Black Annis: The Child-Eater Who Was Really a Nun

On the western edge of Leicester, the old cottages were built with windows too small for a body to pass through — because of what the locals believed waited out on the heath after dark.

She was Black Annis: a towering, blue-faced hag with iron claws for hands, who dropped from a great oak to carry children into her cave, drank their blood, and wore their skins as a skirt. When she ground her teeth, you could hear it five miles off — just long enough to bolt the door.

But the truth beneath the monster may be stranger, and sadder, than the legend. Was Black Annis an ancient devouring goddess? A creature conjured by six lines of a single Georgian poem? Or a real medieval woman — a nun who tended lepers — twisted into a nightmare over five centuries?

We follow the claw marks through tiny windows, a bizarre Easter dead-cat hunt, and a forgotten grave… to ask what the people of Leicester were really keeping out.

Turn the lights down. And mind the windows.