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Villain or Victim: was Tom Otter wrongfully accused?
The tale of Tom Otter is one of the grisliest stories featured by the Lincolnshire Folk Tales project. The historical event fit for any true crime podcast had its own mythology grow up around it, fed by nineteenth-century audiences yearning for the macabre. Otter, a young navvy (or, in local vernacular, banker) working near Lincoln,…
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Ghostly Monks on Lincoln Edge
The Lincoln Edge outside the village of Bracebridge Heath, south of Lincoln, is supposedly haunted by a procession of ghostly monks carrying flaming brands.
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Newton’s Apple
Any schoolchild who has heard of Sir Isaac Newton is almost certain to know one thing about him: he was sitting under an apple tree when an apple fell on his head, and put into it the universal law of gravity.
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Saint Etheldreda’s Staff
The seventh-century St. Etheldreda (also known as Æthelthryth or Æðelþryð, and in religious contexts as Audrey) stopped at Stow on her journey from Northumbria to the Isle of Ely, to where she was fleeing in order to become a nun. She planted her ash staff in the earth, and it transformed miraculously into a mature, foliage-rich tree.
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A Witch of Kirton in Lindsey
A servant we had from the neighbourhood of Kirton Lindsey [sic], North Line. told me when her mother was confined [pregnant], a man in the village “witched her,” so that she could not move in bed, nor could the bed be moved until the man came and “unwitched her”
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Meg’s Island
Cleethorpes is often referred to as Meggies, and it is a word you’ll see written around town. Meggy (or sometimes Meggie) is also a locally-known demonym for a person from Cleethorpes. But why?
Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project 