BostonArchive № 21
Est.MMXXIV
Vol. II · Issue 12 · Spring 2026

Odd Page & History

A curated archive of the weird footnotes of the past, folklore that didn't make the textbooks, failures the winners chose not to mention, and the quiet, stubborn stories that refuse to be forgotten.

✦
Latest Acquisition

This week's odd page.

Fresh from the archive. Usually folklore, occasionally finance, always a little strange.

◆ Folklore · Mythology
Archive No. 0418 · 4.18.2026

A brief, annotated history of the vampire: from Serbian village exhumations to the New England consumption panic.

The Slavic origins are not what literature has made of them. Petar Blagojevich was killed by what may have been epidemic typhus in 1725; his neighbors dug him up and described what they saw. A century and a half later, in Rhode Island, families were still doing the same thing for the same reason. The folk explanation crossed the Atlantic before the novel did.

By Eleanor Thorne 13 min · 2,800 words
The Catalog · Prior Entries

From the archive drawers.

Recent pieces, organized by the shelf they came from.

Folklore № 0324

The fairy tales the Grimms cut out.

The Brothers Grimm collected more tales than they published. The ones they cut, and the editorial choices that shaped what we now think of as the canon.

3.24.26 10 min
Stories № 0317

Three letters the recipients never opened.

Three historical letters that reached their intended recipients posthumously, or not at all. A short archival study of undelivered correspondence.

3.17.26 8 min
◆ The Archivist
Eleanor Thorne
Archivist, historian, and fourth-generation collector of strange footnotes.
  • LocatedBoston, MA
  • JournalSince 2024
  • Day WorkLibrary archives
  • SpecialtyFolklore & fakery
  • ReadingCurrently, Herodotus

Odd Page History began as a folder on my desk at the library, a place I kept the kinds of historical anecdotes that were too strange for the research papers I was indexing, too small for anyone to write a book about, and too good to throw away. After about a year, the folder had a hundred and forty entries in it, and I realized it wanted to be a catalog.

The odd page of the title is a literal reference: in old manuscript conventions, the oddly-numbered pages, the rectos, the right-hand pages, are where the important text goes. The even pages, the versos, are where the footnotes and marginalia live. This journal is, in that sense, written for the versos. The footnotes. The stories that ran off the edge of the main page.

Every entry here started in a primary source somewhere, a chronicle, a court record, a dusty newspaper on microfilm. None of it is made up. A lot of it is still very, very strange.

With cataloging care,
— E. Thorne

◆ Join the Circular ◆

A Friday letter from the archive.

Most Fridays, one email: a new piece, a curiosity from the week's reading, a recommendation from another journal. No ads. No tracking. Just the catalog, by email.