Blurs

High in the mountains of Merionethshire, North Wales, lies a landscape where mist can descend without warning, valleys disappear beneath cloud and the boundary between folklore and the unexplained has always been unusually thin. For generations, Wales has had stories of mysterious creatures inhabiting its mountains and forests. But one particular legend stands apart. It concerns a figure described not simply as a wolf, and not quite as a human being either. A wolf-man. A creature said to move through the Welsh countryside on two legs, possessing an unsettling combination of human and animal characteristics. Was it merely an old Welsh legend? A misidentified animal? A human seen under strange circumstances? Or could the stories preserve memories of something that nobody has ever satisfactorily identified? The Wolf Man of Merionethshire remains one of the stranger cryptid stories associated with the Welsh mountains. A Land Built for Legends Merionethshire — the historic county correspond...

Deep inside a limestone gorge on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, the walls of several caves carry a strange record of fear. They are covered with hundreds of symbols. Some are simple crossed lines. Others resemble letters, initials, circles, boxes and intricate mazes. Many were scratched directly into the limestone around dark openings, cracks and hollows. For years, some of these markings were dismissed as little more than old graffiti. Then archaeologists and heritage specialists realised they were looking at something very different. These were apotropaic marks — symbols intended to turn away evil, misfortune or supernatural forces. The discovery at Creswell Crags revealed what is believed to be the largest concentration of protective marks ever found in British caves. And their location makes the discovery particularly intriguing. The same caves that contain some of Britain's oldest known prehistoric artwork were later revisited by people who apparently feare...

Deep in the folklore of West Cornwall lies a particularly sinister tale attached to a place that, today, is barely recognisable as anything extraordinary. At Higher Bodinar, near Newbridge between Penzance and St Just, an ancient underground structure known as a fogou was once feared as the dwelling place of a group of grotesque supernatural beings: the spriggans. These were not the playful piskies of Cornish folklore. The spriggans were something considerably darker — ugly, spiteful creatures believed to guard ancient treasures hidden beneath the earth. And at Higher Bodinar, tradition placed them directly beneath the feet of the living. The Giant’s Holt The underground structure at Higher Bodinar was traditionally known as the Giant’s Holt. It was one of Cornwall's fogous — mysterious subterranean chambers generally associated with Iron Age settlements. Fogous remain difficult to interpret with certainty. Suggestions for their purpose have included storage, refuge and ritual acti...

Few aspects of the paranormal are as enduring—or as theatrical—as the séance. A darkened room, a circle of people seated around a table, hands joined in silence, and a medium asking the dead to make themselves known. Perhaps there is a knock from inside the wall. A glass moves. The table trembles. A voice seems to emerge from the darkness. For believers, such moments can represent genuine contact with another world. For sceptics, they are examples of deception, suggestion and ingenious stagecraft. For historians, however, séances are fascinating for another reason: they reveal how people have tried to make sense of death, grief and the possibility that consciousness might survive the body. The modern séance emerged from the extraordinary explosion of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, particularly following a famous series of alleged spirit communications in New York State in 1848. From there, the practice spread across the Atlantic and became a cultural phenomenon in Britain, Eur...