Hello, friends, and welcome to the inaugural post of our Historical Curiosities column! History is full of the weird, the spooky, and the confounding. In this column we’ll share fun anecdotes that fit the bill. So, join me as we kick things off with one of my favourite strange tales — the werewolves of Ossory.
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“Come listen to my story,” the song starts. “I’ll tell you no lies.”
The scene unfolds: a beautiful young woman steals away into the woods at night. The branches creak overhead, the river rushes somewhere through the trees, and the figure of a man beckons her to an open grave or a watery death. In the dark, the wild birds sing.
It is, as they say, a tale as old as time; one that we have seen play itself out in countless fairy tales, ghost stories, plays, true crime podcast, and — yes — ballads. You may have heard the term “murder ballad” before. But what does it mean? As Madison Ava Helm wrote in the introduction to her thesis on the subject: “The ballad is a tricky minx to categorize.”1 Bear with me, and we’ll do our best.
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the shadowes are icumen in 