Author: Scepters & Soil
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Before Carrie: The Horrifying History of Menstruation
Stephen King’s Carrie opens with one of the most brutal and uncomfortable scenes in horror history. Carrie White gets her first period in the gym shower and completely loses it. She is not simply embarrassed. She is terrified. Having received no education about her own body, she genuinely believes she is bleeding to death. Instead…
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Beyond the Veil: Why Victorians Turned to Spiritualism
Long before television, radio, or social media, people gathered around dining tables in darkened rooms and waited for the dead to answer them. In Britain and America during the 19th century, séances became a surprisingly familiar part of everyday life. Families dimmed the lights, joined hands, placed their fingers against a table, and waited for…
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Unsolved Mystery: What Really Happened to the Princes in the Tower?
In the summer of 1483, two young boys entered the Tower of London and were never seen alive again. Edward V was only 12. His younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, was 9. They were sons of King Edward IV, members of the House of York, and for a brief moment, they stood at the…
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Queen Victoria: The Supernatural Obsession Behind the Mourning
Queen Victoria is usually remembered as the stern monarch dressed in black, the woman whose name became synonymous with Victorian restraint and mourning. But behind the palace doors, Victoria had another fascination. Séances. Clairvoyants. Ghost stories. Messages from the dead. Her interest in the supernatural began years before Prince Albert’s death and continued throughout her…
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Fet Gede: The Dead Aren’t Feared. They’re Remembered.
When October arrives, Halloween in the United States is usually presented as a celebration of everything frightening about death. Graveyards become decorations. Skeletons hang from porches. Ghost stories fill television screens, and the dead become costumes, props, and monsters. But within Haitian Vodou, the Gede tradition approaches death from a very different direction. The dead…