Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?
I was thinking about ghosts recently, after watching Presence by Steven Soderbergh and I ran into an administrative issue: Why are they
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The archive
Fiction, poetry, essays, reviews and art in one reading room.
The Tape Recorder and the Bog: Preserving Living Voice in the Algorithmic Age
There is a reel of quarter-inch tape in the National Folklore Collection numbered T0119. It was recorded in November 1960 in
The Version Nkem Told
Madam Koi Koi had died six different ways in our dormitory. Uju’s version was a motor accident. Ruth said students pushed
The Weaver Who Only Sold Silence
In a village near the river, there lived a weaver named Kwaku who could make cloth so fine that birds mistook it
The Wings of Icarus
Daedalus had always been a builder of impossible things, but the labyrinth he built for King Minos became his own prison. Trapped
The Sun Who Hid
When that the world was young and gods still walked among the rice and silkworms, freely talked, there reigned a goddess bright
How to Actually Read Runes
Most guides selling you a rune set will tell you it's an unbroken tradition going back thousands of years to
The Debt of Silver Pass
Out past the Cascabel Mountains, where the stagecoach road narrowed to a single wagon’s width, there was a stretch of trail
Book Review: "The Golden Bough" by James Frazer
If you spend any real time reading about folklore, comparative religion, or the history of anthropology, you eventually run into “The Golden
Cù Dubh
The stags were down by noon, which put the four of them in good spirits before they'd even started the
Why We Can’t See in the Dark
Once our eyes were wide as owl-eyes, sharp as any prowling fowl-eyes, seeing clean through pitch and shadow, no torch
Where Vampires Actually Came From
Long before anyone said the word “vampire,” people were already burying their dead wrongly on purpose. The fear seems to go back