Grey Tales

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...

Imagine looking up at the sky tonight and knowing that out there—invisible to the naked eye—a mysterious object is hurtling through our solar system. A visitor from the unimaginable depths of the galaxy that has been wandering through space for over 9 billion years. Longer than our entire solar system has existed. This cosmic wanderer is called 3I/ATLAS, and its story is a thriller full of mysteri...

Imagine you are living in 1903 in a small mining town in Iowa. It is the middle of the night when suddenly a bright light shines through your window. You look outside and see a huge, winged figure with glowing eyes moving across the rooftops at superhuman speed. Sounds like a nightmare? For the residents of Van Meter, Iowa, it was bitter reality. I set out to find facts and rumors and have summari...