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Something Told

Folklore, legends, living tradition, internet-native lore.

220 entries · page 2 of 5

Religious tradition

In Islamic scripture and theology, the jinn are beings made from fire who live unseen alongside the visible world. The Qur'an names them often, and its chapter 72 carries their name.

Provenance · Religious tradition

A river creature of Japanese folk tales, said to seize people and animals. Old families and temples across Japan keep documents said to be written apologies from captured kappa.

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The kapre is a giant of Philippine folklore. Wikipedia says its modern image grew out of racist depictions of Negrito peoples by Christianized lowlanders in the Spanish period.

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The karakoncolos is a winter figure of Turkish folklore said to roam the streets in the coldest part of the season, Its name is tied to the Greek kallikantzaros, and scholars disagree over whether the word began in Turkish or Greek.

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Katharina Kepler is cleared of witchcraft

Katharina Kepler was cleared of a witchcraft charge by the Duke of Württemberg on 4 October 1621, after her astronomer son Johannes helped defend her.

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Religious tradition

Kitsune and Inari

Foxes in Japanese religion and folklore. Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto reveres them as the unseen messengers of Inari Okami, while folk tales tell of fox wives, and of foxes said to haunt houses or to be kept by families.

Provenance · Religious tradition

A creature of the Jiundu swamp in western Zambia, recorded in 1923 as a river danger that floods fords, and later described as a pterosaur-like cryptid.

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The krasue is a Thai ghost pictured as a woman's floating head with her innards hanging beneath, said to feed at night on raw or rotting food. Neighbouring countries tell of close relatives.

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Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman

A rumour about a masked woman whose mouth is split to the ears. It started in Gifu Prefecture late in 1978, reached print in 1979 and frightened schoolchildren across Japan.

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Religious tradition

Kumari, the living goddess

The Kumari is a Newar religious institution of Nepal's Kathmandu Valley in which a girl who has not reached puberty is worshipped as the goddess Taleju Bhawani. Michael Allen dates the earliest known written references to Kumari to the late 13th century.

Provenance · Religious tradition

La Llorona is the weeping woman of Mexican and Latin American folklore, a ghost who wanders crying for the children she drowned. Writers have traced her to pre-Hispanic figures, and films and plays have retold her.

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La Sayona is a Venezuelan legend of a woman's spirit who appears to unfaithful men. A Caracas writer in 1882 reported that one set of appearances had been staged with stilts and a skull.

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La Siguanaba, also Sihuanaba, Ciguanaba, la Sucia or la Cegua, is a night apparition of Central American folklore: a woman who lures or frightens men.

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La Voisin and the Poison Affair

Catherine Monvoisin, called La Voisin, a sorcerer and fortune-teller, received a death sentence on 22 February 1680 during the Poison Affair after naming clients at court.

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A Balinese figure pictured as a flying head trailing its heart, lungs and liver, said to seek out pregnant women and newborns. Miguel Covarrubias wrote in 1937 that the Balinese blamed leyaks for most of the island's troubles, sickness and death among them.

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In folk tradition in Sri Lanka, Maha Sona was a warrior named Ritigala Jayasena who was revived after death with a bear's head fitted backwards.

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Major André's hanging and his ghost

The officer John André was executed as a spy by hanging at Tappan, New York, on 2 October 1780. A legend says his horse's hoofbeats are heard on the road where he was seized.

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Religious tradition

A water spirit honoured by worshippers and priestesses in much of Africa, and carried to the Americas by enslaved Africans. Her name is pidgin English and can be read as Mother Water.

Provenance · Religious tradition

The manananggal is a Filipino night creature said to split at the waist and fly off with its upper half, leaving the legs behind. It has relatives across Southeast Asia, most of them flying heads.

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The mangkukulam is the witch of Philippine folklore, a person believed to harm others with spells and potions. The name first appears in Juan de Plasencia's Customs of the Tagalogs, written in 1589.

Before you read on. People in the Philippines accused of black magic were often shunned and in many cases attacked, especially during the Spanish colonial period, according to Wikipedia. In one mid-nineteenth-century case a curate ordered the killing of 57 people he suspected of sorcery.

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Margery Jourdemayne, burned at Smithfield

Margery Jourdemayne, called the Witch of Eye, was burned at the stake at Smithfield on 27 October 1441. The charge against her was false belief and witchcraft.

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Mary Toft's rabbit births confession

In autumn 1726 Mary Toft was reported to have given birth to rabbits. On 7 December 1726 she confessed in front of the physicians examining her.

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Figures in UFO lore said to scare witnesses into silence. The idea traces to Albert K. Bender of Bridgeport and to Gray Barker's 1956 book about him.

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A creature said to live in the Congo, which a German animal collector took for a brontosaurus in the early 1900s. By 2011, BBC News reported, more than 50 expeditions had found no scientific evidence.

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Religious tradition

The nahual, or nagual, is a Mesoamerican religious idea still held among Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Guatemala: a guardian spirit tied to an animal, or the animal form some powerful people are said to take.

Provenance · Religious tradition

The Ninki Nanka is a dragon of Mandinka belief in The Gambia, said to live in the mangrove swamps and to kill anyone who sees it.

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Nongqawuse's prophecy of 18 February 1857

Nongqawuse predicted that on 18 February 1857 the sun would turn red and the ancestors' promise would be fulfilled. The day passed as an ordinary one, and tens of thousands of Xhosa died in the famine that followed.

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Noppera-bō, the faceless yōkai

The noppera-bō is a Japanese yōkai with no eyes, nose or mouth. Tales of it appear in Kyoto story collections as early as 1663 and in folk reports from many regions.

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Nostradamus and the 1999 King of Terror

A verse attributed to Nostradamus about a leader arriving in 1999 and seven months was linked by some readers to the eclipse of 11 August 1999.

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Religious tradition

The nuno sa punso is a tiny old spirit said to live in earth mounds. People still say "tabi tabi po" to ask its leave when they pass, a courtesy on record since about 1731.

Provenance · Living tradition

Nure-onna is a Japanese yōkai drawn in Edo-period picture scrolls and books as a woman with a snake's body. In a legend from Shimane she comes out of the sea holding a baby that turns to stone.

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Religious tradition

Nyaminyami, the Zambezi river god

A river god of the Tonga people along the Zambezi, pictured with a serpent's body and a fish's head. A 2020 study reports that many believed he opposed the building of the Kariba dam.

Provenance · Religious tradition

Obayifo is the Ashanti Twi word for a person, typically a woman, said to practise witchcraft. R. S. Rattray's Ashanti (1923) describes such witches as hated and feared beings that prey on the human body.

Before you read on. An obayifo is a living person, usually a woman, said to practise witchcraft. The Guardian reported in 2010 that six people in Ghana were on trial accused of burning a woman of 72 to death because they took her for a witch. Duodu's report is about witchcraft accusation in Ghana generally.

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Operation Highjump and Base 211

A United States Navy operation of 1946-47 to set up Little America IV, a research base in Antarctica. A story that Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching call a myth recast it as an Allied attack on a secret German base, Base 211, in Queen Maud Land.

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Orang minyak (the oily man)

A figure of Malay belief, a man coated in black grease who carries off young women at night. It first appeared in Singapore's Berita Harian in October 1957, and the name has since been attached to a rape reported in 2005 and to rumours in Melaka in 2017.

Before you read on. The orang minyak name has been attached to an attack by a man: in 2005 Bernama reported the suspected rape of a nurse at a hospital nurses' hostel by a knife-carrying man covered in oil. The figure has also prompted machete-armed village patrols (Live Science, 2012) and a 2017 police appeal in Melaka to stop spreading rumours (Malay Mail).

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Papa Bois is the old master of the woods in Trinidad and Tobago folklore, a figure hunters fear. Trinidad's national library calls him the best-known of the country's folklore characters.

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The peri, or parī, is a being of Persian tradition. In early beliefs it was probably an evil spirit; by the Islamic period it had become a beautiful figure often translated as fairy.

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Petronilla de Meath, burned at Kilkenny

Petronilla de Meath was flogged and then burned at Kilkenny, Ireland, on 3 November 1324, after being accused alongside Alice Kyteler. Wikipedia calls hers the first known burning for heresy in Ireland or the British Isles.

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Phi pop is a Thai belief in a spirit that can live inside a person, which Silpa Wattanatham magazine says probably began in the northeast. Accusing someone of harbouring a pop has been used to shut people out.

Before you read on. Accusing someone of harbouring a phi pop has been used to isolate people a community dislikes, often those whose behaviour sets them apart (Bangkok Post, 2016; anthropologist Srisakra Vallibhotama via Voice TV, 2017). In 2017, unexplained deaths in Amnat Charoen province were blamed on an outsider man said to be a pop (Voice TV).

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In Thai belief, phi tai hong is the ghost of a person who died a sudden, violent death, such as by murder or drowning, often without proper funeral rites.

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Picou's werewolf by the buckwheat field

A peasant says a man named Picou saw a wolf the size of a calf over his hedge after sunset, and refuses to cross the marsh that night.

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An Indonesian ghost shaped like a corpse bound in its burial shroud. The BBC says Indonesian folklore treats pocong as souls of the dead that are trapped.

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Pontianak (kuntilanak)

A female spirit known as the pontianak in Malay and the kuntilanak in Indonesian, found in the beliefs of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Sources tie her to a woman who died in childbirth and to a stillborn child.

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Popobawa is a night attacker of Zanzibar belief, said to sexually assault people in their sleep. Reports go back to 1965 on Pemba, with scares peaking in 1995 and returning in 2000 and 2007.

Before you read on. During the scare Henriette Jansen described in Tanzanian Affairs (1996), a man was killed who had been named as Popobawa. It was then announced that he was a mental patient, a mainlander, who had travelled to Zanzibar to be treated.

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Portefaix and the Beast of Gévaudan

On 12 January 1765 a group of children from Le Villaret in Gévaudan, led by Jacques Portefaix, drove off the Beast of Gévaudan.

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Religious tradition

The qallupilluit are beings of Inuit tradition who live beneath the sea ice and take children away. Cousins, an Inuk from Iqaluit, told Nunatsiaq News in 2024 that the story warns children who play at the floe edge as the ice breaks up, where they could drown.

Provenance · Living tradition

In Greenlandic tradition, a qivittoq is a person who turned away from the community to live alone in the mountains, and who was thought to gain sharpened senses and supernatural abilities. The idea is known from 18th-century West Greenland.

Provenance · Living tradition

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Radio Quito's War of the Worlds broadcast

On the twelfth of February, 1949, Radio Quito aired a live drama about an alien invasion in Quito, Ecuador. When listeners learned it was fiction, a mob attacked the station's building, and six or more people died.

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Religious tradition

Rakshasas are beings found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and the folk Islam of Indonesia, according to Wikipedia. A Rigveda hymn to Agni hails him as their slayer, and in the Ramayan Ravan calls himself their king.

Provenance · Religious tradition

Riri Yaka, or Reeri Yakseya, is a figure of Sinhalese belief, called the demon of blood in 19th-century accounts from Ceylon and blamed above all for illnesses that cause bleeding.

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