Frightening Folklore

I had a very strange dream a few days ago about people being accused of being witches and being hanged from a tree.  Now, I’ve been thinking about the folklore that surrounds trees. There is a great deal of folklore about trees. Like the beast is tied to the rose in Beauty and the Beast, there is folklore of people’s lives being tied to trees. When the person dies, the tree dies at the same time. Sometimes people take something that belongs to a person suffering from an illness and puts it on a tree in hopes that the tree will take on the illness and the person will regain their health. In some cultures, certain trees are thought house djinn or other spirits. Thinking about trees has made me think about the Dwarf Black Elder tree I bought and planted in my yard after I sold my first few articles, seven years ago. I tied my writing career to it in my mind, thinking that my writing career will grow with the tree and that the tree will grow with my writing career. My Elder tr...

The rituals and beliefs that surrounded farming and harvesting crops in ancient times was strange and even frightening.  Scarecrows are now a common fall household decoration as well as a staple in many fields, but they have a very creepy side to them. Some people have even claimed to see scarecrows walking through the fields and peering in their windows at night.  In Polish folklore, there is a creature that looks like a scarecrow called Hastrman that lurks along riverbanks making the sound of a baby crying to lure people to it. It carries a large sack, which it uses to abduct its victims.  The very first scarecrows could have been actual humans who had been sacrificed to their gods for the fertility of the crops in ancient times.  Human sacrifice was a part of farming and harvesting crops in many ancient cultures all around the world. In some cultures, the heads of sacrificed humans were cut off and placed on pikes. Some ancient pagans placed humans i...