Category: Weird History

6 January 2024

The Kraken: How the Myth of a Legendary Sea Monster Became Reality

Originally based in Scandinavian folklore, the Kraken is a large mythological creature said to haunt open water. The first known account of the Kraken was written by King Sverre of Norway in 1180 during a time when the oceans were relatively uncharted. The Kraken was said to be a hunter of ships, the bigger the better, making it a predator...

Categories Paranormal Encounters/Weird History

3 January 2024

Sex and Frenzy in the Central Panel of Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’

I spy with my little eye: two people copulating inside an oyster, a frog with no arms (or a fish with legs?), a mob of people climbing eagerly into a broken egg, and a boar with blueberries for tentacles. Behold – The Garden of Earthly Delights. To clear a few things up about this incredibly bizarre piece of art: yes,...

Categories Weird History

23 April 2023

The Bizarre Death of Garry Hoy, the Lawyer that Accidentally Threw Himself Out a Window

Ever do something incredibly reckless and think to yourself “it would be pretty embarrassing if this was how I died”? This quick but incredibly weird story of the death of a Canadian lawyer is one of those tragic but completely avoidable incidents that sound completely made up. But it isn’t, this really happened. And it unfortunately happened in front of...

Categories Weird History

20 March 2023

Émilie Sagée and the Curse of Unintentional Bilocation

Born in Dijon, France on 3 January 1813, Mademoiselle Émilie Sagée was a thirty-two-year-old French teacher who worked at a Latvian boarding school between 1845 and 1846. She was described as blonde and blue-eyed with a mild temper and a quiet but anxious disposition. The boarding school Pensionnat of Neuwelcke had a total of forty-two students, all young girls from...

Categories Paranormal Encounters/Weird History

24 February 2023

Biblically Accurate Angels: Christianity’s Undisputed Horror Icons

Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. Christianity’s highest ranking angels and the closest beings in proximity to God. But instead of beautiful heavenly creatures, The Bible describes them as their own brand of terrifying Lovecraftian abominations.

Categories Weird History

10 February 2023

‘Something Wicked this Way Comes’: Witchcraft in Scotland and the Curse of Macbeth

The theatre world is filled with superstitions: always turn the ghost light on before leaving an empty theatre, never whistle backstage, tell an actor to ‘break a leg’ instead of ‘good luck’, keep peacock feathers off the stage, and never — under any circumstance — utter the name ‘Macbeth’ inside a theatre.

Categories Paranormal Encounters/Weird History

1 February 2023

Death in Apartment 85: The Kramatorsk Radiological Accident

After the recent fiasco in Western Australia involving a missing -and now found- eight millimetre radioactive capsule containing Caesium-137, I couldn’t help but wonder if something like this has happened before. Because history does enjoy repeating itself and we often don’t learn from our mistakes. And lo’ and behold, it has happened before… more times than I’m personally comfortable with...

Categories Weird History

16 January 2023

The Murky Truth About the Meowing French Nuns

The idea of an outbreak of nuns trading their hymns for the sounds of wailing felines – especially in a medieval French convent – is not only creepy but it also feels like the premise of a film in the Conjuring universe. But where did this story come from? Do we have any proof that it actually happened?

Categories Weird History

9 January 2023

Akhenaten’s Purgatory: Dissecting the Legend of the Mad Pharaoh’s Cursed Soul

According to legend, the angered priests of Egypt put a curse on Akhenaten upon his death to wander the great expanse of The White Desert of Farafra for all of eternity as punishment for abolishing their jobs, their gods, and the destruction of their temples.

Categories Paranormal Encounters/Weird History

7 January 2023

The Bizarre Tale of Ali Razeghi, Fars News Agency, and the Non-Existent Iranian ‘Time Machine’

A bizarre article from the Iranian news agency Fars reported in April 2013 that a local inventor had created a form of time machine. The article was mysteriously removed almost as quickly as it was posted — but not quickly enough to evade the radar of international press.

Categories Weird History