Writings

Maybe you already know that vampires cannot enter a house uninvited. You may have heard of Krampus, or the creatures said to haunt the British Isles. But how much of what you remember comes from the original folklore, and how much from the stories that followed? We've introduced something new at Lore Lorn: Tales & Trials, a growing collection of questions about the myths, legends, creatures, customs and superstitions of the world. Each quiz takes you into a different traditio

A poem on the artwork: Nøkken som hvit hest (1907) by Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

The Witch (c. 1500) by Albrecht Dürer. She didn’t want your name. She wanted the heat in your chest, the one that burns when you lie to your wife about where you were and why your hands are shaking. Meet her at the crossroads where the road to the church meets the road to the cemetery. Don’t bring flowers. Bring the debt you’re hiding in your pocket. She’s older than the dirt, you know this. Her skin is the color of wet ash, her eyes are the green of pond water where things

'Before the Pumpkin, There Was the Turnip' explores the origins and evolution of the jack-o'-lantern, from Irish turnip carvings and the legend of Stingy Jack to the modern Halloween pumpkin.

The dead girl sits on the stairs with mud between her toes. There are no stairs. She asks why the kitchen is gone. I tell her they drowned the village. She looks past me to the old woman at the fence, white hair pinned at the nape, one hand shaking above her cane. Who is that? Your sister. She frowns. Ruth is six. At the fence, my grandmother is crying so hard she has forgotten to wave.

I was thinking about ghosts recently, after watching Presence by Steven Soderbergh and I ran into an administrative issue: Why are they wearing clothes? Not why are they wearing white. Not even why do they sometimes drag chains around, which I mean just seems inconvenient when your main activity involves walking through walls. I mean clothes at all. If I die tonight and my soul leaves my body, I can just about follow the proposed mechanics. Body here. Soul elsewhere. Fine. Bu

On a February afternoon in 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem was shovelling snow into an open manhole on 123rd Street when something in the dark started thrashing. They looked down. An alligator looked back up. It took a rope, a noose, and a fair amount of yelling before Salvatore Condulucci and his friends dragged a seven-and-a-half-foot reptile out onto the street, where it promptly died, most likely from the cold, or the fall, or both. The New York Times ran the st

Modern witchcraft has become very easy to photograph. Might that be part of the reason it has become so easy to misunderstand?

Gods received supper there. The unwanted dead were buried there. Magicians left things there. Musicians supposedly met the Devil there. There is an instruction in an English book of magic from around 1600 that is so funnily matter-of-fact: “Burye this plate in a crosse waye wher 2. wayes meete.” No explanation of why a crossroads. For people reading and writing such instructions, the junction of two roads was already the sort of place where you might reasonably leave a magica

Charon’s fare is the famous answer. It is not quite the whole one. The Greek underworld was not disorganised: On the contrary, it had some bureaucracy to it. You die. Hermes delivers you to the edge of the world below. There is a river to cross, a boat waiting, and a ferryman who, despite the fairly exceptional circumstances, still expects to be paid. His name is Charon. Most people know the rest. Put a coin in the dead person’s mouth so that Charon will carry them across the

We like to think modern life has made us terribly sensible. We have smart meters, online banking, video doorbells, and tiny computers in our pockets that somehow still can’t stop us from losing our keys. And yet, plenty of us still refuse to see the bride before the ceremony, hang greenery over the door, tap wood when we tempt fate, or feel oddly comforted when someone sprinkles water, salt, smoke, or a prayer around a new home. Modern folklore isn’t dead. It’s in the habits