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August welcomes the peak of summer, rich in harvest traditions, celestial wonders, and mysterious folklore. Embrace gratitude and warmth as we celebrate the season’s abundance and look forward to the changing days.
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Bread, butter, salt. fire and even empty egg shells were once surrounded by rules designed to protect the household. Step into the kitchen, where everyday cooking still carries traces of some very Old Magic…
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Shoes in walls, witch bottles beneath floors, horse skulls under houses and dried cats hidden in ceilings. Our ancestors built protection into their homes – and when we find it centuries later, sometimes we still put it back.
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Getting dressed was once riddled with magic. From inside-out clothes and lucky socks to dangerous buttons, troublesome stiles and the unforgivable crime of putting shoes on the table, some of the old rules are still hiding in our wardrobes.
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September arrives quietly, with heavy hedgerows, gathering swallows, dew-strung spider webs and the first chill beneath the morning sun. From the Harvest Moon and autumn equinox to Michaelmas geese, blackberry folklore and the old signs said to foretell the coming winter, we wander through the history, wildlife, skies and strange seasonal traditions of September.
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A penny in a new purse, silver for a baby, a coin for a gifted knife or hammered into a wishing tree. We still use money for luck in ways that have very little to do with buying anything.
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Short Story Sunday presents Old Magic by Simon Axford – a story set in the universe of his new novel – ‘I Know How This Goes’
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How much old magic survives in the things we throw away? From lost teeth beneath pillows to hair and nail clippings, our discarded pieces once carried dangerous power…
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At Wharram Percy, ten people were cut, broken and burned after death. Forensic anthropology reveals what happened to their bodies – but can it tell us what their community feared?
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A wicked man dies unshriven, rises from his grave and brings pestilence with him. When villagers exhume his swollen, blood-filled corpse, medieval England gets disturbingly close to a vampire.
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A human skull has guarded Bettiscombe Manor for generations, but science revealed the famous legend had the wrong victim. So who was the mysterious woman behind Britain’s screaming skull? 💀
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Long before Dracula gave Britain its elegant, aristocratic vampire, our dead were considerably less sophisticated. They got out of the grave, lumbered around frightening the neighbours, spread disease and occasionally required somebody to hit them with a spade..
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Britain’s most famous Vampire has a name, a date and a terrifying history. But dig into the original sources and the Croglin Vampire becomes stranger than the legend suggests…
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Ellie returns home to find a stranger in her kitchen and a perfectly good cup chipped. Unfortunately for him, Ellie has survived considerably worse things than an unexpected houseguest…
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There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.
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How Clement Vallandigham became history’s unluckiest defence lawyer
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The UK has a history of big cat sightings, including the “Beast of Bodmin” in the late 1700s, the “Essex Lion” in 1905, and the “Fen Tiger” in the 1980s. These reports have sparked speculation about the presence of exotic felines in the British countryside, with sightings continuing into the 2020s.
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Dr Carrie Dale has spent years uncovering the truth behind unexplained deaths. But when a week of increasingly bizarre fatalities lands on her mortuary table, coincidence begins to feel like conspiracy. As the bodies pile up, Carrie finds herself chasing an impossible pattern – and wondering whether Death itself has developed a very dark sense…
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The matter first became public in the summer of 1919 when Polly Wright went to a meeting at the Theosophical Society in Bradford. She was interested in the occult, having had some experiences of astral projection and memories of past lives herself.
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Our ancestors didn’t imagine another world above the clouds. They imagined it was just beyond the hill..
