Geralt calls her a "Noonwraith." The Poles call her Południca. And in Lusatia she was feared as the Noon Woman — sickle in hand. In Part 1 of our new four-part series on the real myths behind the monsters of "The Witcher," we dig up where the deadliest ghost in Slavic legend truly comes from: a demon who doesn't appear in the night, but in the merciless light of the noon hour.

We follow her from the Witcher contract "The White Lady" through the Sorbian legends of Lusatia and the biblical "noonday demon" to Dvořák's chilling tone poem — and ask, at the end, what CD Projekt Red changed about the old myth. And why.

📖 Further reading & sources:

• Karl Haupt: Sagenbuch der Lausitz, Vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1862) – "Die Mittagsfrau. Připolniza"
• Johann Georg Theodor Grässe: Der Sagenschatz des Königreichs Sachsen, Vol. 2 (Dresden, 1855/1874) – "Das Mittagsgespenst"
• Edmund Veckenstedt: Wendische Sagen, Märchen und abergläubische Gebräuche (Graz, 1880)
• Friedrich Sieber: Wendische Sagen (1925) – "Die Mittagsfrau fragt zu Tode"
• Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960), chapter "Question and Answer"
• Kazimierz Moszyński: Kultura ludowa Słowian (Folk Culture of the Slavs)
• Karel Jaromír Erben: Kytice (1853), ballad "Polednice"
• Antonín Dvořák: The Noon Witch (Polednice), Op. 108 (1896)
• Research of the Sorbian Institute / Serbski institut on the Noon Woman
• Psalm 91:6 (Vulgate 90:6): "daemonium meridianum"

#LadyMidday #Poludnica #Noonwraith #TheWitcher #SlavicMythology #Folklore #Lusatia #Sorbs #Mythology #GreyTales

Forty minutes east of Munich lies one of the largest unbroken forests in Germany — ninety square kilometres, with not a single settlement to break it up. Cutting straight through it runs State Road 2080, and along it, level with the lonely Hubertus Chapel, a "White Lady" is said to walk at night: the ghost of a cyclist who supposedly bled to death in the forest after a hit-and-run. She waves drivers down, gets in without a word, and vanishes again — or grabs the wheel and steers the car into a tree.

The problem: that accident never happened. No record, no bicycle, no body. And yet the locals would rather take a nightly detour than drive the stretch.

In this episode we ask how a ghost is born out of nothing. We trace the White Lady back to the death omen of the House of Hohenzollern and the pagan-Germanic goddess Perchta, we meet the international "Vanishing Hitchhiker," and we descend into a forest that lies over a pagan boar cult, Iron Age graves, and the skull of a plague saint. What we're left with is an unsettling realisation: the White Lady of the Ebersberg Forest is the only ghost whose birth we can watch almost in real time — a legend that formed before our eyes, in the age of the internet.

Further reading / sources:

• Jan Harold Brunvand: The Vanishing Hitchhiker. American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (1981)
• Johann Georg Theodor Grässe: Sagenbuch des Preußischen Staats, Vol. 1 (the legend of the White Lady)
• Oskar Schwebel: Die Sagen der Hohenzollern (1878)
• Jacob Grimm: Teutonic Mythology / Deutsche Mythologie (on Frau Holle / Perchta and white female figures)
• Wikipedia: "White Lady (ghost)," "Ebersberg Forest," "Ebersberg Abbey," "St. Sebastian (Ebersberg)"
• Bavarian State Office / BfN on the Ebersberg Forest (history as a sovereign hunting forest, forest layout)
• Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ebersberg local section, on the modern haunting legend

Note: This episode deals with a legend. It is folklore and folk studies, not a documented criminal case.

In 1576, a gravedigger on a plague island in the Venetian lagoon reopened a mass grave. One of the corpses — a woman — was bloated, red-lipped, and her burial shroud was torn to shreds around her open mouth. It looked like she had been eating. He grabbed a brick and shoved it between her jaws.

In 2006, archaeologists found her. The brick was still there.

The Nachzehrer is the forgotten vampire of German folklore — and it is nothing like the one you know. No cape, no fangs, no castle. This undead lies in its coffin and chews. First its shroud, then its own flesh. And through an invisible, magical connection, everyone it was close to in life begins to waste away. You don't see it coming. You just get tired. Pale. And then you die.

In this episode, we trace the Nachzehrer from the plague pits of medieval Germany to the academic vampire debates at the University of Leipzig. We uncover the Kashubian Vjesci — a near-identical creature from Poland's Baltic coast — and the eerie "Empty Night" ritual designed to catch the undead before burial. We examine the forensic science that explains everything the gravediggers saw: the bloating, the red lips, the torn shroud, the sounds from underground. And we visit the Venice find — a 16th-century woman with a brick in her mouth, whose face was reconstructed by scientists in 2024, more than 400 years after she was declared a monster.

🔔 Subscribe for deep dives into folklore, the uncanny, and the stories that refuse to stay buried.

Imagine a bathtub. Stone, or maybe copper. In a cold chamber of a castle high in the Carpathians. Filled not with water — but with the blood of young girls. In it sits a countess who believes this bath will keep her young.Nearly everyone knows this image. It is one of the most famous horror stories in Europe. And it is an invention. It appears in no court record. No witness ever described it. It was written 115 years after the woman's death by a Jesuit scholar who never met her.Elizabeth Báthory — the Blood Countess. 650 victims, says a legend. 80, says a court verdict. Zero, say some historians today. In this episode, the final chapter of the Carpathian Trilogy, we lay out every side. The countess as sadist. The countess as political victim. And the long, dark space in between where the two can no longer be separated. We trace the rigged trial of 1611, the torture confessions, the phantom number of 650, and the revisionist case that Báthory was destroyed by Habsburg debt, Counter-Reformation politics, and a cousin who happened to be Palatine. And we ask why the most enduring image — the blood bath — was fabricated a century after her death, and what that tells us about every monster story we've ever been told.This is the third and final episode of the Carpathian Trilogy. --------------------------------🔔 Subscribe for deep dives into folklore, the uncanny, and the stories that refuse to stay buried.

Nuremberg, 1488. A printing press spits out a pamphlet with a woodcut on the cover: a crowned prince dining at a table, surrounded by a forest of stakes. Men, women, children — skewered like insects. It becomes one of Europe's first mass-media sensations. And it creates a myth that refuses to die.

But who was the man behind the woodcut? Was Vlad III Țepeș really the bloodthirsty monster of the German pamphlets — or the just ruler of the Russian chronicles? A sadist who turned impalement into a system of government — or a moderniser who centralised a failing state? A war criminal — or the only man who made Sultan Mehmed II turn his army around?

In this episode, we follow Vlad from his childhood as an Ottoman hostage to the Easter massacre at Târgoviște, from the forest of 20,000 impaled bodies to his mysterious death in the Wallachian swamps. We trace the German pamphlets and their Russian counterpart. We ask why Matthias Corvinus needed a scapegoat — and why Ceaușescu needed a hero. And we settle the question once and for all: did Bram Stoker base Dracula on Vlad the Impaler? The answer is no. And the real story is far more interesting.

This episode is a direct sequel to our Strigoi episode. If you haven't seen that one yet, I'd recommend watching it first.

In January 2004, six men in a Romanian village dug up a dead man. He had been in the ground for six weeks. They cut open his chest, removed his heart, burned it at a crossroads, mixed the ashes with well water, and gave it to a sick young woman to drink. They said they saved her life. They said the man had become a Strigoi.This is not folklore. This is not the Middle Ages. This happened in 2004 — with police reports, a court verdict, and evidence of at least twenty similar cases in the same region that never made it to the public.In this episode, we trace the Strigoi from its ancient Latin roots to the Romanian villages where it never stopped being real. We open the archaeological graves of Poland, Czechia, and Venice. We follow the Habsburg bureaucrats who accidentally invented the word "vampire." And we unravel the most persistent myth in horror history: that Bram Stoker's Dracula was inspired by Vlad the Impaler. He wasn't. The true source is far older, far stranger, and far more disturbing — and six men with a pitchfork proved it was still alive.🔔 Subscribe for deep dives into folklore, the uncanny, and the stories that refuse to stay buried.

Keywords:

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In part two of our journey into the Nøkken, we go down into the cellar — to the place where music becomes more dangerous than any knife. Because the most terrifying thing about this Scandinavian water spirit isn't that he can be a horse, or a bearded old man with water dripping from his beard. It's his violin.We travel to the Norwegian valley of Hallingdal, to the farm Myljo Larsgard, in the spring of 1724. A wedding turns into a knife fight. The fiddle player goes down to tap a fresh barrel of mead — and finds someone already waiting for him. We unpack the exact recipe of the bargain at the waterfall: the white billy goat, the north-flowing falls, the Thursday night, the fingers that have to bleed before the gift is handed over. And we listen for the eleventh tune — the one no fiddler is ever allowed to play, because it brings even the dead back up to dance.We meet Torgeir Augundsson, known as Myllarguten, the miller's boy from Telemark whose whole country believed he had really struck the deal. We stand in front of two of Scandinavia's most haunting paintings, Kittelsen's Nøkken and Ernst Josephson's twelve-year obsession. We hear Stagnelius's poem about an innocent child silencing a water spirit forever. And in the end, we ask the question that makes this creature so deeply human: does the Nøkken have a soul — and can it be saved?Subscribe and stay watchful.#GreyTales #Nokken #Folklore

For more than a thousand years, the lakes, rivers, and millponds of Scandinavia have been haunted by a creature that has no fixed shape. He is a bearded old man with water dripping from his beard. He is a grey horse with its hooves on backwards. He is a naked young man sitting on a lily pad in the moonlight. His name is the Nøkken — and he is one of the most disturbing figures in all of European folklore.In this first part of a two-episode journey, we travel through Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Finland to understand who this water spirit actually is. We hear the story of the dairy maid who climbed onto a horse that wasn't a horse, and gave her name to a heath in eastern Iceland. We visit the Swedish lake whose water lilies are blood red, and we learn why. And we discover why Scandinavian mothers, for centuries, taught their children to carry a steel nail in their pocket before going anywhere near water.Behind all of these stories lies a bitter truth. In 19th-century Sweden, roughly 40% of all children died before the age of 15. The Nøkken wasn't only a monster. He was an explanation. A way of managing grief. A warning that worked.In part 2, we go into the cellar. We meet the violin, the bargain at the waterfall, and the eleventh tune that no one is allowed to play.Subscribe so you don't miss it.#GreyTales #Nokken #Folklore

Imagine looking up at the sky tonight and knowing that out there—invisible to the naked eye—a mysterious object is hurtling through our solar system. A visitor from the unimaginable depths of the galaxy that has been wandering through space for over 9 billion years. Longer than our entire solar system has existed. This cosmic wanderer is called 3I/ATLAS, and its story is a thriller full of mysteries, scientific controversies, and a question that should concern us all: Are we really alone in the universe?Oumuamua, Borisov, and Atlas fascinate laypeople and scientists alike. I've compiled everything there is to know about them.-----Music: Skies Speak - Landscape, Theatre of Delays - HorizonAuthor: Cris Frickenschmidt

Imagine you are living in 1903 in a small mining town in Iowa. It is the middle of the night when suddenly a bright light shines through your window. You look outside and see a huge, winged figure with glowing eyes moving across the rooftops at superhuman speed. Sounds like a nightmare? For the residents of Van Meter, Iowa, it was bitter reality.I set out to find facts and rumors and have summarized everything here. After extensive analysis, here is my conclusion.-----Music: Kyle Preston - Tomb Research Cave Ambience, Theatre of Delays - Tides, Yehezkel Raz - RA - Instrumental versionAuthor: Cris Frickenschmidt