In 1843, English inventor Sir Henry Cole created the first commercially produced Christmas card. It was tame and festive, showing a family gathered around for Christmas dinner above an inscription wishing the recipient a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. By the 1870s Christmas cards were being sent by nearly everyone thanks to the emergence of the affordable halfpenny stamp...
It’s no secret that the Isle of Wight is one of the most haunted islands in the world. Castles, manor homes, hospitals, pubs, roads, cliffs — everywhere you look the island is overflowing with creepy tales of ghostly apparitions and disembodied voices. It’s more difficult to find a part of the island that doesn’t have a ghost story than one...
READ MORE Whitecroft Hospital: The Haunted Victorian Asylum You Can Call Home
Overtoun Bridge, located in Scotland’s West Dunbartonshire, has a peculiar and frightening reputation: since the 1950s the bridge has allegedly been plagued by an ongoing trend of canine ‘suicides’. Reports of the number of dogs that have jumped or fallen over the edge of Overtoun Bridge could be as high as 300. In at least 50 cases, the dogs have...
READ MORE The Mysterious Dog Suicides on Overtoun Bridge, West Dunbartonshire
Scotland’s Gruinard Island, better known as ‘Anthrax Island’, is a frightening example of the catastrophic repercussions of biological warfare. From 1942 to 1943, the British tested the affects of anthrax on the small, unassuming island off the coast of Gruinard Bay… and paid the price for the next 48 years. What is Anthrax? Classified as an infectious disease, anthrax has...
READ MORE ‘Anthrax Island’: Britain’s Secret WWII Testing Ground for Biological Warfare
The first reported sighting of Owlman took place in the town of Mawnan, Cornwall on 17 April 1976. The Melling family, consisting of Don, his wife, and their two daughters June (12) and Vicky (9), were camping near Mawnan when they stopped for a picnic in the wooded area next to the medieval St. Mawnan and St. Stephen’s Church. While...
READ MORE Owlman: Did a Mysterious Creature Really Haunt the Cornish Town of Mawnan?
Helen Duncan, ‘the last witch’ of Britain, was born in the small town of Callander, Scotland in 1897 to Archibald McFarlane and Isabella Rattray. As a child, Helen (born Victoria Helen) was said to cause distress at school by tormenting her classmates with frightening prophesies. And from a young age Helen believed she was clairvoyant and could see the spirits...
Almost two decades ago, Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code won over millions of readers with an entertaining pseudo-historical adventure to find the Holy Grail. And with a new interest in historical conspiracy theories and secret societies, a spotlight was put on the Shugborough Inscription at Shugborough Hall, a sequence of ten letters that form one of the...
READ MORE The Unsolvable Shugborough Inscription, the Priory of Sion, and the Holy Grail
This is a weird story, I fully admit that. But I have so many drafts about haunted locations on the Isle of Wight that I was curious if anything other than ghost sightings had happened on the island. And then I stumbled upon the bizarre story of Sam the Sandown Clown and obviously had to look more into… whatever the...
READ MORE Sam the Sandown Clown: Alien, Man in Black, or Folie à Deux?
Raynham Hall in Norfolk, considered one of the most beautiful homes in the country, began construction in 1619 and was completed some fifteenth years later. The house was designed by Sir Roger, 1st Baronet Townshend, with construction lead by his Master Mason, William Edge. The hall is the first in England to be heavily influenced by European architecture, possibly a...
READ MORE The History of The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall and Britain’s Most Famous Ghost Photograph
The stories of John Dee and Edward Kelley, notorious Renaissance occultists, are a peculiar mix of history and folklore that continue to influence artists and writers hundreds of years after their deaths. The small sample of artistic representations of Dee and Kelley below explore the lasting romantic impression they left of black magic, alchemy, and spiritualism during the English Renaissance....
READ MORE John Dee and Edward Kelley: Visual Depictions of the Renaissance Occultists at Work