Pagan Ghosts Don’t Fear ‘Turn Undead’
An Ottonian chronicler in the 11th century A.D. recorded an odd ghost story in the town of Deventer, in the modern-day Netherlands. In it, a band of ghosts ignore the sacred power of a Catholic priest and do him great harm. The story’s a good one in its own right, but it’s also a great […]
The Kaguru Ghostland
The anthropologist T.O. Beidelman recounts meeting a woman in Tanzania in 1957-1958 who had a ongoing dispute with her dead father. Her people, the Kaguru, believe that there exists a parallel world of ghosts, and that all souls cycle between our two worlds in an endless circle of rebirth. This belief, and the way it […]
Encounters With the Medieval Dead
This post is exactly what it says on the tin: three encounters suitable for an undead-themed dungeon or any fantasy campaign where undead are present! We’ve got three stories from 1100-1200 A.D. – one from Denmark, one from Britain, and one from Italy. To start with, we have a tale from The Deeds of the Danes, […]
The Cruel, Prophetic Witch of Northern Greece
Ancient Greece was full of legends about witches in Thessaly, a wild region in the north. The Roman poet Lucan (39-65 A.D.) channeled the most horrid of these in his Pharsalia. This epic poem about the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey includes an aside where Pompey’s son consults a monstrous fortune-teller: the cannibal […]
The Dunhuang Manuscripts and the Mogao Caves
In the early 20th century, an itinerant Daoist priest in the deserts of western China discovered a treasure trove of medieval documents, hidden for a thousand years behind a false door in an abandoned Buddhist temple. The discovery would give historians a corpus of documents they still use to this day – and the discovery and […]
Abandoning Saint-Octave-de-l’Avenir
The abandoned village of Saint-Octave-de-l’Avenir in Quebec, Canada, makes great inspiration for the site of a haunting in your campaign. A rural village near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, its declining, aging population led the government to forcibly resettle the village in the 1970s. Later, the area was opened to tourism. At your […]
Saber-Toothed Tigers and Weapons Ghosts Recognize
Medieval Finns believed stone age artifacts were magical. The millennia-old knapped stone tools sometimes turned up by their plows could, they thought, ward off evil. Medieval Finns buried these tools in the foundations of their walls and hearths to guard their homes. There’s something very cool about stone arrowheads and adzes as wards, whether they […]