Freaky Folklore

There's a rule whispered from senior girls to juniors in Nigerian boarding schools, passed on in the dark after the matron locks the doors and carries the only key home: if you wake in the night and hear the slow click of heels down the corridor — koi, koi, koi — you do not move, you do not call out, and whatever you do, you never open your eyes to look. Because once...

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There's an old woman at the edge of the village. She keeps to herself, lives in the shadow of the silk cotton tree, and has no husband, no children, no people anyone can name. And in the mornings, the babies three houses down wake up pale, exhausted, and marked with bruises in the soft places — where the blood runs nearest the skin.

Tonight we travel to the ea...

Deep in the karst mountains of eastern Serbia lives a monster no one has ever described, because no one who saw it came back. The Bauk waits in caves, holes, and abandoned houses, lurching through the dark on a clumsy gait, and it can only be driven off by two things: light and noise. For centuries, Serbian parents used it to make children behave. Tonight, two American YouTub...

Every coastal people on earth knows the same rule: if something takes you in the water, you swim for shore. The shore is safety.

The A-mi-kuk does not care about the shore.

Four long arms. No legs. A body of slick, naked hide, like an animal that was skinned and never got the message. It rises up under kayaks off the Alaskan coast and drags men down into the sil...