling up a living victim, or immurement, has been used both as a punishment and for darker, magical purposes. In this episode, we detangle the history from the folklore of this grisly act. We begin with an instance of immurement from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado” (including a clip from a dramatization in …
Bone and Sickle continues its holiday tradition of Christmas ghost stories, or a goblin story, in this case. Our tale about an encounter between a gravedigger, or sexton, and a host of goblins is extracted from Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, The Pickwick Papers. Strangely, it is not Dickens’ only Christmas goblin story. As a special …
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 …