The beliefs of aurora borealis

The aurora borealis is also called the Northern Lights, visible in the night sky in the far north. These Northern Lights are spectacular, colourful, pretty and full of magical stories. In the northern hemisphere, the Northern Lights are mainly seen above Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Canada, Finland and Scotland. It's rare for the Northern Lights to appear in the south of Europe, although it has done this in the past a few times. This would mean there was a tense level of solar activity and the aurora borealis showed as red coloured, giving it a more frightening appearance to the people back then who didn't understand what the Northern Lights really were. 

The name "aurora borealis" is Latin and means "sunrise wind". Aurora is a Roman goddess and she rode a chariot of many colourful lights to bring a new day. It was believed that Aurora is the sister of Sol the sun god and Luna the moon goddess. 

People that witnessed the Northern Lights in the past, associated it with omens. The aurora borealis appeared fiery red coloured lights over France and Italy, who were afraid that it meant coming plague and war, even famine. Red coloured Northern Lights showed in England and France at a time soon before the French Revolution. However, the Swedish found the aurora borealis a good omen, and celebrated it. These lights were considered a sign of a good harvest, decent weather and successful farming. 

In Scandinavia, it was believed it was bad luck for a pregnant woman to look at the Northern Lights. It was even more worse if a woman looked at these lights while giving birth, as it was said it will result in a child with bad eyesight or blindness. In Greenland it was believed that the aurora lights were the souls of babies who were stillborn and also who had died prematurely. The Sami believe the lights are created by whales of the ocean. The Finnish believe that the lights are a creation of magical fire fox creatures. In Norse mythology, the lights are the glowing colours of the beautiful Valkyrie, maidens who ride across the sky, and of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge that connects the realms.   

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Selkies

 

The storms of January battering the landscape originates from the sea, and beaches around British Isles and northern Europe are empty. They appear uninviting, cold and treacherous. It brings out many stories and folk legends of various monsters and mythical beings associated with the coastlines. Among them are the Selkies, a type of creature that is also a shapeshifter. These Selkies usually appear like beautiful women and handsome men wearing seal skins, because they're also seals other times. Selkies appear in legends of the Orkney Islands, Ireland, the Faroes, Shetlands, Scotland and Iceland. 

The Selkies would gather as seals, and then during moonlit nights on the beach, and transform into humans. They would transform either once a year, or every ninth night, or every seventh stream. They would become human and then dance on the beaches at night. They have sealskin, which gives them transformation. If the sealskin vanished, the Selkie would be trapped in human form and unable to return to the sea. There Selkie men would seduce human women. Orkney tradition have beliefs that a lonely woman may want to find a magical Selkie man, and she would need to go to the shore and cry seven teardrops into the sea. The Selkie man would answer her and swim to shore and be with her for the night. It's also believed that Selkie men would whisk human women away. 

There are many stories of Selkie women seducing human men and sometimes marrying them. If a Selkie woman's sealskin was stolen by a human man, she would be trapped by him and need to live with him as his wife. She would find her sealskin that way, or if not, she would be forever stuck on dry land. There's a sad story of a man who wouldn't return the sealskin to his Selkie wife, even when she begged and pleaded. She stayed with him and had his children. Years later her children found her sealskin and returned it to her, but she had to leave. The Selkie mother returned to the sea after kissing goodbye to her grown up children. They never saw their mother again.

More on the magical Selkies:

Read: "When humans encounter Selkies"  HERE.

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The legend of Sarah Jane

In certain parts of USA there are legends associated with rivers and bridges, but especially "Crybaby Bridges". These bridges are called Crybaby Bridges are given to small spooky looking bridges, haunted by the eerie sounds like babies crying. There are beliefs that these bridges are haunted. 

In Kentucky is Sleepy Hollow Road, there is a CryBaby Bridge where ghostly sounds of a crying baby is heard, and this has been legendary for many years since before the modern steel bridge was made. There was once before an old fashioned small bridge, where a number of babies were thrown into the river by desperate mothers who couldn't afford to look after them. 

In Texas there are several CryBaby Bridges with tragic stories connected to them. One involves a baby drowning, another about both a mother and child killed on the bridge during a car accident, and the traces of a ghost baby's handprints seen on a car window. But most famous of all is the legend of Sarah Jane.

In Port Neches, Texas, is a sad story of a baby called Sarah Jane. Both Sarah Jane and her mother were murdered by a dangerous man. It's said Sarah Jane was thrown into the river and her cries have been heard for many years afterwards. People who heard the baby's cries called out to Sarah Jane. 

I found many different versions of the Sarah Jane legend. Another version goes back to the time during the American Civil War, and a young mother named Sarah Jane was hiding her baby from enemy soldiers. She put her baby underneath a bridge so the passing soldiers wouldn't find either of them. The river changed later in the day and carried the baby off. The distraught mother went searching for her baby and wasn't able to. Distraught and filled with despair, the mother soon took her own life, hanging herself from a noose under the same bridge. Long afterwards, the cries of the baby was heard by the bridge.  

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The seaweed ghost

Here in the long winter month of January, the trees are skeletal and the grass is colourless. It gets frosty and foggy with storms. It's a very cold grim time that starts the new year. I shall continue posting about some true stories of the paranormal as told and written by people. This is another called "The Seaweed Ghost" that fits with the spookiness of winter beaches. 

In the early 20th century, two young women are in a car driving along Cape Cod, a coastal area in Massachusetts, United States. The women are sisters, and things take on a turn for the worst when their car breaks down during heavy rain. They found themselves quite lost and alone, with mud all around them and in bad weather. They saw a house further up a slope, which made them step out into the mud and wet, walking through damp foliage as they climbed up towards the house. They knocked on the door and waited a while but there was no answer, so they tried again. Soon they found the door was already unlocked and they opened it, calling out. As no one answered them, they both entered the house and were pleased to be indoors where it was nice and warm. 

They found that there was a room covered in dust and books on the shelves, which made them aware it must be an abandoned house. They decided to stay for the night because a storm picked up outside. The sisters prepared to get settled in, with blankets from the car. They lit a small fire in the fireplace, and went to sleep on the floor wrapped up cosy under the blankets. They were later woken up by a figure of a man who appeared to be standing in front of the fire. They noticed that he was wearing wet clothes and in the uniform of a sea captain. The sisters were very nervous and stayed quiet as they watched the man. After a while, one of the women said "who's there?" and the man only responded with a deep groan, and then he vanished into thin air.

The women were frightened. When morning arrived, daylight revealed a small puddle with seaweed where the man stood. The only footprints was their own. One of the women dipped her finger in the puddle on the floor and tasted it, which was salty. They packed and took the seaweed and rushed out of the house. Later made their way to the road, and hitched a ride into the nearest town. While in the car, they asked the driver about the house who told them that it had been empty for many years. The family who once lived there moved after their son was lost at sea. The seaweed had been tested, which confirmed it was a type that grows on corpses. 

The original tale is from "Full Fathom Five" by Alexander Woollcott, posted in The New Yorker in 1929.  

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The Grey Girl

 

As we move into the long dark period of January, everything looks colourless as the trees are bare. Floods, storms and snow threaten the landscape and most of us keep indoors. Some have to be outside and face the cold grim season. Here this month I want to mention a few eerie true stories of the paranormal sent by online users and these are apparently real. Let me start with one called "The Grey Girl" that fits in with the greyness of January. 

A young 22 year old woman called Leire89 posted that she had a frightening experience and wanted to share it. She was a teenager, when it all began in Bilbao in Spain. Leire89 was 15 years old when she started having horrible nightmares of the same theme and she continued dreaming of this for years. She said:

"In the nightmare, I found myself alone in an abandoned building. I am standing in a dimly lit hallway, when all of a sudden, I hear very distant sounds". 

She explains that there were constant violent thudding blows throughout the building. As she's standing alone in the corridor these bangs appear to get nearer and nearer to her. So scared, she turned away and ran down the other end of the corridor, taking her into a bathroom, where she closes the door behind her and listens to the banging. The sounds become thunderous and reaches the bathroom door, when she wakes up in cold sweat. Leire89 says: 

"Everyday after I have this nightmare, I can't shake the feeling that I'm being watched. It's as if someone or something is watching everything I do at every moment of the day."

She has many visions of a ghostly girl all in grey, who kept appearing and disappearing. She connects her nightmares to a brutal murder case where an entire family died, but one of the kids was missing, a teenaged girl. She found a photograph of the missing girl and believes it resembles the mysterious ghost girl in grey. Then one day she had the same recurring nightmare again only this time the bangs were revealed to be the strange girl in grey. Leire89 was vulnerable and the spectre was threatening, until she moved towards her and vanished into her body. 

Leire89 discovered that she was pregnant and stopped having those nightmares of the grey girl. However, she doesn't remember being with a man and can't explain how she got pregnant. During a visit to hospital for a scan, she found out that she was going to have a girl. She remains terrified of what will happen and believes that the baby might've been the grey girl. It was first posted 10 years ago on the website Scary For Kids and I don't have an update on how Leire89 is doing. If it was all a dream, this makes for an incredible scary one.

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Cryptid news January

 Happy New Year and welcome to 2024 on She Wolf Night blog. I shall post some of the latest news about cryptids at the beginning of each month.

A mother and son were walking in the woods when they encountered a large Bigfoot type of creature described as being "built like Dwayne Johnson". It happened at the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. There's been a number of other sightings at that particular place. Article here at Country 94.

While Bigfoot cases are numerous in the Americas, some happen a lot elsewhere. In Wales, large Bigfoot prints were discovered on the ground. These are found in Caerphilly, Wales, and the prints are 16 inches in length, which is much bigger than the average man's footprint. It's believed they belonged to a woodwose entity. More UK Bigfoot sightings (called Woodwose and Wild Man) resulted in a sample being tested and found that it's DNA matched both a hominid and a Cercopithecidae.

Also in the UK people reported seeing a massive creature built like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Details of that in Daily Star HERE.

A photograph of Bigfoot was taken in the dark in Montana. To see that go HERE. 

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(Image above is a 15th century tapestry of woodwose by unknown artist).