Folklore & Legend on vo.rs

The Systembolaget Rumours: The Poison That Wasn't in the Bottle

Sun, 31 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Coca-Cola Formula: The Recipe in the Vault

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The Templar Treasure: Gold, Guilt, and a Friday in 1307

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Freemasonry: The Secret That's Mostly a Handshake

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Skull and Bones: The Tomb on the Yale Campus

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The Philadelphia Experiment: The Ship That Vanished on Paper

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Avril Was Replaced: The Pop Star and Her Double

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Tupac Lives: The Rapper Who Kept Releasing Records

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:00:00 +0000

Elvis Is Alive: The King Who Wouldn't Stay Dead

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Bohemian Grove: The Owl, the Fire, and the Powerful Men

Sat, 17 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The Rothschilds: The Bank That Became a Myth

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

The New World Order: A Phrase That Ate the Century

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Reptilians: The Lizards Beneath the Crown

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Denver Airport: The Blue Horse and the Underground Kingdom

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:00:00 +0000

Paul Is Dead: The Beatle Who Was Buried in the Grooves

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:00:00 +0000

The Illuminati: A Bavarian Book Club and Its Afterlife

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Slender Man: The Monster the Internet Made

Wed, 29 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On the freezing night of 16 December 1916 — 29 December by the Western calendar — Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was lured to the Moika Palace in Petrograd, the home of Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest young man in Russia. Within a few hours he was dead, and his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka river. The peasant mystic who had held extraordinary sway over the Empress Alexandra, whose apparent power to calm the haemophilia of the heir to the throne had made him indispensable and detested in equal measure, was gone. But the manner of his going, as it came down to us, reads less like a murder than like the killing of a monster in a folk tale. He was poisoned and would not die. He was shot and would not die. He was shot again, beaten, bound, and drowned — and even then, the story goes, the water finished what the poison and the bullets could not. The near-immortality of Rasputin is one of the twentieth century’s most vivid legends. It is also, in most of its particulars, a fiction — and we can name the man who wrote it.

The Curse of Tutankhamun: The Mosquito and the Headline

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In the early hours of 5 April 1923, in a hotel room in Cairo, George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, died of blood poisoning. He had nicked a mosquito bite while shaving, the wound had become infected, erysipelas set in and then pneumonia, and a man already weakened by a car crash years before could not fight it off. He was fifty-six. Five months earlier he had stood behind Howard Carter as the archaeologist made a small breach in a sealed doorway in the Valley of the Kings, held up a candle, and saw “wonderful things” — the almost intact tomb of a boy-king dead for three thousand years. By the time Carnarvon died, the discovery of Tutankhamun was the biggest story on earth. And so a shaving cut became a curse, and a mosquito became the instrument of a pharaoh’s revenge. The story of how that happened is a small masterclass in how the modern world manufactures its ghosts.

The Man in the Iron Mask: A Prisoner, a Legend, and a Velvet Cloth

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

On the morning of 19 November 1703, a prisoner died in the Bastille. The register recorded him under the name Marchioly, gave his age vaguely, and noted that he had been buried the following day in the parish of Saint-Paul. The gravediggers were paid, the cell was emptied, and the furniture he had used was reportedly burned. He had been a prisoner of the French crown for more than three decades, moved from fortress to fortress under the same jailer, and in all that time almost no one had learned his name or seen his face uncovered. From that scrap of official secrecy grew one of the most durable legends in Europe: a man whose face was locked inside a mask of iron so that no living soul could recognise the king he might have unseated. The truth is quieter, sadder, and in its own way more interesting than the iron.

Jack the Ripper: The Letters That Named the Legend

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

D.B. Cooper: The Man Who Jumped Into Folklore

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:00:00 +0000