Detail map
The United States
12 entries in 12 subareas: 1 at grade A, 7 at grade B, 4 at grade C. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.
The entries, in brief
The folklore of the United States documented in this atlas: Haint e haint blue, Boo hag, Wampus cat, Bell Witch, Brown Mountain Lights, Mothman, Granny women, Rougarou, Yee naaldlooshii, New England vampire panic, Philadelphia Experiment and Jersey Devil. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (1 at grade A, 7 at grade B, 4 at grade C), with the sources it comes from. The 12 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.
Haint e haint blue A
The haint is not the personal ghost of high Anglo-Saxon tradition, but a restless dead person or a generic malevolent spirit, often tied to a place: a ford, a crossroads, a house, a tree. The operative premise of the haint blue…
Bell Witch B
Not a creature but a talking poltergeist, active between 1817 and 1821. The phenomenology reported includes knocks and scratches on the walls, bedclothes pulled off and above all a disembodied voice capable of conversing,…
Boo hag B
The boo hag is skinless, red and slimy; by day she wears a stolen human skin and lives in the midst of the community without arousing suspicion. At night she slips it off and flies, entering the house through a crack or down the…
Brown Mountain Lights B
Point-like reddish, yellowish or white lights that appear on the flank of the mountain, move, divide and go out. There is no creature at all: the tradition is a luminous theophany, and the narrative explanations have been…
Jersey Devil B
In the New Jersey Pine Barrens the Jersey Devil is described as a creature about the height of a man or a little less, with a horse's or goat's head, a long neck, bat wings, hind legs ending in hooves and a forked tail; it gives…
Mothman B
Humanoid figure about two metres tall, winged, with glowing red eyes set on the shoulders or at chest height, which flies without beating its wings and chases cars at very high speed. The sightings are concentrated in the TNT…
Philadelphia Experiment B
In October 1943, at the Philadelphia navy yard, the United States Navy is said to have made a warship and its crew invisible. The ship is then said to have vanished from its mooring to reappear a few minutes later at Norfolk, in…
Rougarou B
A man turned into a wolfish beast who roams at night in the swamps, the cypress groves and the sugar cane fields. In the versions collected in Louisiana the curse lasts 101 days, and to be freed of it one must wound the rougarou…
Granny women C
Not a creature but a real social figure: an elderly woman recognised as an authority in matters of childbirth, miscarriage, infant care, wounds, fevers and snakebite. Her competences included the local plant pharmacopoeia,…
New England vampire panic C
There is no monster, there is a ritual practice: when several members of the same family died of consumption in sequence, the most recently deceased was exhumed. If the heart or the organs still contained liquid blood, a sign…
Wampus cat C
An enormous cat, between a cougar and a lynx, with glowing green or yellow eyes and a scream like that of the cougar; in some versions it has six legs. Newspaper descriptions of the 1930s go as far as several metres in length…
Yee naaldlooshii C
This entry deliberately describes the ethnographic context and not the narrative content. In the Diné community speaking of it is an active taboo, not a narrative convention: many Diné do not utter the term and do not discuss…
← Back to the world map · Search the whole atlas · How the grades are assigned