History of the occult at sea. Includes stories of the Flying Dutchman, The Iron Mountain and more.

Pirates and smugglers, ghost ships and sea-serpents, fishermen’s prayers and sailors’ rituals – the coastline of the British Isles plays host to an astonishingly rich variety of local legends, customs, and superstitions. In The Fabled Coast, renowned folklorists Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood gather together the most enthralling tales and traditions, tracing their origins and examining the facts behind the legends. Was there ever such a beast as the monstrous Kraken? Did a Welsh prince discover America, centuries before Columbus? What happened to the missing crew of the Mary Celeste? Along the way, they recount the stories that are an integral part of our coastal heritage, such as the tale of Drake’s Drum, said to be heard when England was in peril, and the mythical island of Hy Brazil, which for centuries appeared on sea charts and maps to the west of Ireland. The result is an endlessly fascinating, often surprising journey through our island history.

Drawing from her own interviews and a wealth of material from the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive, Barbara Rieti explores the range and depth of Newfoundland witch tradition, looking at why certain people acquired reputations as witches, and why others considered themselves bewitched. The tales that emerge - despite their seemingly fantastic elements of spells and black heart books, hags, and healing charms - concern everyday affairs and reveal the intense social interdependence central to outport life. Frequently featuring women, they provide fascinating new perspectives on female coping strategies in a volatile economy.

The wreck in 1866 of the General Grant in the desolate sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands is one of the world’s great nautical mysteries, a story that still tantalises and thrills. When the ship was crushed in a cave beneath a sheer cliff face, a few crew members and a handful of passengers managed to escape in a lifeboat. For more than two years they lived a hand-to-mouth existence on a nearby island before they were rescued. This story is extraordinary in itself, but soon compelling legends spread that the ship had sunk with a fabulous hoard of gold from the Victorian goldfields. For 140 years, expeditions and bounty hunters have searched for the ship and her elusive cargo. In the relentless seas of the Auckland Islands, it has been a soul-destroying endeavour. Locating the vessel has been difficult enough; finding the gold has proved impossible – unless one of those early expeditions really did find it … In this book Madelene Ferguson Allen and Ken Scadden tell the full story of the voyage from Melbourne, the shipwreck, the plight of the castaways and the search for the gold. At this distance in time, separating the facts from the legends is difficult, but they have scrupulously researched the events of the shipwreck and examined every subsequent search for the gold. The story is more remarkable than fiction, a tale of heroes and cads, heartbreak and loss, hope and despair, hunger and greed. As it has bewitched so many in the past, so it will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

Rather than providing a dictionary of superstitions, of which there are already numerous excellent, exhaustive and, in many cases, academic works which list superstitions from A to Z, Bainton gives us an entertaining flight over the terrain, landing from time to time in more thought-provoking areas. He offers an overview of humanity's often illogical and irrational persistence in seeking good luck and avoiding misfortune. While Steve Roud's two excellent books - The Penguin Dictionary of Superstitions and his Pocket Guide - and Philippa Waring's 1970 Dictionary concentrate on the British Isles, Bainton casts his net much wider. There are many origins which warrant the full back story, such as Friday the thirteenth and the Knights Templar, or the demonisation of the domestic cat resulting in 'cat holocausts' throughout Europe led by the Popes and the Inquisition. The whole is presented as a comprehensive, entertaining narrative flow, though it is, of course, a book that could be dipped into, and includes a thorough bibliography. Schoenberg, who developed the twelve-tone technique in music, was a notorious triskaidekaphobe. When the title of his opera Moses und Aaron resulted in a title with thirteen letters, he renamed it Moses und Aron. He believed he would die in his seventy-sixth year (7 + 6 = 13) and he was correct; he also died on Friday the thirteenth at thirteen minutes before midnight. As Sigmund Freud wrote, 'Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.'

"Papers read at the 2008 summer meeting and the 2009 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society."