Folklore & Legend
The Systembolaget Rumours: The Poison That Wasn't in the Bottle
Sweden's temperance state really did poison alcohol. The bottles on the monopoly shelf were the one place it never happened.
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Folklore & Legend
22 articles
Folklore & Legend
The Coca-Cola Formula: The Recipe in the Vault
A soft drink is only sugar, water and flavouring. So why do we tell each other it is the best-kept secret on Earth?
Folklore & Legend
The Templar Treasure: Gold, Guilt, and a Friday in 1307
A king in debt, a dawn of mass arrests, and a fleet that supposedly sailed away with the hoard. The treasure legend is really a story about injustice.
Folklore & Legend
Freemasonry: The Secret That's Mostly a Handshake
Aprons, passwords, and a murdered stonemason from the Bible. Behind three centuries of panic sits a men's charity that guards a grip.
Folklore & Legend
Skull and Bones: The Tomb on the Yale Campus
A windowless brownstone, three generations of Bushes, and a rumour about Geronimo's skull. What the legend gets right about power, and wrong.
Folklore & Legend
The Philadelphia Experiment: The Ship That Vanished on Paper
A destroyer said to have turned invisible in 1943 owes its whole legend to one lonely man's letters and a book he scribbled in the margins of
Folklore & Legend
Avril Was Replaced: The Pop Star and Her Double
A grief-stricken Brazilian blog set out to prove a theory it never believed.
Folklore & Legend
Tupac Lives: The Rapper Who Kept Releasing Records
How a Vegas shooting, a vault of unheard songs, and a Renaissance pen name convinced a generation their prophet only pretended to die.
Folklore & Legend
Elvis Is Alive: The King Who Wouldn't Stay Dead
How a grieving fandom turned an undignified death in a Memphis bathroom into a story of a king who slipped quietly away.
Folklore & Legend
Bohemian Grove: The Owl, the Fire, and the Powerful Men
A stone owl, a summer bonfire, and a century of watching the powerful vanish behind a curtain of redwoods.
Folklore & Legend
The Rothschilds: The Bank That Became a Myth
A real 19th-century banking dynasty, and the antisemitic libel that turned a surname into a shadow government
Folklore & Legend
The New World Order: A Phrase That Ate the Century
How three ordinary words spoken by presidents became the master key of modern conspiracy folklore
Folklore & Legend
Reptilians: The Lizards Beneath the Crown
How an ancient fear of the serpent became a 1990s theory that the powerful are shape-shifting reptiles.
Folklore & Legend
Denver Airport: The Blue Horse and the Underground Kingdom
A cursed statue, an apocalyptic mural, and a runaway construction budget become a temple for the end of the world.
Folklore & Legend
Paul Is Dead: The Beatle Who Was Buried in the Grooves
How a barefoot man on a zebra crossing became the corpse at the centre of pop's strangest rumour.
Folklore & Legend
The Illuminati: A Bavarian Book Club and Its Afterlife
A real secret society of Enlightenment academics lasted less than a decade — then outlived its own extinction by two and a half centuries
Folklore & Legend
Slender Man: The Monster the Internet Made
A monster with a known birthday, a known author, and a known copyright — and, within five years, a body of folklore and a child bleeding in the woods.
Folklore & Legend
The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River
How a squalid political murder became the legend of the monk who would not die — and why the killer wanted you to believe it
Folklore & Legend
The Curse of Tutankhamun: The Mosquito and the Headline
How an infected shaving cut, a slow news season, and a century of mummy fiction conjured a pharaoh's revenge from an empty tomb
Folklore & Legend
The Man in the Iron Mask: A Prisoner, a Legend, and a Velvet Cloth
A real prisoner of Louis XIV, an invented mask, and the two centuries of storytelling that turned a nobody into a king's secret
Folklore & Legend
Jack the Ripper: The Letters That Named the Legend
Five murders in Whitechapel made a killer. A letter to a news agency, probably written by a journalist, made a myth that will never die.
Folklore & Legend
D.B. Cooper: The Man Who Jumped Into Folklore
A polite man in a business suit hijacked a jetliner, collected his ransom, and stepped out the back into the rain — and into American legend.