Explore some curious British Customs with us, including those of Midsummer, swan-upping,egg-hopping, St. Bartholomews knives, and the violent tradition of St. Michaelmas ganging. Our source for th

A malignant vapor, weird plagues and punishments, a Polish dwarf, and a perilous journey into the lightless depths of a pyramid all included in thispleasantly macabre collection of short tales from

Tales of animal ghosts are usually relegated to the periphery of ghost story collections, but in this episode, we showcase this class of apparition. Our stories were collected ina volume from 1915 ca

Fairy tales featuring cats are generally pleasant. After our last show about malformed births, we thought, Andrew Langs story, The Colony of Cats might be a pleasant tonic, albeit one with a bizarr

For centuries, strange births, often sounding like mythological monsters, were regarded as portents of ill omen. We hear a number of these fantastical accounts, including a description of the birth of

A self-crucifixion that occurred in 1806 on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon is the topic of our story this time around. The perpetrator and object of this crucifixion was Mattio Lova

An Irish ghost story seems a good way to add a bit of Halloween spice to your St. Patricks Day.Our selection, which will be read by Mrs. Karswell, comes from the 1825 publication Fairy Legends and T

Epitaphs can sum up the life of the individual buried beneath or can comment on the human condition generally. Fromthe melancholy to the absurd to the catastrophically caustic, we survey in this epis

A potpourri of peculiar tales culled from a favorite 19th-century volume. This episode features some outstanding British eccentrics, an extraordinary case of delusional morbidity, lethal religious fa

Enjoy with us a collection of short curious tales culled from a favorite Victorian volume the Stone Eater of London, a mariners report of fire from the sky, the rise and fall of a French giant, 18