Grey Tales

In the Grimms' version, a huntsman saves Little Red Riding Hood. In Perrault's, she's eaten. But in a peasant tale from Burgundy, recorded in the 1880s, the girl eats her own grandmother's flesh, undresses in front of a werewolf, and in the end saves herself. In episode 3 of our Grimm series, we dig for the dark roots of Little Red Riding Hood: from a Latin schoolbook written aroun...

Nothing added, nothing embellished: that's what the Brothers Grimm promised in the preface to their fairy tales. At the same time, they rewrote their book again and again over nearly half a century and seven editions. In episode 2 of our Grimm series, we lay the versions side by side: how Rapunzel's pregnancy disappeared, how Snow White's mother became a stepmother, why Rumpelstiltskin...

Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: ancient German folk tales, passed down by old peasant women at the spinning wheel? Not quite. In the first episode of our five-part Grimm series, we ask who actually told the Brothers Grimm their fairy tales. We follow a manuscript that traveled through a Trappist monastery in Alsace all the way to Geneva, watch Heinz Rölleke bury a star witness...

Last week we told the old stories. Today we ask who wrote them. The leprechaun probably isn't named after his "little body" at all, but after Roman priests whom Irish monks took for a race of wolf-men. His oldest story is a teaching tale about the law of distraint. In the nineteenth century he wore red, not green. The book that made him famous was lost by its editor and rewritten by...

Forget the green suit. Forget the rainbow. In his oldest stories the leprechaun isn't a mascot. He's a solitary, cunning and occasionally murderous creature. He comes out of the sea to drown sleeping kings. He lives in the wine cellar and refuses to move out. And he wins every single time, not through strength, but because he knows exactly where a human being looks when you distract them....

Last time, I only told the stories. This time, we open our eyes. Part 2 of our Norway special asks the why behind the troll legends: where does the troll come from? Why does the sun kill him? Why does he flee the church bell? What really stood at that cradle – and why does this overwhelming creature lose in almost every story? A journey through etymology, National Romanticism, and the most honest,...

Norway is full of trolls. You just have to know how to read the mountains. In this first part of our Norway special there's no analysis, no explaining – only stories. A full story-hour at double length: the great petrification legends of the coast, the classic troll tales of Asbjørnsen & Moe, and the ancient belief about the child in the cradle. The interpretation follows in Part 2. Sit do...

In November 1610 the Spanish Inquisition burns people from the Basque village of Zugarramurdi at Logroño as devil-worshippers – the climax of the largest witch trial in history, in which some 7,000 people ultimately fall under suspicion. In this episode we follow how a neighbour returning with a story becomes an avalanche of fear, confession and burning stakes – and how, of all people, one inquisi...

Wiltshire, 1662: a magistrate takes a travelling beggar's drum away — and afterwards his house drums for two years. Out of nowhere. The "Drummer of Tedworth" is remembered as the first documented poltergeist in England. But behind the haunting lies a far bigger fight: over God, over the soul, and over who gets to decide what really happened. In this episode we dig beneath the ghost s...

She waits at the roadside, she is beautiful, she loves you — and she is fattening you to drink your blood. The Lamia is one of humanity's oldest bogeys and one of its saddest. In this episode we follow her from an ancient vampire bride in Corinth, back to a queen of Libya whose children were all taken by a jealous goddess, and down to the rivers of Mesopotamia, where her ancestor Lamashtu was...

At the edge of a spring, on the shortest night of the year, a woman of unearthly beauty sits combing her golden hair. She offers you a treasure — for a single kiss, without fear. Almost no one passes the test. The Moura Encantada is one of the best-known figures of Portuguese and Galician folklore — and one of the most misunderstood. In this episode we follow her from the spring all the way into r...

In the autumn of 1589, near Bedburg in the German Rhineland, a wealthy farmer is broken to death as a werewolf. His name: Peter Stubbe. His case was printed across Europe and shaped our image of the werewolf to this day. But the closer you look, the less the story adds up — right down to a guest at the scaffold who had no business being there. An investigation across the records, the pamphlet, and...

In the year 858, the Annals of Fulda — one of the most important historical sources for the East Frankish kingdom — record an incident that sits utterly out of place between Viking raids and comet sightings. On an estate near Bingen on the Rhine, an "evil spirit" spent three years throwing stones, hammering on walls, exposing thefts, revealing an affair involving the village priest, driv...

Every year on the first weekend after Ash Wednesday, thirty-metre wooden towers are erected across Vorarlberg, Austria — and set ablaze along with a gunpowder-filled witch doll. The custom is called "Funken," it's UNESCO-listed, and the standard explanation is: ancient paganism, driving out winter demons. But is that really true? In this episode, I follow up on a viewer suggestion an...

The grand finale of our four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of "The Witcher" takes us away from the Slavic forests – south, to Portugal, Spain and Galicia. There the bruxa waits: in the games a beautiful, deadly vampire; in real folk belief a child-killing night-witch who turns into a bird and comes through any crack. We follow her trail all the way back to ancient Rom...

He's one of the most iconic creatures in "The Witcher 3": the Leshen, a towering forest terror with a deer skull and antlers. But in Part 3 of our four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of "The Witcher," we uncover the truth: that face is largely invented – a modern "invented tradition." We dig up the real Leszy: the master and shepherd of the fore...

It's the very first monster of the Witcher saga – and the moment Geralt became a hero: the striga, a cursed princess who rises from her crypt by night. In Part 2 of our four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of "The Witcher," we uncover where this creature truly comes from. We follow the trail from Andrzej Sapkowski's debut (1986) back to Roman Zmorski's fairy tale "Strzyga" (1852)...

Geralt calls her a "Noonwraith." The Poles call her Południca. And in Lusatia she was feared as the Noon Woman — sickle in hand. In Part 1 of our new four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of "The Witcher," we dig up where the deadliest ghost in Slavic legend truly comes from: a demon who doesn't appear in the night, but in the merciless light of the noon ho...

Forty minutes east of Munich lies one of the largest unbroken forests in Germany — ninety square kilometres, with not a single settlement to break it up. Cutting straight through it runs State Road 2080, and along it, level with the lonely Hubertus Chapel, a "White Lady" is said to walk at night: the ghost of a cyclist who supposedly bled to death in the forest after a hit-and-run. She w...

In 1576, a gravedigger on a plague island in the Venetian lagoon reopened a mass grave. One of the corpses — a woman — was bloated, red-lipped, and her burial shroud was torn to shreds around her open mouth. It looked like she had been eating. He grabbed a brick and shoved it between her jaws. In 2006, archaeologists found her. The brick was still there. The Nachzehrer is the forgotten vampire of...

Imagine a bathtub. Stone, or maybe copper. In a cold chamber of a castle high in the Carpathians. Filled not with water — but with the blood of young girls. In it sits a countess who believes this bath will keep her young. Nearly everyone knows this image. It is one of the most famous horror stories in Europe. And it is an invention. It appears in no court record. No witness ever described it. It...

Nuremberg, 1488. A printing press spits out a pamphlet with a woodcut on the cover: a crowned prince dining at a table, surrounded by a forest of stakes. Men, women, children — skewered like insects. It becomes one of Europe's first mass-media sensations. And it creates a myth that refuses to die. But who was the man behind the woodcut? Was Vlad III Țepeș really the bloodthirsty monster of the...

In January 2004, six men in a Romanian village dug up a dead man. He had been in the ground for six weeks. They cut open his chest, removed his heart, burned it at a crossroads, mixed the ashes with well water, and gave it to a sick young woman to drink. They said they saved her life. They said the man had become a Strigoi. This is not folklore. This is not the Middle Ages. This happened in 2004 —...

In part two of our journey into the Nøkken, we go down into the cellar — to the place where music becomes more dangerous than any knife. Because the most terrifying thing about this Scandinavian water spirit isn't that he can be a horse, or a bearded old man with water dripping from his beard. It's his violin. We travel to the Norwegian valley of Hallingdal, to the farm Myljo Larsgard, in...

For more than a thousand years, the lakes, rivers, and millponds of Scandinavia have been haunted by a creature that has no fixed shape. He is a bearded old man with water dripping from his beard. He is a grey horse with its hooves on backwards. He is a naked young man sitting on a lily pad in the moonlight. His name is the Nøkken — and he is one of the most disturbing figures in all of European f...