Traditional Legends

The stories I had quietly carried for years, the night visitors, the warnings, the ancestral echoes never left me. Instead, they began to change temperature. They wanted water. They wanted air that pressed close to the skin. They wanted heat, rot, and movement.

Long before she was invoked by sorcerers or described as the Queen of Ghosts, Hekate held a very different place in the ancient world. Her earliest identity was not sinister or occult. Instead, she was a protector, a guide, and the sacred embodiment of the spaces where one thing becomes another.

In the high desert mesas of the American Southwest, the Hopi people have passed down a deeply layered spiritual tradition for centuries. At the heart of it all are the Kachinas powerful spirit beings who represent everything from natural forces and ancestors to animals and cosmic entities.

There’s a saying in the hills: “If you hear your name called from the woods, don’t answer.”

Robert Johnson’s name carries a strange weight. He’s a ghostly figure in American music—a man who recorded just 29 songs in the 1930s and then vanished, leaving behind not only legendary blues tracks but also one of the most enduring myths in music history: that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talent.

Traveling through the quiet backroads of Appalachia, it’s not uncommon to stumble across the weathered ruins of old farmhouses.These paired entrances were known as death doors: one reserved for the living, and the other for the dead.

In many parts of East and Southeast Asia, August isn't just a hot summer month—it’s a spiritual time full of reverence, caution, and rituals. Known as Ghost Month, this period is steeped in tradition, superstition, and ancestral respect.

In 2008, a woman named Lerina Garcia Gordo posted on an online forum something extraordinary. She claimed to have woken up in a world that wasn’t hers. Her sheets were different. Her job had changed. Her relationship status was not what she remembered. The differences were subtle, but undeniable. She was convinced she had somehow shifted into an alternate reality.

Whispers in the mists. Songs from unseen lips. Footsteps echoing in empty woods. In the highlands of the American Southeast, such signs may mark the presence of the Nunnehi—the Hidden People.

Before the name "hurricane" entered our everyday vocabulary, before weather apps and Doppler radar, the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean had their own way of explaining the violent storms that ripped through their islands. They feared and respected a force of nature embodied not as a storm system, but as a wrathful, commanding deity: Guabancex The Furious Goddess of Storms.

The Appalachian Mountains stretch over 2,000 miles from Alabama to Canada, winding through dense forests, rugged peaks, and some of the oldest terrain in North America. But they also hold darker mysteries—specifically, a pattern of unexplained disappearances that has come to be known as the Missing 411 phenomenon.

When we think of witch trials in America, the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 often come to mind. However, lesser-known episodes of witch hysteria also unfolded in other corners of the early United States, including the rural heart of South Carolina.

In the heart of New Orleans lives a legend—one whose influence reaches far beyond the French Quarter. Marie Laveau.

Known across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, these supernatural entities have long haunted the edges of human experience—neither angels nor demons, but something more ambiguous, more unpredictable.

High in the deathly quiet of the Himalayas, where the air thins and the snow never melts, something watches. Something ancient.

Lizard people may sound like a recent internet-fueled conspiracy, but the belief in reptilian humanoids goes back centuries and spans cultures around the world.

West Virginia’s motto has always been Wild and Wonderful. West Virginia’s alleged werewolves live at the blurry edge between folklore and fact.

In the ancient forests of Finland, lives a goddess whose presence predates history itself—Mielikki.

During the 1800s, vampire panics gripped communities. West Virginia, too, has its own lesser-known tales of vampires.

In the shadowy corners of Appalachian folklore lies a practice that sounds like it was pulled from a horror movie script—but it’s very real.