π Legends
οΌ File legendThe Hope Diamond, a magnificent deep-blue gem now resting in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., is said to carry one of the most famous curses in...
Long before the lamp-bound genie of storybooks, the djinn haunted the deserts and imagination of Arabia. In pre-Islamic belief and later in Islamic...
Among the most beloved tales associated with the One Thousand and One Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves unfolds in the storied landscape of th...
The Queen of Sheba is one of the great enigmatic figures of the ancient world, a ruler of dazzling wealth and wisdom whose legend spans the Bible, ...
Mami Wata is the powerful water spirit venerated across West and Central Africa and carried by the diaspora to the Caribbean and the Americas. Usua...
In the folklore of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples of southern Africa, the Tokoloshe is a small, hairy, mischievous water sprite that can turn its malic...
Anansi the spider is the beloved trickster of the Akan people of Ghana, a small creature whose cunning outwits the strong and whose stories sailed ...
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...
Along the Sea Islands of Georgia, among the Gullah Geechee descendants of enslaved Africans, endures one of the most haunting and hopeful legends o...
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 slumber-party dares across North America for generations. The rules are simple an...
Paul Bunyan is the towering lumberjack of North American tall tales, a giant so vast that, folks swear, it took five storks to deliver him as a bab...
Along Archer Avenue on the southwest side of Chicago drifts one of America's most beloved phantom hitchhikers: Resurrection Mary. The story usually...
In the early 1800s, the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, claimed to be tormented by an unseen entity that came to be known as the Bell Witch. It be...
In Brazil, and with variants throughout Spanish America, people tell of the Headless Mule, the punishment that falls upon a woman who carries on a ...
In the sugar mills of northern Argentina, above all in TucumΓ‘n, 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 BoitatΓ‘ is one of Brazil's oldest legends, told by Indigenous peoples long before the Portuguese arrived. Its TupΓ name means 'fire serpent', a...
In Paraguay and the GuaranΓ regions of Argentina and Brazil people respect and fear the Pombero, a short, ugly, very hairy being with large backwar...
The Saci-PererΓͺ is one of the best-loved figures in Brazilian folklore, a mischievous one-legged imp with dark skin who smokes a pipe and wears a m...
In the Brazilian Amazon, along the banks of the great rivers, people tell of Iara, the 'mother of the water', a mermaid with very long green or bla...
In the jungles and mountain ranges of Colombia, especially in Tolima and the coffee country, people fear the Patasola, a female spirit with a singl...
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...
In the mountains and countryside of the Dominican Republic people speak of the Ciguapa, a small, elusive female creature with brown or coppery skin...
In the old neighborhoods of Guatemala, especially La RecolecciΓ³n in the capital and colonial Antigua, people tell of El SombrerΓ³n, a little man dre...
Across the Venezuelan plains people fear La Sayona, the specter of a stunningly beautiful woman who appears to men who carouse at night or cheat on...
Folklore from the Venezuelan plains tells that El SilbΓ³n, '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 Krakow, in a limestone cave above the Vistula river, there once lived a terrible dragon, the Smok Wawelski. By day and night ...
The glowing jack-o'-lantern of Halloween owes its name to an old Irish tale of a crafty drunkard called Stingy Jack. Meeting the Devil in a tavern ...
Across the rural roads of Ireland rides the Dullahan, one of the most dreaded figures of Celtic folklore, a headless horseman who is death itself m...
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 noble house of Lusignan in western France once claimed descent from a water-fairy, and their tale is among the most famous of European folklore...
In the greenwood of Sherwood Forest, medieval ballads tell, an outlaw named Robin Hood led a band of merry men against the injustice of the powerfu...
Johann Georg Faust was a real wandering scholar, astrologer and alchemist of early sixteenth-century Germany, remembered as a braggart who claimed ...
In the early fourteenth century, so the Swiss tell it, the tyrant Gessler, a bailiff of the Habsburg emperor, raised his hat on a pole in the marke...
When the High King of Britain died leaving no known heir, the land fell into quarrel, and it was said that whoever could draw a certain sword from ...
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...
Where the River Rhine narrows and curls beneath a great slate rock near St. Goarshausen, the water runs deep, fast and treacherous, and boatmen hav...
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 β Spanish for "the golden one" β 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...
Along the coast of the Sea of Japan, fishing villages have long told of Urashima Taro, a kind young fisherman rewarded and undone by a single act o...
One of Japan's most unsettling modern urban legends, Hachishakusama emerged from internet message boards in the 2000s but is told as though passed ...
Often called Vietnam's Cinderella, the tale of Tam and Cam is far older and darker than its Western cousin, told for generations in the villages of...
In the Malay world of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, few spirits are feared like the Pontianak, the vengeful ghost of a woman who died in pregn...
Across Aboriginal Australia, from Arnhem Land to the deserts, the Rainbow Serpent is one of the oldest and most sacred beings of the Dreamtime, the...
The noise, red decorations and fireworks of Chinese New Year all trace, in legend, to a fearsome monster called Nian. Storytellers describe him as ...
Every Mid-Autumn Festival, families across China raise mooncakes to the sky in memory of Chang'e, the lady who dwells on the Moon. In the age of le...
No ghost is more beloved in Thailand than Mae Nak, whose tragic love is honoured at a shrine beside the Phra Khanong canal in Bangkok. As the story...
Often called Japan's oldest surviving narrative, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter recounts how an old woodsman near Mount Fuji finds a glowing stalk o...
Chinese lovers gaze at the summer sky to find the sorrowful lovers of the Qixi legend, said to have first been told in the ancient heartland along ...
In the countryside around Okayama, storytellers have long delighted children with the tale of Momotaro, the boy born from a peach. An old childless...
Beside the misty waters of West Lake in Hangzhou unfolds one of China's four great folk romances. A white snake spirit named Bai Suzhen cultivates ...
In the snow country of northern Japan, travellers whisper of Yuki-onna, a woman as pale as fresh drifts who appears when blizzards trap the unwary....