Banshee

Traditionally, when a citizen of an Irish village died, a woman would sing a lament (in Irish: caoineadh, ['ki¢°n??] or ['ki¢°n?u¢°]) at their funeral. These women singers are sometimes referred to as “keeners”. Legend has it that, for five great Gaelic families: the O’Gradys, the O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, and the Kavanaghs, the lament would be sung by a fairy woman; having foresight, she would appear before the death and keen. When several banshees appeared at once, it indicated the death of someone great or holy. The tales sometimes recounted that the woman, though called a fairy, was a ghost, often of a specific murdered woman, or a woman who died in childbirth.

Banshees are frequently described as dressed in white or grey, and often having long, fair hair which they brush with a silver comb, a detail scholar Patricia Lysaght attributes to confusion with local mermaid myths. This comb detail is also related to the centuries-old traditional romantic Irish story that, if you ever see a comb lying on the ground in Ireland, you must never pick it up, or the banshees (or mermaids – stories vary), having placed it there to lure unsuspecting humans, will spirit such gullible humans away. Other stories portray banshees as dressed in green, red or black with a grey cloak.

Banshees are common in Irish and Scottish folk stories such as those recorded by Herminie T. Kavanagh. They enjoy the same mythical status in Ireland as fairies and leprechauns.

The banshee wails around a house if someone is about to die.

The Hag

A hag, or “the Old Hag”, was a nightmare spirit in British and Anglophone North American folklore. This variety of hag is essentially identical to the Anglo-Saxon mæra — a being with roots in ancient Germanic superstition, and closely related to the Scandinavian mara. According to folklore, the Old Hag sat on a sleeper’s chest and sent nightmares to him or her. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. Currently this state is called sleep paralysis, but in the old belief the subject had been hagridden.It is still frequently discussed as if it were a para-normal state.

In Irish and Scottish mythology, the Cailleach is a hag goddess concerned with creation, harvest, the weather and sovereignty.In partnership with the goddess Brìde, she is a seasonal goddess, seen as ruling the winter months while Brìde rules the summer.In Scotland, a group of hags, known as The Cailleachan (The Storm Hags) are seen as personifications of the elemental powers of nature, especially in a destructive aspect. They are said to be particularly active in raising the windstorms of spring, during the period known as A Chailleach.

Hags as sovereignty figures abound in Irish mythology. The most common pattern is that the hag represents the barren land, who the hero of the tale must approach without fear, and come to love on her own terms. When the hero displays this courage, love, and acceptance of her hideous side, the sovereignty hag then reveals that she is also a young and beautiful goddess.

The Three Fates (particularly Atropos) are often depicted as hags.

In Persian folklore, the Bakhtak has the same role as that of “the Old Hag” in British folklore. The Bakhtak sits on a sleeper’s chest, awakening them and causing them to feel they are unable to breathe or even to move. Bakhtak also is used metaphorically to refer to “nightmare” in the modern Persian language.

Many stories about hags seem to have been used to frighten children into being good. Peg Powler, for example, was a river hag who lived in river trees and had skin the color of green pond scum. Parents told their children that if they got too close to the water she would pull them in with her extra long arms, drown them, and sometimes eat them. The parents hoped that the children would be afraid of the hag so they wouldn’t go anywhere near the water. That way, they’d never fall in and drown. Peg Powler has other regional names, such as Jenny Greenteeth from Yorkshire and Nellie Longarms from several English counties.

Many tales about hags do not describe them sufficiently to make it clear whether the tale deals with an old woman who has learned magic or a supernatural being.

Brown Mountain Lights

Although the mysterious lights have been observed by local Native American tribes for hundreds of years, the earliest sighting by a European seems to be from a surveyor of the area, Gerard Will de Brahm, in 1771. He tried to explain the phenomenon as a “nitrous vapor” which “inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates.” One early account dates from September 13, 1913, as reported in the Charlotte Daily Observer. A fisherman claimed to have seen “mysterious lights seen just above the horizon every night” red in color, with a pronounced circular shape. Rather soon after this account, a US Geological Survey employee, D.B. Stewart, studied the area in question and determined the witnesses had mistaken train lights for something more mysterious reports of odd lights continued, and a more formal USGS survey began in 1922, under the direction of George Rogers Mansfield. He determined witnesses had misidentified automobile or train lights, fires, or mundane stationary lights. However, this does not explain the fact that the lights had been observed long before the advent of automobiles, trains or electricity in general. In later decades, reports of the Brown Mountain Lights continued. An experiment conducted in 1977 shone a 50,000 candela floodlight 22 miles (35 km) towards Brown Mountain. Experimenters saw a red, circular light floating above the horizon, and thus concluded that refraction of ordinary lights were likely to blame for the Brown Mountain Lights.

Research on the phenomenon has been conducted by paranormal researcher Joshua P. Warren and the League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained phenomena Research based in Asheville, NC. They say that after fifteen years of field research working with a wide variety of scientists, they concluded that the lights are caused by natural plasmas produced by special geologic and atmospheric conditions of the mountain. According to their interpretation, conductive and non-conductive layers of the mountain (such as magnetite and quartz) store electric charge when water runs through tunnels in the ridge. At night, when the rocks cool and contract, these layers squeeze together causing massive discharges. Sometimes multiple discharges intersect and spin fast enough to be observed in the visible electromagnetic spectrum, causing the illusion of a self-contained sphere of light at the point of intersection.

Bigfoot

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is an alleged apelike animal said to inhabit remote forests in North America, with many of the sightings occurring in the Pacific northwest of the United States and British Columbia, Canada. Bigfoot is sometimes described as a large, hairy bipedal hominoid, and many believe that this animal, or its close relatives, may be found around the world under different regional names, such as the Yeti of Tibet and Nepal. Bigfoot is one of the more famous examples of cryptozoology, a subject that tends to be dismissed as pseudoscience by mainstream researchers, because of unreliable eyewitness accounts and a lack of solid physical evidence. Most theorists consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of unsubstantiated folklore and hoaxes.

Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness Monster is an unidentified animal purported to inhabit Scotland’s Loch Ness, the most voluminous freshwater lake in Great Britain. Along with Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster is one of the best-known mysteries of cryptozoology. Local Scottish highlanders, and many people around the world, have affectionately referred to the animal by the feminine name of Nessie.

Most scientists and other experts find current evidence supporting the creature’s existence unpersuasive, and regard the occasional sightings as hoaxes or misidentification of known creatures or natural phenomena. However, belief in the legend persists around the world, with the most popular theory posing that the creature is actually a plesiosaur.

UFOs

An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is any real or apparent flying object which cannot be identified by the observer and which remains unidentified after investigation.

Sightings of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times, but reports of UFO sightings started becoming more common after the first widely publicized U.S. sighting in 1947. Many tens of thousands of such claimed observations have since been reported worldwide, and it is very likely many more go unreported due to fear of public ridicule because of the  social stigma created around the UFO topic.

In popular culture throughout the world, UFO is commonly used to refer to any hypothetical alien spacecraft but the term flying saucer is also regularly used. Once a UFO is identified as a known object (for example an aircraft or weather balloon), it ceases to be a UFO and becomes an identified object. In such cases, it is inaccurate to continue to use the acronym UFO to describe the object.