Urban Legends, Folklore, and Local Superstitions

[Sarco_Phage]

Sup playground.

Tell me about the urban legends, folklore, and superstitions of your local area. This can be anything as limited as your home city to as large as your province or country. These are things which are interesting to me, and hopefully to you as well.

It's actually pretty fun what a superstition can tell you about a culture.

For example, one of my favorite local superstitions goes thus: if, on your way to the cockpit [place where they have rooster fights] you encounter a man, you wil win your bet. If you encounter a child or a woman, you will lose your bet.

How REMARKABLY PATRIARCHAL are my people? :smallbiggrin:

Anyway, what superstitions do you guys recall?

[Killer Angel]

Probably this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=178392&highlight=legends) can help you, at least a little... :smallsmile:

[Sarco_Phage]

Ooh, that thread's been dead for a while. Sad, I was gonna post in it. :/

I suppose we can consider this a continuation of that one?

[Killer Angel]

I suppose we can consider this a continuation of that one?

I suppose so. :smallwink:

Anyway, I live near the shores of Lake Orta, and in the lake's center, there's the island of St. Jules (our local St. Patrick). As described by legend, the island was originally infested by dragons and serpents but later delivered from evil by St. Jules.
There are also legends regarding basilisks all over the country, 'til the borderline with Swiss (proof (http://v5.cache8.c.bigcache.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/27833785.jpg?redirect_counter=1)).

[Sarco_Phage]

Okay, whoever made that statue must have a real thing against iguanas.

Anyway, local legend:

Beware pure white dogs, and if you see a black dog with a white mark, especially in a cross-shape, consider them a ward against the pure white dogs. The pure white dogs are aswang or asuwang, shape-shifting demons who eat flesh, and hate what is holy.

The process of turning asuwang is simple: you must simply eat meat that is offered you by one.

[Eldan]

I suppose so. :smallwink:

Anyway, I live near the shores of Lake Orta, and in the lake's center, there's the island of St. Jules (our local St. Patrick). As described by legend, the island was originally infested by dragons and serpents but later delivered from evil by St. Jules.
There are also legends regarding basilisks all over the country, 'til the borderline with Swiss (proof (http://v5.cache8.c.bigcache.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/27833785.jpg?redirect_counter=1)).

Actually, it doesn't stop at the border. We have our fair share of basilisk stories as well. In fact, Basel, the city about as far away from Italy as you can be in this country, has a basilisk holding it's coat of arms. (Funny thing: the name Basel doesn't come from Basilisk, originally, but because they both have the same root (basileus, "King"), they just adopted it later).
See here, though I guess that one would be called Cockatrice in English. No such distinction in German.

http://bb-1970.netfirms.com/Basilisk-Dateien/image001.jpg

[Killer Angel]

Actually, it doesn't stop at the border. We have our fair share of basilisk stories as well. In fact, Basel, the city about as far away from Italy as you can be in this country, has a basilisk holding it's coat of arms.

I was aware of Basel but I'm near CH-TI and, as you said, it's too far away.

edit: I suppose that, snakes and drakes were identified as symbols of pagan culture, so the rising christianity culture, filled the places with legends regarding saints fighting this kind of creatures, so it's a common trope.
But I won't go further in this religious background, for evident reasons. :smallwink:

[Manga Shoggoth]

For example, one of my favorite local superstitions goes thus: if, on your way to the cockpit [place where they have rooster fights] you encounter a man, you wil win your bet. If you encounter a child or a woman, you will lose your bet.

One is curious. What would happen if you met my wife, daughter and myself out for a family walk?

[Barbin]

Towns around Lake Massawhippy in the Eastern Townships have "Whippy" The Loveable Lake Monster.

We also have 7 foot long sturgeons at nearly 500 feet of depth.

[Sarco_Phage]

One is curious. What would happen if you met my wife, daughter and myself out for a family walk?

I would win my bet on my Rooster and lose it at the same time. And then they'd eat it.


Towns around Lake Massawhippy in the Eastern Townships have "Whippy" The Loveable Lake Monster.

We also have 7 foot long sturgeons at nearly 500 feet of depth.


Man, sturgeons are huge enough to qualify for sea monster status any day.

[Nibleswick]

Shoot,out on the Columbia River the sturgeons are still considered babies if they are anything less than seven feet.

Around here though there are legends of trout that big down at the bottom of the reservoirs.

[Soilborn]

Oddly enough the Slender Man has shown up recently in Baltimore urban myth. There must be an SA goon harem around here or something.

[Starbuck_II]

Virginia has a few:
Bunny Man:
There is a story that a man dressed as a bunny haunts the residential neighborhoods around our nation's capital. Yes, Silly as this may sound at first, this Bunny Man has been a fixture of local legend for at least 30 years. By 1973 the so-called "Bunny Man" had been reported in Maryland, and the District of Columbia. His infrequent and widespread appearances tended to occur in secluded locations and usually tell of a figure clad in a white bunny suit armed with an ax threatening children or vandalizing property.
By the 1980s the Bunny Man had become an even more sinister figure with several gruesome murders to his credit. Although he has been reported as far south as Culpepper, Virginia. his main haunt has been the area surrounding a railroad overpass near Fairfax Station, Virginia frequented by party goers, the now infamous "Bunny Man Bridge."

I've only heard secondhand, never known of him myself.


Richmond also has a
Vampire:
The story told of a blood covered creature with jagged teeth and skin hanging from its muscular body that emerged from the cave-in and raced toward the James River. Pursued by a group of men, the creature took refuge in Hollywood Cemetery, where it disappeared in a mausoleum built into a hillside bearing the name W.W. Pool.

Ghost haunting:
http://www.prairieghosts.com/octavia.html

The movie Donnie Darko? Yes, the movie was based in Middlesex, VA.

Another supernatural-ish one is weird family of eccentric, peculiar-looking people named Lincoln (no relation, apparently, of President Lincoln) who allegedly terrorized an unnamed small Midwestern town in the 1890's or early 1900's.

These Lincolns supposedly were standoffish, odd-looking people who moved in the 1890's from somewhere in the East (possibly from Massachusetts) to a small town in the Midwest. The father, mother, daughter and two sons were squat and "froggish"-looking with "ugly" faces, pallid whitish skin, bulging "hyper-thyroid" eyes, and high broad foreheads. Their aloof, unfriendly personalities brought quick dislike, as did their habit of prowling around the town at night and scaring townsfolk who met them.

In 1896 or 1900, one of the Lincoln sons was lynched for raping and murdering the daughter of a prominent local family. At the Lincoln youth's funeral, his father declared that the town would regret the deed, and threw a worm or slug at the girl's father, crying "Here is your doom!" Shortly afterwards, the dead girl's father and brother died under mysterious circumstances, their bodies crushed to a pulp and covered with slime, and townsfolk kept having nighttime sightings of the dead Lincoln boy. Some townsfolk who had seen the Lincoln boy's apparition later went insane. A posse sent to open the Lincoln boy's grave to see if his body was still there found a single set of footprints leaving the grave. Upon opening his coffin, they found that the corpse was gone. The Lincoln family moved out of town shortly after the funeral, perhaps going back East. For the next few years, however, the area suffered a succession of severe droughts, floods and tornadoes, almost as if the town had been cursed by the Lincolns.

Someone I of know first heard of the "Lincoln Legend" as a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the Summer of 1966, from a U.Va. friend of his, Raymond G. Frey (now a Philosophy professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio). Frey had just heard about it at a family gathering in Kermit, West Virginia from an elderly physician who had once met one of the witnesses of the original events. The elderly MD had been a dinner guest at Frey's relatives' house one evening. He had reminisced about memorable highlights of his years in medicine. Many years earlier, the old doctor had attended a dying and delirious patient. In his delirium, the patient had screamed "LINCOLN! LINCOLN!" The next day, the patient was more lucid, and the doctor asked him about the significance of the name "LINCOLN!" he had been crying out the night before. The patient then told him the Lincoln Legend, claiming himself to have been one of the townspeople who had known the Lincolns. The patient died soon afterward, but the doctor said that the patient's story was corroborated by a relative. Unfortunately, however, Frey does not remember the name of the doctor, though the guy has asked him a few times over the years.

The story intrigued him, and ever since 1966 he has searched either for confirmations or for evidence of a traceable definite fictional origin. For years, he has fruitlessly combed historical, "true weird mysteries," and "true crime" literature, as well as possible science-fictional and fantasy sources of the story, but he never discovered any printed fictional story exactly like the "Lincoln Legend"--although many people over the years have agreed with his hunch that the sinister, "ugly," "froggish"-looking Lincolns with their bulging eyes resembled the amphibious "batrachian" aliens described by macabre fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in stories like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931).

In late 1980, he sent a letter to Fate magazine outlining the Lincoln Legend as Frey had described it, asking any Fate readers who had ever read or heard of the story to contact him. His letter was printed in the March 1981 issue of Fate, which hit the newsstands in early February 1981. A couple of weeks later, he got a typewritten note in the mail from somebody calling herself Greta Gilmore of South Bend, Indiana, enclosed with a xerox of a two-page unfinished handwritten letter to him supposedly written by her brother Carl who had just mysteriously disappeared. Carl Gilmore claimed to be descended from the original Lincolns, who had lived in South Bend in the 1890's. He summarized accounts of the Lincoln Legend, basically similar to his version and to each other though with a few differences of detail (including different first names for the Lincolns, and different names for the girl the Lincoln son molested), allegedly printed in a couple of popular paperback books on weird phenomena published in the 1960's that he had picked up a few years earlier in a local used bookstore: Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes and John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension. Both books set the Lincoln Legend in South Bend in the 1890's, describing the Lincolns as squat, pallid, "froggish" folk with bulging eyes who had moved to South Bend from western Massachusetts, whose son molested the daughter of a prominent South Bend family. Intrigued because he was a South Bender and a Lincoln on his mother's side, he did some local historical and genealogical research, but found no record of the people or incidents mentioned in the Ronan and Macklin books. A few years later, he inherited his grandmother's house in a "decaying neighborhood" of South Bend-- and discovered the Lincolns' records, scrap-books, and diaries in the attic. His letter, hinting at the "fantastic, horrible, unspeakable" doings of his "eldritch progenitors" Theo and Oliver Lincoln, "diseased maniacs" living in a "hellish dream world," broke off just as it was getting really interesting! At the same time, I thought his letter read suspiciously like a story by H.P. Lovecraft, especially with his purple prose of "decaying neighborhood," "eldritch progenitors," "diseased maniacs," and "hellish dream world"! Carl Gilmore's discovery of his own descent from the evil, froggish Lincolns reminded me of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth," whose narrator discovered his own descent from the sinister half-alien Innsmouth fish-men. Carl's disappearance, likewise, recalled the disappearances, suicides, or gruesome deaths of many Lovecraft protagonists who discover a deep dark secret about themselves or the Cosmos.

He wrote a couple of replies to Greta and Carl Gilmore, but never got an answer. He tried to obtain the books mentioned by Carl Gilmore as describing the Lincoln Legend, Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes and John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension, but without success. He dropped the matter for many years, then resumed his investigations in the Fall of 1997. Again he wrote Carl and Greta Gilmore, but again got no reply. He again tried to locate the Ronan and Macklin books, but found that while both authors were real enough authors of popular compendiums of strange happenings, the titles cited by "Carl Gilmore" never existed. The Ronan and Macklin books he did obtain contained nothing like the Lincoln story. He even wrote to Margaret Ronan, and she wrote him back that she had never written, read, nor heard of any such book as Evil This Way Comes, and never heard of the Lincoln story. A supposed history of South Bend mentioned by "Carl Gilmore" (A History of St. Joseph County by "Morton Shianerkof") also turned out to be non-existent.

He got in touch with John F. Palmer, the Local History Librarian at the South Bend and St. Joseph's County Public Library. Palmer wrote him back in February, 1998 that he had never heard of such a case and could find nothing like it in local newspapers or records. Palmer did send him, however, photostats of vast amounts of information on local Gilmores and Lincolns--both of whom were quite plentiful in South Bend. Greta Gilmore was a real person, and her address was real, also. One night in January 1998, he called Greta Gilmore's phone number. Her mother answered, saying that they had gotten and read the letters he'd written but were puzzled. Greta had no brother named Carl, and her brother had never disappeared. They definitely had NO Lincolns in their family tree. The whole thing had been just a hoax at his and the Gilmores' expense by some unknown practical joker! At least he surmised that at the time.

[Adlan]

The Black Shuck (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oc_9z_-6nU) Legend is Native to my Area. There's also a village that was washed away by the sea, you supposedly can still hears it's church bell tolling on a stormy night, though I've not heard anyone say they heard it in living memory, as the church tower was demolished by dynamite, it was a shipping hazard.

There's too many to mention when it comes to the local city, Norwich.

[Barbin]

A headstone in Mount Royal Cemetary in Montreal contains a hidden message.

If you read it the first letter of each line after the person's name it will spell out '' F**k You''.

[Aidan305]

Actually, it doesn't stop at the border. We have our fair share of basilisk stories as well. In fact, Basel, the city about as far away from Italy as you can be in this country, has a basilisk holding it's coat of arms. (Funny thing: the name Basel doesn't come from Basilisk, originally, but because they both have the same root (basileus, "King"), they just adopted it later).
See here, though I guess that one would be called Cockatrice in English. No such distinction in German.

I always thought that was a wyvern on that crest. Mind-you, never looked that clearly when I was over.

[Eldan]

Eh. It's called a Basilisk, because it fits with the name of the town. Though, really. The distinctions aren't always that clear. Basilisk, Dragon, Lindwurm, Wvyern... evil reptilian thingy.

[Sarco_Phage]

A headstone in Mount Royal Cemetary in Montreal contains a hidden message.

If you read it the first letter of each line after the person's name it will spell out '' F**k You''.

Heh. I've seen pictures of that, didn't think it was real.

[ILM]

I was in Iceland 2 years ago. I swear, literally every willage had the same story: "There was this giant troll terrorizing the area, and one day a hero came. They fought and after a while the troll was petrified by the light of the rising sun (either during the fight or as he was running away). This is the large shapeless piece of rick you can see over there. Then the hero founded this town."

Every single village.

(Jokes aside, it's a lovely place full of lovely people and I greatly enjoyed my trip there)

[Juggling Goth]

I suppose so. :smallwink:

Anyway, I live near the shores of Lake Orta, and in the lake's center, there's the island of St. Jules (our local St. Patrick). As described by legend, the island was originally infested by dragons and serpents but later delivered from evil by St. Jules.
There are also legends regarding basilisks all over the country, 'til the borderline with Swiss (proof (http://v5.cache8.c.bigcache.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/27833785.jpg?redirect_counter=1)).

Is that why, when I went to Milan for a friend's wedding, I kept seeing this coat of arms with a giant blue snake eating a red baby?

[RandomNPC]

Heh. I've seen pictures of that, didn't think it was real.

where can I find these pictures?

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Is that why, when I went to Milan for a friend's wedding, I kept seeing this coat of arms with a giant blue snake eating a red baby?

That's actually the coat of arms of the Visconti family of Milano, and also appears on the arms of the House of Sforza, who took over government of Milan when the Visconti's died out, quartered with a black crowned bird on a field of gold. The snake is called a Biscione, which means 'large grass snake', or sometimes a 'Vipera', 'viper. It's not always a child, sometimes it's a 'Moor', or just a man, and the colours vary. The snake is either blue or green, and the man's colour varies much more than that.

[Sarco_Phage]

where can I find these pictures?

The tombstone of John McCaffery.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2053/2471034806_555e118af9.jpg

[Amiel]

Another supernatural-ish one is weird family of eccentric, peculiar-looking people named Lincoln (no relation, apparently, of President Lincoln) who allegedly terrorized an unnamed small Midwestern town in the 1890's or early 1900's.

These Lincolns supposedly were standoffish, odd-looking people who moved in the 1890's from somewhere in the East (possibly from Massachusetts) to a small town in the Midwest. The father, mother, daughter and two sons were squat and "froggish"-looking with "ugly" faces, pallid whitish skin, bulging "hyper-thyroid" eyes, and high broad foreheads. Their aloof, unfriendly personalities brought quick dislike, as did their habit of prowling around the town at night and scaring townsfolk who met them.

In 1896 or 1900, one of the Lincoln sons was lynched for raping and murdering the daughter of a prominent local family. At the Lincoln youth's funeral, his father declared that the town would regret the deed, and threw a worm or slug at the girl's father, crying "Here is your doom!" Shortly afterwards, the dead girl's father and brother died under mysterious circumstances, their bodies crushed to a pulp and covered with slime, and townsfolk kept having nighttime sightings of the dead Lincoln boy. Some townsfolk who had seen the Lincoln boy's apparition later went insane. A posse sent to open the Lincoln boy's grave to see if his body was still there found a single set of footprints leaving the grave. Upon opening his coffin, they found that the corpse was gone. The Lincoln family moved out of town shortly after the funeral, perhaps going back East. For the next few years, however, the area suffered a succession of severe droughts, floods and tornadoes, almost as if the town had been cursed by the Lincolns.

Someone I of know first heard of the "Lincoln Legend" as a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the Summer of 1966, from a U.Va. friend of his, Raymond G. Frey (now a Philosophy professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio). Frey had just heard about it at a family gathering in Kermit, West Virginia from an elderly physician who had once met one of the witnesses of the original events. The elderly MD had been a dinner guest at Frey's relatives' house one evening. He had reminisced about memorable highlights of his years in medicine. Many years earlier, the old doctor had attended a dying and delirious patient. In his delirium, the patient had screamed "LINCOLN! LINCOLN!" The next day, the patient was more lucid, and the doctor asked him about the significance of the name "LINCOLN!" he had been crying out the night before. The patient then told him the Lincoln Legend, claiming himself to have been one of the townspeople who had known the Lincolns. The patient died soon afterward, but the doctor said that the patient's story was corroborated by a relative. Unfortunately, however, Frey does not remember the name of the doctor, though the guy has asked him a few times over the years.

The story intrigued him, and ever since 1966 he has searched either for confirmations or for evidence of a traceable definite fictional origin. For years, he has fruitlessly combed historical, "true weird mysteries," and "true crime" literature, as well as possible science-fictional and fantasy sources of the story, but he never discovered any printed fictional story exactly like the "Lincoln Legend"--although many people over the years have agreed with his hunch that the sinister, "ugly," "froggish"-looking Lincolns with their bulging eyes resembled the amphibious "batrachian" aliens described by macabre fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in stories like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931).

In late 1980, he sent a letter to Fate magazine outlining the Lincoln Legend as Frey had described it, asking any Fate readers who had ever read or heard of the story to contact him. His letter was printed in the March 1981 issue of Fate, which hit the newsstands in early February 1981. A couple of weeks later, he got a typewritten note in the mail from somebody calling herself Greta Gilmore of South Bend, Indiana, enclosed with a xerox of a two-page unfinished handwritten letter to him supposedly written by her brother Carl who had just mysteriously disappeared. Carl Gilmore claimed to be descended from the original Lincolns, who had lived in South Bend in the 1890's. He summarized accounts of the Lincoln Legend, basically similar to his version and to each other though with a few differences of detail (including different first names for the Lincolns, and different names for the girl the Lincoln son molested), allegedly printed in a couple of popular paperback books on weird phenomena published in the 1960's that he had picked up a few years earlier in a local used bookstore: Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes and John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension. Both books set the Lincoln Legend in South Bend in the 1890's, describing the Lincolns as squat, pallid, "froggish" folk with bulging eyes who had moved to South Bend from western Massachusetts, whose son molested the daughter of a prominent South Bend family. Intrigued because he was a South Bender and a Lincoln on his mother's side, he did some local historical and genealogical research, but found no record of the people or incidents mentioned in the Ronan and Macklin books. A few years later, he inherited his grandmother's house in a "decaying neighborhood" of South Bend-- and discovered the Lincolns' records, scrap-books, and diaries in the attic. His letter, hinting at the "fantastic, horrible, unspeakable" doings of his "eldritch progenitors" Theo and Oliver Lincoln, "diseased maniacs" living in a "hellish dream world," broke off just as it was getting really interesting! At the same time, I thought his letter read suspiciously like a story by H.P. Lovecraft, especially with his purple prose of "decaying neighborhood," "eldritch progenitors," "diseased maniacs," and "hellish dream world"! Carl Gilmore's discovery of his own descent from the evil, froggish Lincolns reminded me of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth," whose narrator discovered his own descent from the sinister half-alien Innsmouth fish-men. Carl's disappearance, likewise, recalled the disappearances, suicides, or gruesome deaths of many Lovecraft protagonists who discover a deep dark secret about themselves or the Cosmos.

He wrote a couple of replies to Greta and Carl Gilmore, but never got an answer. He tried to obtain the books mentioned by Carl Gilmore as describing the Lincoln Legend, Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes and John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension, but without success. He dropped the matter for many years, then resumed his investigations in the Fall of 1997. Again he wrote Carl and Greta Gilmore, but again got no reply. He again tried to locate the Ronan and Macklin books, but found that while both authors were real enough authors of popular compendiums of strange happenings, the titles cited by "Carl Gilmore" never existed. The Ronan and Macklin books he did obtain contained nothing like the Lincoln story. He even wrote to Margaret Ronan, and she wrote him back that she had never written, read, nor heard of any such book as Evil This Way Comes, and never heard of the Lincoln story. A supposed history of South Bend mentioned by "Carl Gilmore" (A History of St. Joseph County by "Morton Shianerkof") also turned out to be non-existent.

He got in touch with John F. Palmer, the Local History Librarian at the South Bend and St. Joseph's County Public Library. Palmer wrote him back in February, 1998 that he had never heard of such a case and could find nothing like it in local newspapers or records. Palmer did send him, however, photostats of vast amounts of information on local Gilmores and Lincolns--both of whom were quite plentiful in South Bend. Greta Gilmore was a real person, and her address was real, also. One night in January 1998, he called Greta Gilmore's phone number. Her mother answered, saying that they had gotten and read the letters he'd written but were puzzled. Greta had no brother named Carl, and her brother had never disappeared. They definitely had NO Lincolns in their family tree. The whole thing had been just a hoax at his and the Gilmores' expense by some unknown practical joker! At least he surmised that at the time.


On the other hand, it would've been amazing if the Deep Ones were based in reality.

[Killer Angel]

That's actually the coat of arms of the Visconti family of Milano, and also appears on the arms of the House of Sforza, who took over government of Milan when the Visconti's died out, quartered with a black crowned bird on a field of gold. The snake is called a Biscione, which means 'large grass snake', or sometimes a 'Vipera', 'viper.


...which later, more worldly, was taken as symbol from Inter football team.
But that's another story. :smalltongue:

[Maxios]

Spring-Heeled Jack. Granted, I live in America, not England, and I've never left the country. I know of him from wikipedia.

The sightings of him started in the early 1800s. They said he could jump very high (hence his name). They also said he had the appearence of the gentleman, wore metal claws on his fingers, and could breathe fire.
The sightings stopped in the 1900s.

[Eric Tolle]

The legends around here are pretty mundane, pretty much of the sort "If you see a guy following you with an open switchblade, you'll lose money", or "If you enter the Google campus cafeteria without an ID or visitor's pass, you'll be asked to leave", or "If you bring your laptop to the McAffee building, they'll have a tech personally come and fix that problem where McAffee screws up your computer". I know for a fact that the last one is just a legend.

[Sarco_Phage]

But that first one, um, that sounds like less of a superstition and more of the fact that you just got mugged. D:

[Z3ro]

I grew up down the street from Resurrection Mary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_mary)

[Sarco_Phage]

Hnnh, that's interesting. She's supposed to have corporeal effects rather than merely being a haunter.

A lot of my local ghost stories involve driving by a cemetery, then something untoward happening.

[Icedaemon]

Over here, in addition to fairly standard werewolf myths, the most common thing from folk legends would be the Kratt.

Older tales tend to speak of people who use sorcerous powers which enable going just about anywhere for theft. Later tales mention puppetlike creations made from wood and rubbish which the owners either controlled via something akin or astral projection. In even later tales from when christianity had become commonplace enough that Christian myths mixed with folklore, the said constructs were animated by demonic spirits for which one made pacts with the devil. The lattermost is the best known due to being used the most in literature and plays, including a ballet.

The Kratt was one of the explanations for meteor showers - the bright tails of the comets were the streaks of flame that a kratt flying at high speeds would produce (Obviously we had come up with the theories behind rocketry by the eleventh century, but sadly never got around to making a prototype, or at least not a successful one, nor to writing the theories down).

[Eruantion]

Oh man, North Carolina has tons of these. I could go on for a long time about them...
Arguably the most popular is the Devil's Tramping Ground (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Tramping_Ground). According to legend, this is where the devil can come to Earth and send evil into the world. Nothing grows there, and allegedly anything you try and put in the circle overnight, even people, will be found outside of it in the morning.