๐ Legends
๏ผ File legendMelon heads are said to be small, pale, big-headed humanoids living in the woods of three American states: around Wisner Road in Kirtland and Chard...
Finnish folk belief put a nรคkki in nearly every deep water: a being that seized bathers, children and swimming horses and dragged them under. It is...
Under Kronborg Castle at Helsingรธr, in the galleries the garrison once used, a bearded man in armour sits with his beard grown into the table in fr...
รlfhรณll, Elf Hill, is a glacially smoothed rock knoll about three metres high on the south side of รlfhรณlsvegur in Kรณpavogur, just outside Reykjavรญ...
Two different men have been called Peer Gynt, and this page used to run them together. The first is a hunter from Kvam in Gudbrandsdalen, told to P...
The Nรคcken is famous as a naked fiddler in a Swedish waterfall, and that is the newest thing about him. The oldest complete Swedish sentence the Sw...
Warsaw's coat of arms shows a mermaid, Syrenka, holding a sword and shield, and the legend behind it has been told since at least the 14th century....
Pan Twardowski is Poland's Faust: a Krakรณw magician who signed a pact with the devil and slipped in one clause โ the devil could only claim him in ...
Every guidebook tells the same story: that the Prague Orloj was built by master Hanuลก, that the councillors had him blinded so no other city could ...
Perchta of Roลพmberk was real: born at ฤeskรฝ Krumlov in 1429 or 1430, married off in November 1449 to Jan V of Lichtenลกtejn, dead in Vienna on 2 May...
The Novgorod First Chronicle, under the year 1167, records that Sotko Sytinich laid a stone church to Saints Boris and Gleb inside the city kremlin...
Everything known about Kitezh comes from one book, and the book is some five hundred and fifty years younger than the invasion it describes. The Bo...
Afanasyev printed "Vasilisa the Beautiful" in the fourth fascicle of his Russian Folk Tales in 1858, as tale no. 44 โ no. 104 in modern editions. A...
Portuguese folklore is full of mouras encantadas, enchanted women who guard treasure beside springs and comb golden hair with golden combs. Sintra'...
The Boca do Inferno is a collapsed sea cave on the Atlantic cliffs two kilometres west of Cascais, near Lisbon: a chasm some thirty metres across w...
In the Archaeological Museum of Barcelos, in the Minho, stands a rough granite cross carved with a hanged man, Saint James holding up his feet, and...
Toledo's Ermita del Cristo de la Vega holds a crucifix whose right arm hangs free of the cross, and Spain has told at least three stories to explai...
In the mountains of La Vera, in the province of Cรกceres, an old romance and local legend tell of La Serrana de la Vera, a beautiful woman who lived...
A pass at 865 metres south of Granada, on the old road to the Alpujarras, is called El Suspiro del Moro, the Moor's Sigh: the spot where Boabdil, l...
The Casa de las Siete Chimeneas stands on Plaza del Rey in central Madrid, one of the few pieces of sixteenth-century domestic architecture left in...
Mari of Anboto is the great lady of Basque mythology, said to live in a cave high on the east wall of Anboto, a 1,331-metre limestone ridge in the ...
On the wild Galician coast near Cedeira, in A Coruรฑa, the tiny sanctuary of San Andrรฉs de Teixido has drawn pilgrims for centuries, wrapped in one ...
In Alfonso X's Estoria de Espaรฑa, written around 1270-1289, there is a palace in Toledo that had stood locked since the time of many kings. Roderic...
Beneath the vanished church of San Cebriรกn in Salamanca lies a crypt that popular legend transformed, from the Middle Ages onward, into a secret sc...
This grim legend from 12th-century Aragรณn is tied to King Ramiro II, called 'the Monk' because he left a monastery to take the crown after his brot...
Teruel, in Aragรณn, preserves the tomb of Diego de Marcilla and Isabel de Segura, whose story of thwarted love is traditionally dated to the early 1...
Soria's Monte de las รnimas is a real hill, and on the map it carries a duller name: Monte de Peรฑaranda. Its famous one is ecclesiastical bookkeepi...
Malin Kundang is the Minangkabau tale of a fisherman's son who sails away poor, comes back rich, refuses to recognise his mother in front of his cr...
The Queen of the Southern Sea is presented almost everywhere as timeless oral tradition, and almost everything told about her can in fact be dated....
Mount Makiling, the 1,130-metre volcanic mountain that Los Banos, Bay and Calamba in Laguna share with Santo Tomas in Batangas, is named after a Ta...
Balete Drive is 1.3 kilometres of ordinary residential street in New Manila, Quezon City, and the most famous ghost story in the Philippines is att...
Naale Baa is not the name of a ghost. It is an order โ "come tomorrow" in Kannada โ chalked or painted on the doors of houses across Karnataka so t...
Korea's nine-tailed fox is real enough as a word: it turns up in the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty as an insult thrown at corrupt officia...
The oldest surviving account of the ghost of Yeongnamnu was written in 1810 by the scholar Hong Jik-pil, who climbed the pavilion at Miryang, heard...
The story of Meng Jiangnรผ is traditionally set during the building of the Great Wall under the Qin, in the third century BCE. Meng Jiangnรผ had only...
Yotsuya Kaidan is one of Japan's classic ghost stories, first staged as kabuki theater in 1825 and set, according to the tale, in the Yotsuya distr...
One of modern Japan's most widespread school ghost stories concerns Hanako-san, said to haunt the third stall of the girls' bathroom on the third f...
Two levels below the keep of Himeji Castle there is an old well shown to visitors as Okiku's Well, where a servant accused of losing one of ten hei...
At 1140 Royal Street in New Orleans' French Quarter stands the mansion once owned by Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a socialite whose name became bound ...
Quito's best-known legend says that an indigenous man named Cantuรฑa, unable to finish the atrium of San Francisco on time, sold his soul to the dev...
At Cerro Rico in Potosรญ, the silver mountain that sustained the Spanish colonial empire for centuries, Bolivian miners still venerate El Tรญo, a hor...
In Chiloรฉ the Pincoya is the owner of the shellfish beds, not a mermaid โ and the oldest printed account of her, two pages by Francisco J. Cavada i...
The oldest datable appearance of the Caleuche is not a sailor's yarn. On 8 July 1881, while the witches of Chiloรฉ were being prosecuted in Ancud fo...
In the founding text nobody buries anything. Ricardo Palma wrote the tradiciรณn in 1876 and printed it in Lima in 1877, and in it the treasure is no...
In downtown Lima, on the corner of Garcilaso de la Vega Avenue and Plaza Dos de Mayo, stands a blue-facaded building popularly known as Casa Matusi...
The Alley of the Kiss is a flight of steps about 68 centimetres wide climbing from the Plaza de los รngeles in the historic centre of Guanajuato. T...
Fishermen and shore-dwellers on both sides of the Northumberland Strait, the channel between Prince Edward Island and the Nova Scotia and New Bruns...
The White Lady of Montmorency Falls is Quebec's best-known ghost: a bride who is said to have thrown herself from the 83-metre cataract near Quรฉbec...
Iram of the Pillars and the City of Brass are two different stories, and this page used to run them together. The Quran names Iram once, in Surah 8...
Iranian tradition says the tyrant Zahhak is still alive, chained inside Mount Damavand, and that at the end of time he will break loose and be kill...
On a rock two hundred metres off the Uskudar shore, Istanbul's Maiden's Tower carries a story everyone in the city can tell: a ruler was warned tha...
Shahmaran, the half-woman half-serpent queen of an underground kingdom of snakes, is one of the most reproduced images in southern Turkey, and one ...
Two hours above the village of Imlil, on the mule track that climbs the Aรฏt Mizane valley towards Mount Toubkal, a boulder painted white marks the ...
Islamic tradition gives Barhut an address rather than an idea: a well, in a valley, in Hadramawt, whose water a hadith transmitted by al-Tabarani c...
Umm al-Duwais is the best-known jinniyya of Emirati folklore: a young woman, beautiful and heavily perfumed, with a cat's eyes, one leg of a donkey...
The Baoulรฉ of central Cรดte d'Ivoire trace their name to a queen who paid for a river crossing with her only son. The story is told as pure oral tra...
Moroccan mothers still use her name to keep children away from water after dark, and pilgrims still leave candles at her cave on Jebel Zerhoun. Aic...
Zerzura is a lost oasis nobody has ever found, and its paper trail is shorter and stranger than the legend suggests. The name first appears around ...
The Hope Diamond is a 45.5-carat blue diamond in a case on the second floor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and the most f...
The Qur'an gives them a chapter of twenty-eight verses, and the oldest thing anyone can read about them in Arabia may be a line scratched on basalt...
Everybody files Ali Baba under the medieval Arab world. The oldest text of the tale is four pages of French, written in Paris on Monday 27 May 1709...
Every version of the Queen of Sheba can be dated, and the dates do not agree with each other. The oldest surviving account, 1 Kings 10:1-13, runs t...
Mami Wata is a living devotion, not a story: a water divinity honoured from Senegal to Tanzania and across the Atlantic, served by priestesses and ...
In the folklore of the Xhosa, Mpondo and Zulu peoples of southern Africa, the tokoloshe - also tikoloshe, thikoloshe or uHili - is a small, hairy, ...
Anansi the spider belongs to the Akan of Ghana, but Anansesem โ "Ananse stories" โ is a genre label rather than a spider's biography: the Akan give...
When archaeologist Howard Carter breached the sealed tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in 1922, he uncovered treasures be...
In May 1803 a group of Igbo captives, sold near Savannah and shipped towards St. Simons Island, rose against the crew of the small vessel carrying ...
The legend of the crossroads is the darkest and most seductive tale in American blues, and it clings above all to the guitarist Robert Johnson. As ...
Bloody Mary is the ritual that has terrified sleepover guests and schoolyard dares across North America for generations. The rules are always whisp...
Paul Bunyan is the giant lumberjack of North American tall tales, and the striking thing about him is that his story can be dated layer by layer. I...
Resurrection Mary is the most famous ghost in Chicago: a young woman in a white dancing dress who is picked up along Archer Avenue, southwest of th...
The Bell Witch is the best-known haunting in the United States and one of the few with a named family, a dated span and a place on the map: the far...
The Headless Mule is told across Brazil as the punishment of a woman who loved a priest, and it is always introduced as very old. Its documented li...
In the sugar mills of northern Argentina, above all in Tucumรกn, Salta and Jujuy, the laborers tell in terror of the Familiar, a huge snake or a bla...
In Vallecito, San Juan Province, Argentina, people venerate the Difunta Correa, one of the country's most massive folk devotions even though the Ch...
The Boitatรก is the fire that runs across the fields at night, and it is one of the oldest things anybody wrote down about Brazil. At the end of May...
The Pombero is the best known being in Paraguayan folklore โ first in belief and first in reported sightings in a 2020 survey of 4,015 people โ and...
The Saci is Brazil's most familiar folk figure, and also one of the best documented: you can watch him change shape in print, decade by decade. In ...
Iara is Brazil's mermaid: a beautiful woman of the rivers who lures men into the water, and one of the best-documented cases of a legend that every...
In the mountains and forests of Tolima and the Colombian coffee country, people speak of the Patasola, a being with a single leg. Almost everything...
In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and across Central America people tell of the Cadejo, a large shaggy dog the size of a calf with eyes that glow...
Everyone in the Dominican Republic can describe the ciguapa: a small woman of the mountains, naked under hair that falls to her calves, who comes o...
El Sombrerรณn is one of Guatemala's best known legends, although the figure is not exclusive to the country: anthropologists have recorded a very di...
On the Venezuelan plains they say the Sayona comes out at night to the man who is out carousing: a tall, beautiful, long-haired woman who invites h...
Folklore from the Venezuelan plains tells that El Silbรณn, 'the Whistler', is the tormented soul of a young man who murdered his own father; in some...
One harvest day in the twelfth century, villagers of Woolpit in Suffolk found two children, a boy and a girl, standing bewildered at the edge of th...
Beneath Wawel hill in Krakรณw opens a limestone cave above the Vistula where tradition places the Smok Wawelski, the dragon that laid the region was...
Stingy Jack is the story usually told to explain the Halloween jack-o'-lantern: a man who outwits the Devil, is refused by both Heaven and Hell, an...
The Dullahan is Ireland's headless horseman, and he is far easier to date than to trace. Everything usually said about him โ the head the colour of...
In the misty hills and hollow lanes of Galicia, in Spain's green northwest, the oldest and most feared apparition is the Santa Compana, a nocturnal...
The house of Lusignan claimed descent from a water-fairy, and the story is usually told as if nobody had written it. Somebody did. On 20 November 1...
The rhymes were medieval; almost nothing else about them is. Robin Hood is first mentioned around 1377, in Piers Plowman, by a slothful priest who ...
The Faust legend has a documented core. A wandering astrologer and alchemist called Georg Faustus is recorded across Germany between 1507 and about...
The story is dated 1307. The oldest text that tells it was written around 1470, in the chancery of a small alpine canton: the Weisses Buch von Sarn...
Two authors are usually credited with fixing this story: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory. Only one of them ever wrote it. Geoffrey's Histori...
In the sixteenth century, when the Jews of Prague lived under the constant threat of violence, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the revered Maharal, i...
The Loreley is a slate cliff 132 metres high on the Rhine at Sankt Goarshausen, where the river narrows, deepens and has been drowning boatmen for ...
In the summer of 1284, so the tale goes, the German town of Hamelin was overrun by rats. A stranger in a coat of many colours arrived and offered, ...
El Dorado โ Spanish for "the golden one" โ began not as a city but as a man: a Muisca ritual in which a newly chosen chief was covered in gold dust...
The Headless Horseman is the ghost at the heart of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the tale set in the real hamlet of Sleepy Hollow in New York's Hu...
La Llorona, "the Weeping Woman," is one of the most widespread legends of Latin America, told for centuries across Mexico and beyond. In the best-k...
The Nihon Shoki, completed in 720, gives the story four sentences: in the seventh month of Emperor Yลซryaku's twenty-second year, a man of Tsutsukaw...
Hasshaku-sama is the rare legend that can be timed to the second. On Tuesday 26 August 2008, between 09:45:56 and 09:54:54 Japan time, a poster ide...
Everyone calls it the Vietnamese Cinderella. The oldest printed version anyone can actually read tells it the other way round. In tale XXII of A. L...
The pontianak is the best known ghost of the Malay world, and her paper trail is shorter and stranger than the phrase "ancient folklore" suggests. ...
Two words in this file's title are English inventions with a date. "Dream-times" first appears on page 185 of a paper by Francis James Gillen, the ...
Every account of Chinese New Year tells you why the doors are red and the firecrackers loud: a monster called Nian came down once a year to eat the...
The story everyone tells about Chang'e is younger than it looks. In the oldest version we can read โ Qin bamboo slips lifted from a tomb at Wangjia...
The oldest line about Mae Nak that anyone has been able to point to is not a love story. It sits inside a nineteenth-century Thai sung epic, where ...
A bamboo cutter with a name โ Sanuki no Miyatsukomaro โ splits a shining stalk and finds a girl three sun tall, about nine centimetres, so small sh...
For most of its recorded life this was not a love story at all. The oldest line that puts the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl together is a Qin wedding...
Every Japanese child knows Momotaro: the boy who came out of a peach, hired a dog, a monkey and a pheasant with millet dumplings and sailed to the ...
The tale everyone tells about West Lake is much younger than it sounds, and it used to be a horror story. In the earliest Hangzhou version, printed...
Everyone tells the same Yuki-onna story, and it has an author. Lafcadio Hearn published it in Kwaidan in 1904: two woodcutters trapped by a blizzar...