All posts tagged with witch

It’s that time of year again, when the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins come out to play, the dead walk, and little children dress up as their favorite monsters and scurry from house to house cramming countless pieces of candy into bulging bags.

BHL has been celebrating Halloween all week with tweets, Facebook posts and quizzes, and a Flickr collection dedicated to the holiday. While doing research for our festivities, we gathered countless myths and legends associated with the biodiversity of Hallow’s Eve. Come along with us as we explore Halloween from nature’s viewpoint, and, thanks to some inspiration provided by Smithsonian.com, find out how you can use BHL to transform yourself into the precise likeness of your favorite species!

It’s almost Halloween, and to celebrate, we wanted to feature a book that properly connoted the Halloween spirit. What did we find? Observations Suggested by the Cattle Plague, About Witchcraft, Credulity, Superstition, Parliamentary Reform, and Other Matters (1866), by H. Strickland Constable. This book is a delightful, tongue-in-cheek discussion of the unconventional cures for ailments and diseases that were popularly accepted during the time period. You might be asking, why is this kind of a book in BHL? The answer: Cattle!

There are some things you just don’t expect to find in BHL, and a witch on a broomstick is one of them. So when one of our book scanners sent a few of us here at BHL an image from one of the books he was scanning, we all did a double take. Indeed, smack-dab in the middle of a book on birds was an illustration of the epitome of a Halloween hag soaring over stormy waters, surrounded by birds. So, of course, we had to ask ourselves, why is there a witch in BHL?