Icy Sedgwick's Blog

Moles are fascinating creatures. They’re phenomenal diggers and while they weigh around 120g, they can shift 540 times their body weight of earth (BMCR 2025). Given they live entirely underground, they’re a rarely seen mammal, and we only know they’re there when we see their molehills. Surprisingly, there is more folklore about them than more […]

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Otters are some of the most charming mammals you might encounter. Sometimes nicknamed the “water sausage” by the internet, otters are playful, intelligent, and capable of using tools. They also appear in popular culture, most notably in Tarka the Otter and The Wind in the Willows. Yet in reality, they’re incredibly elusive. They might live […]

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When we think about folklore, we often think about the characters involved: King Arthur, Queen Mab, Lady Godiva, and more. Yet folklore has an intrinsic link with place, too. Even the most throwaway comment about a place can reveal stories linked with them. Such stories can reveal how we feel about places, especially when human […]

The post Creepy Listener Tales of Space and Place appeared first on Icy Sedgwick.

English folklore is full of peculiarities. The legends of the so-called screaming skulls are definitely among them. These are skulls kept in mansions and farmhouses, sometimes considered to be guardians of the property. Legends abound of the violent deeds done to the owners of the skulls. But many of these stories come with hauntings attached […]

The post The Screaming Skulls: Guardian Spirits or Poltergeists-in-Waiting? appeared first on Icy Sedgwick.

Poltergeist marked Hollywood’s big-budget engagement with the ghost film in 1982. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, it took the haunted house film and mashed it together with the family adventure film. Throw in some special effects courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, and you end up with the film that relocated […]

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Last week, we looked at some poltergeist definitions and whether such definitions are even helpful. Can something as truly bizarre as a ‘knocking spirit’ be boiled down to a series of checkboxes on a form? Yet they’re also not the invention of the 20th century. Nor are they the preserve of ghost hunters or psychics. […]

The post The Wesley Poltergeist and the Bishopwearmouth Poltergeist Go Head-to-Head appeared first on Icy Sedgwick.

This instalment of Fabulous Folklore begins with a reading of the Poltergeist entry from my new book, Ghostlore. Then we explore the problem with poltergeists—how do you define one?! From deciding what phenomena to include to picking a name, the poltergeist proves to be a flexible yet elusive figure in historical accounts. Is that spontaneous […]

The post Poltergeists: Noisy Ghosts or Household Spirits? appeared first on Icy Sedgwick.

People have lived in the Madrid area since prehistoric times. Occupied by Romans, Moors, and then the Spanish, it has quite the history (World Population Review 2025). Over 6.8 million people live in Madrid. That’s less than Paris and London but more than Berlin. Of course, a capital city will boast a few ghost stories. […]

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If you head away from the hustle and bustle of the Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square), you’ll head into the stranger, more magical part of Venice. It’s in the tangle of narrow streets and courts that you enter the realm of Venetian legend. It’s difficult to know how many of them have any basis […]

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Dublin is a beautiful city that straddles the River Liffey, famous as the home of Guinness and the National Leprechaun Museum. What you might not expect from the Irish capital is a series of Dublin ghost stories. Though why not? The city enjoys a millennium of history, including Viking settlement, economic hardship caused by the […]

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