Myths, monsters, and fairy tales the textbooks quietly edit out. Werewolves, sea beasts, and the small gods that outlived the empires that banned them.
From the 1725 Serbian case of Petar Blagojevich to the New England consumption panic of the 1880s. The folk explanation crossed the Atlantic before the novel did.
Newspapers, court testimony, and Society for Psychical Research case files between 1855 and 1898. Six hauntings with substantial paperwork.
From Herodotus's distant rumors of the Neuri to Bedburg's theatrical trials and the twentieth-century B-movie: the werewolf as mirror. What people saw in it says more about them than about wolves.
The edits between the 1812 and 1857 editions of Grimm are a map of what a rising middle class needed to forget. Incest, unwed pregnancy, murderous mothers: all quietly sanded off the page.
Kraken, Leviathan, Irish merrows. A sober archival pass at what sailors probably actually saw, and why the reports outlasted the fog.