While schools and universities boast urban legends alongside ghosts, prisons tend to be more like hospitals. You find tales of hauntings, but little in the way of folklore. It’s probably due to the concentration of human life in one place – and the brutality that runs alongside it. Haunted prisons somehow don’t seem so surprising. […]
folklore
Haunted Hospitals: Porters, Matrons, and Past Patients
If you go looking for ghost stories, you very quickly stumble across haunted hospitals. In fact, it was finding so many tales about Cardiff Royal Infirmary that prompted this post in the first place. And not all of the stories are necessarily sad. The resident ghost at St Nicholas Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne is […]
University Folklore: Ghosts and Exam Failure Curses
In a lot of ways, it’s hardly surprising there is a lot of university folklore. People are away from home, often for the first time, in a strange environment with a lot of new places. They’re also often in old buildings where who only knows what has happened in the past. So it’s easy for […]
School Folklore: Ghosts, Black Dogs, and Cautionary Tales
Think back to the schools you’ve attended. Did they have a Grey Lady in a disused corridor? A hell hound in a supply cupboard? A secret tunnel to a neighbouring building? The ghost of a former pupil, forever roaming the halls? Many schools end up with urban legends and folklore attached to them. In many […]
Belfast Ghost Stories: A Prison, a Market, and a Railway Station
Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland, and its site has been occupied since the Bronze Age. It’s been a major port since the 19th century, and the Harland & Wolff shipyard built RMS Titanic here. It’s a city of much history, both violent and industrial, so it comes as no surprise that there are […]
Exploring the myths of the Charterhouse Plague Pit
Watching the progress of the Crossrail construction project was fascinating in terms of what was unearthed. The Charterhouse Plague Pit was one such buried secret, first uncovered in March 2013. Charterhouse lies between Clerkenwell and Smithfield, just north of the City of London. The area is allegedly rife with plague pits, although if you believe […]
