A Japanese Feast of the Dead, 1615

One of the things we all ‘know’ about Halloween is that it’s just an American import. It’s not, though, completely true. Modern Halloween has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain, which itself was imported to the US by Irish migrants in the nineteenth century. But it also has a distant ancestor, too, in…

The Spooky World of Anne Armstrong, 1673

Anne Armstrong was a servant-girl. Probably just a teenager in 1673, she lived at Birches Nook in Northumberland. She also, in the dark seasons of 1672 and early 1673, had a series of terrifying supernatural experiences. So she said. Anne gave her testimony in a string of statements made over the winter and spring of 1673,…