The Early Modern World: Founding the University of Glasgow, January-March 1451

Only a few days into the new year of 1451 the Scottish city of Glasgow received a very unique papal bull, an official decree by the pope. In this papal bull the pope, Nicholas V, decreed that Glasgow was to have its own university. It read:

NICHOLAS the Bishop, servant of the servants of God, for perpetual memory of the fact. Amongst other blessings which mortal man is able in this transient life by the gift of God to obtain, it is to be reckoned not among the least, that by assiduous study he may win the pearl of knowledge, which shows him the way to live well and happily, and by the preciousness thereof makes the man of learning far to surpass the unlearned, and opens the door for him clearly to understand the mysteries of the Universe, helps the ignorant, and raises to distinction those that were born in the lowest place. And therefore, the Apostolic See, the prudent administrator of spiritual as well as temporal things, and the steady and unfailing friend of every commendable undertaking, to the end that men may be moved more readily to win so lofty a height of human condition, and when won, dispense it again to others, always with increase thereof, encourages some, prepares
places for others, aids and fosters others, and loads them with gracious favours. Forasmuch, therefore, as it was lately shown to us on behalf of our dearest son in Christ, James, the illustrious King of Scots, that the said King, laudably intending not only the weal of the commonwealth, and indwellers and inhabitants of the country subject to him, but also the other parts neighbouring thereto, was very desirous that a university, with every lawful faculty, should be set up and ordained by the Apostolic See in his city of Glasgow, as being a place of renown and particularly well fitted therefor, where the air is mild, victuals are plentiful, and great store of other things pertaining to the use of man is found, to the end that there the Catholic faith may be spread, the simple instructed, equity in judgement upheld, reason flourish, the minds of men illuminated, and their understandings enlightened. We, having carefully considered the premises, and also the uncommon sincerity of faith and devotion which the said king is known to bear towards us and the Roman Church, are moved with fervent desire that the said city may be adorned with the gifts of the sciences, so that she may produce men distinguished for ripeness of judgement, crowned with the ornaments of virtue and erudite with the dignities of the various faculties and that there may be an overflowing fountain of the sciences, out of whose fullness all that desire to be imbued with the lessons of knowledge may drink. Having, therefore, with careful deliberation, deeply weighed all these things, and especially the suitableness of this city, which, as we have heard, is said to be particularly meet and well fitted for multiplying the seeds of learning and bringing forth of salutary fruits, not only for the advantage and the profit of the said city, but also of the indwellers and inhabitants of the whole kingdom of Scotland, and the regions lying round about, we, being moved with fatherly affection, and inclined by the supplications of the said king in that behalf, to the praise of God’s name, and propagation of the orthodox faith, erect, by apostolical authority a university in the said city in all times to come for ever, as well in theology and cannon and civil law as in arts, and every other lawful faculty. And that the doctors, masters, readers, and students there may brook and enjoy all and sundry privileges, liberties, honours, exceptions, and immunities granted by the apostolic see, or otherwise in any manner of way to the masters, doctors and students in the
university of our city of Bologna: And that our reverend brother, William, bishop of Glasgow, and his successors for the time being, bishops of Glasgow, shall be rectors of the schools of the said university of Bologna have. And that those who in process of time shall merit to obtain a diploma in the faculty in which they study, and licence to teach, that they may be able to instruct others; and also that those who seek the honour of master or doctor to be conferred on them, shall be presented by the doctor or doctors and master or masters of the faculty in which the examination is to be held, to the Bishop of Glasgow now and for the time being, and if the church of Glasgow lack the solace of a pastor, to the vicar or official in spiritual things of our beloved sons of the chapter of the said church. Which bishop, or vicar, or official, having called together the other doctors and masters then teaching there, shall diligently attend by himself or another to the examination of those that are to be promoted in those things which in any way are requisite for the degree of master or doctor, according to the wont and custom commonly observed in other universities, and shall bestow on them such licence, or confer such honour of mastership, if they shall be found fit and qualified for the same. And those who shall have been examined and approven in the said university of the city of Glasgow, and shall have got such licence to teach and degree, as aforesaid, shall thenceforth, without any other examination and approval, have full liberty to be regents and to teach, as well in the said city as in each and all other universities in which they shall choose to rule and teach, notwithstanding of any statues and customs, even although strengthened by oath, apostolic conformation, or any other guarantee, and whatsoever else there may be in the contrary, Let none therefore in any wise infringe this writing of our erection, constitution and appointment, or with foolhardy daring go in the contrary thereof; but if any one shall presume to attempt this, let him know that he shall incur the wrath of Almighty God, and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul. Given at Rome, at St Peter’s, the year of our Lords incarnation, one thousand four hundred and fifty, the seventh of the ides of January, and the fourth year of our pontificate.

Scotland’s second university, the first being St. Andrews which was founded in 1413, the founding of the university was part of a wider process in late Medieval and early-modern Europe of constructing institutes of higher education. This post will look at universities and higher education during this time period, and how Scotland’s universities played into wider European ideas of education during the time period.

The European University

A depiction of doctors at the University of Paris

The universities being discussed today are seen by contemporary historians as having their origins during the increasing urbanisation of particularly western Europe from 1000 CE. Of course, institutes to bring people together to train them in higher education were not limited to western Europe and many pre-dated this period – from the Islamic west Asia to China to the Roman Empire these institutes have existed in some form or other. What we are looking at today is a specific type of university that emerged in western Europe that through colonialism and capitalism in centuries to come defined what a university would look like. Whether by being willingly emulated, like Russia, or through imposition, like in the Americas, India, and Africa, this model overrode local higher education forms to create the specific institute we recognise today. This first of these has been recognised as Bologna, but when it was founded is up for debate. Traditionally, the University of Bologna claims its founding was in 1088, but historians like Jacques Verger have highlighted that the true date is unknown and has since been picked by successive heads of the university as a point of convenience. This is because the first ‘universities’ emerged as a corporation of universitas magistrorum et scholarium (university of masters and students), meaning a guild of teachers and already educated students coming together. There had already existed institutes like this in Europe at the time – the Islamic madrasas in Spain and Sicily worked on a developed version of this principle.

Like many aspects of European society at the time, the Church was instrumental in the development of the university. To avoid being overstretched the papacy realised that it required people with specialised knowledge of the law and ecclesiastical codes to run the Church. Likewise, secular authorities required an increasing number of bureaucrats to manage the growing urban population across Europe. Pre-existing cathedral schools and guilds were not enough to meet these demands, so the more informal networks of masters and students developed into a ‘university’. Bologna, Paris, and Oxford would develop universitities by 1150, although when we can say they were founded is questionable. Originally there was no campus and lessons were on an ad hoc basis depending on where was available, usually the local cathedral. While universities were founded to aid the state and Church, and with explicit permission from these institutions, they were officially independent bodies. Universities were to be self-governing institutes, a guild made to foster new generations of educated administrators. Located in urban areas the cities began to revolve around the university as students were sent to delineated housing, ‘colleges’, with local businesses emerging to to cater to the students. Printing presses, inns, and even brothels sprung up around these areas – any visitor to Oxford and Cambridge will be struck today how much they revolve around the university.

As Merry Wiesner-Hanks has argued, a new and shared cultural life emerged from the university. This was an elite life – while theoretically open to all a certain grasp of the classics, literacy, and an ability to pay tuition meant university was an option for mainly the elite. Lessons were done in Latin, and as these institutions were uncommon until the 1500s it meant people from across Europe were rubbing shoulders with one another. Latin created a common language, but as more and more universities opened vernacular languages began coming increasingly into classes. However, up until the 1800s many universities required a knowledge of Latin with many still expecting it until the twentieth-century. This was also a homosocial environment – women were strictly barred from higher education. As a result, universities were an aggressively male space that resulted in both same-sex exploration and some of the first mass printed pornography.

Glasgow and Scotland

As mentioned, the University of Glasgow was not Scotland’s first university with St. Andrews being the first. The university was born from two major events for the history of Scotland and Christianity respectively. In 1378 the Catholic Church was divided in two between Avignon and Rome with the Scottish bishops siding with the Avignon papacy, (multiple popes claimed to be the legitimate one). A big reason for this was that the Scottish had a mutual enemy with the French – the English. In 1296 the English king invaded Scotland to claim the throne beginning over fifty years of conflict between the Scottish and English. Thanks to the war and the papacy settling in Rome this meant that Scottish bishops were looking for a new home, and Henry Wardlaw, Bishop of St. Andrews, ensured they found a new one in St. Andrews where a new university was founded. Getting its own university allowed Scottish bishops to be trained in Scotland, ensuring it remained visibly separate from England.

Glasgow, meanwhile, was emerging as a major city in Scotland. With a significant cathedral surrounding St. Mungo the eventual city was developing a unique identity that would continue up to this day. Mary, Queen of Scots, would get to her second husband, Lord Darnley, in Glasgow in 1565 showing how quickly Glasgow was emerging as a major centre of power rivalling that of St. Andrews and the capital of Edinburgh. This was just over a century after the founding of the University of Glasgow. The city had been an essential base of the anti-English nobles during the Wars of Independence, with William Wallace being betrayed and captured just north of Glasgow in 1305. While Scotland is geographically small it is difficult to traverse. Mountains and rugged roads made overland travel difficult, and going by ship was treacherous thanks to some of the strongest winds on the planet. This meant students heading between Glasgow and St. Andrews had a difficult time getting there, and even then St. Andrews had few students. Perhaps ten a year graduated from St. Andrews before 1450, and many Scottish students found it more desireable to study in France or Cologne instead of St. Andrews.

History Rhyming – University, Travel, and Brazil

Scottish students before the 1500s were not the only ones in history who had to travel far for a university education. Elite Brazilians during Portuguese rule had a similar experience. Unlike the Spanish, for the Portuguese Brazil was a land simply of extraction – it was only to be developed to ensure the economy, that ran on enslaved labour, would produce goods to be sent back to Portugal. That meant, especially after the Jesuits were expelled in 1759, local elite Brazilians lacked opportunities for higher education unless if they could afford to send their children to the University of Coimbra in Portugal itself. It took until 1792 for the Portuguese monarchs to allow for an institute of higher education in Brazil, the Royal Academy of Artillery, Fortification and Drawing in Rio de Janeiro. In contrast, the Spanish had founded its first university in the Americas in 1538 via a papal bull. It would be Napoleon who caused the Portuguese to open universities in Brazil. Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal led to the royal family to flee to Brazil, and while there they began recreating Portugal in the Americas, including actually having local universities.

Founding the University of Glasgow

Glasgow was now in a prime position to have its own university. The presence of a major cathedral with its own patron saint; it was more accessible for those in west Scotland; and the king was wanting to stretch his wings. After a long minority James II was able to rule in his own right in 1449, and the young king had inherited a kingdom whose court was dominated by the Douglas family and the memory of English invasion still relatively fresh. After all, James II’s father, James I, had been kidnapped by the English and kept as prisoner, albeit quite comfortably, from 1406 until 1424. While the papal bull had credited James with petitioning the pope for the creation of a university, in reality it was the Bishop of Glasgow, William Turnbull, who did this. The bishop was glad to get a university, and the pope seemingly agreeing with the young king would have done wonders to solidify his standing.

The university would officially be founded by the papal bull on January 7, 1451. Like with many earlier universities it lacked an official campus so classes were held at the cathedral. After all, the university was founded as a way to develop a class that would aid in the running of the Church itself. Largely based on the running of St. Andrews the University of Glasgow adopted the Parisian model – the French influence from the exiled Avignon bishops were then introduced to Scotland with the founding of the first university. After five years of study students would be awarded a Masters in Arts after studying arts, theology, law, philosophy, and/or medicine. Those who completed three years study would, instead, be awarded a Bachelor of Arts. Students that achieved the level of Master were given the chance to vote in the election of the chancellor, a suprising democratic impulse that would last until 1977. This was not unique to Glasgow with St. Andrews, Prague, and Vienna also allowing this opportunity. Universities were expected to produce a certain type of student, one that accepted a pedagogy rather than engaged with it. This meant they were all, quite literally, ‘singing from the same prayer sheet’ and were, therefore, seen as equals.

The University of Glasgow did not quickly produce the cohort of Scottish clergy and bureaucrats that those who had founded it had intended. The more ambitious potential students still went to France to get their education, especially Louvain where Turnbull had been educated. Michael Lynch estimated that both St. Andrews and Glasgow had produced around 100 graduates by 1540. The prestige of other continental universities took students away from the Scottish universities, and it would take the formation of more universities in Scotland (Aberdeen and Edinburgh) for Scottish students to remain in Scotland. While the University of Glasgow did not create the large base of educated masters as initially hoped, it helped Glasgow’s prestige. It would be no coincidence that by the end of the century the cathedral-university allowed for it to successfully have its own archbishopric.

Other Events:

Other events happened in the first quarter of 1451. Here are some of them:

• January 27 would see a peace treaty signed at Naumberg between two brothers, Frederick II of Saxony and William III of Thuringia, ending their conflict – the Saxon Fratricidal War.
• February 3, the Ottoman sultan Murad II would die allowing for his son Mehmed II to inherit the throne. In just a few years Mehmed would conquer Constantinople.
• March 26, an alliance would be made between Albania and Naples at Gaeta. This was Albania’s attempt to escape Ottoman domination by willingly becoming a vassal of Naples as a counter-weight.

Bibliography:

• David de la Croix, Alice Fabre, Frederic Docquier, and Robert Stelter, ‘The Academic Market and The Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000–1800)’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 22:4, (2024), 1541-1589
• Thomas Fudge, ‘The Schism and the Conciliar Movement’, in Stephen Mossman, (ed.), Debating Medieval Europe: The Central and Late Middle Ages, c.1050-1450, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025), 320-346
• Avner Grief, ‘Family Structure, Institutions, and Growth: The Origins and Implications of Western Corporations’, AEA Papers and Proceedings, 96:2, (2006), 308-312
• Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History, (London: Pimlico, 1992)
• Fitzroy MacLean, Scotland: A Concise History, Fifth Edition, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019)
• Michael Moss, Moira Rankin, and Lesley Richmond, Who, Where, and When: The History and Constitution of the University of Glasgow, (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2001)
• Neil Robertson, The Little History of Glasgow, (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2024)
• Walter Ruegg, ‘Themes’, in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, Volume One: Universities in the Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3-34
• Andreas Sohn, ‘Colleges and the University of Paris, Professors and Students, Religion and Politics Some Remarks on the History of Europe in the Late Middle Ages (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)’, in Anja-Silvia Goeing, Glyn Parry, and Mordechai Feingold, (eds.), Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Learning, (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 17-42
• Jacques Verger, ‘Patterns’, in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, Volume One: Universities in the Middle Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 35-68
• Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, Second Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Zoopedia: Humboldt Squid

Welcome back to 2026’s Month of Horror and we are looking at one of the ocean’s most infamous and terrifying animals. It is really something when Jeremy Wade of River Monsters was scared of this animal. Nicknamed by local fisherman as diablos rojos, Red Devils, this is the humboldt squid.

Taxonomy and Evolution

The humboldt squid has the scientific name Dosidicus gigas and is the only member of its genus. These squid get their name from the Humboldt stream. They belong to an order of squid called Oegopsida, and is one of the orders that make up the group that we call ‘squid’. These squids are commonly referred to as ‘pelagic squid’ due to their habitat of open oceans, including the famous giant squid. The genus Dosidicus actually has fossil evidence with the powerful beaks being preserved dating back to the Pliocene epoch, 5-2.5 million years ago. It is difficult to determine the evolution history beyond this as humboldt squid generally live in deep waters where it is impossible to find fossils.

Biology and Behaviour

Humboldt squid can grow to be quite large and are some of the largest species of squid – of course they are dwarfed by the giant and colossal squids. The mantle, the main part of the body, can reach lengths of 1.5 to 2 metres (5 to 6 feet) with their eight arms and two longer tentacles extending their length up to 4 metres. Most do not reach those lengths, often being eaten or simply dying of old age before they come close to those largest sizes. Humboldt squid can reach quite heavy weights with some of them reaching up to 50 kilograms, almost my weight. Despite being called ‘red devils’ they are not always red – when they are pulled out of the water their skin changes colour to a dark red. Many cephalopods can change their colouration thanks to pigments in their skin, and Humboldt squid keep in with this trend. Humboldt squid females are generally larger than the males.

Humboldt squid communicate using their skin pigments to change colouration. Flashes of different colours are used to communicate with one another, attract prey, and scare off predators. Normally they are a brown or a rusty colouration, and will sometimes flicker red and white. These squids also have their long tentacles covered in 100 to 200 suckers with hooks on them – these hooks are easily capable of tearing into flesh to make it easier to eat. Two fins on the mantle helps them change direction as they propel themselves through the water, and like with many other squids they can propel themselves incredibly quickly. Some have been clocked at 24 km/h (or 15 mph).

Humboldt squid live in large shoals in the hundreds, something which has made them dangerous to fishermen. As a squid begins thrashing, or detect the struggling of a fisherman, tens to hundreds of squid could converge on them with their hooks and beaks. Humboldt squid reproduce sexually, and the males have a special tentacle which he literally stabs the mantle of the female. This injects sperm into the female which eventually fertilises her eggs. The females will lay three masses of eggs which float together in a clump of jelly that consists of over a million eggs, sometimes two million eggs. When the eggs hatch the squid grows quickly. They only live for a year, or maybe two years at maximum.

Diet and Predators

Humboldt squid are carnivorous, and very infamously aggressive as they hunt for food. As mentioned, they use their colour changes to attract prey and then use their tentacles to tear apart prey which are further torn apart by the beak. Most of their diet consists of small fish, other cephalopods, and small crustaceans, but most of their diet consists of other Humboldt squid. If a squid is injured the others will tear it apart, and when people fish for the squid on lines it attracts more squid. They are eaten by other animals, especially the smaller squid, including fur seals, sharks, sperm whales, orca, and sea birds. A 2018 paper found that thresher sharks had a significant part of their diet consisted of Humboldt squid.

Distribution and Habitat

Humboldt squid are found in the eastern Pacific, especially off the coast of the Americas. During the day they are found in deep waters, over 250 metres down, but at night they follow their food closer to the surface where they are more likely to encounter humans. They have been traditionally been found in warmer waters, normally from Mexico to Peru, although as global waters have become warmer through the El Niño effect. Humboldt squid have been moving out of their normal habitat and have been moving further north and south – as far south as Chile and as far north as Canada. Normally, the best place to see wild Humboldt squid was in the Sea of Cortez in the Gulf of California.

Conservation and Threats

As Humboldt squid live in deep water and migrate over wide distances it has been difficult to determine if they are rare or not. In 2014 the IUCN tried to evaluate the squid but found that there was not simply enough data to give them a rating, and no attempt has been made since then. Global warming seems to be benefiting them as they have been found in formerly quite cold waters, and this can have a devastating knock-on effect as the squid are now competing with local wildlife. They are a popular food source in Baja California, Peru, and Chile with their large size providing a lot of meat from just one squid.

Bibliography:

• ‘The Deep’, Blue Planet II, directed by Orla Doherty, (BBC: 2017)
• ‘Humboldt Squid’, Mexican Marine Life.org, [Accessed 24/10/2025]
• ‘Humboldt Squid’, Oceana, [Accessed 24/10/2026]
• I. Barratt and L. Allcock, ‘Dosidicus gigas (Humboldt Squid)’, IUCN Red List, (2014), [Accessed 23/10/2026]
• Malcolm Clarke and John Fitch, ‘Statoliths of Cenozoic Teuthoid Cephalopods from North America’, Palaeontology, 22:2, (1979), 53-55
• Adriana Gonzalez-Pestana, Nicolas Acuna-Perales, Francisco Cordova, Javier Coasca, Eliana Alfaro, Joanna Alfaro-Shigueto, and Jeffrey Mangel, ‘Feeding habits of thresher sharks Alopias sp. in northern Peru: predators of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas)’, Journal of the Marine Biology Association of the United Kingdom, 99:3, (2019), 695-702
• Jessica Kurth and Michael Garzio, ‘Dosidicus gigas‘, Animal Diversity Web, (08/03/2008), [Accessed 24/10/2026]
• River Monsters, ‘Even Jeremy Wade is Scared of the Humboldt Squid’, YouTube.com, (27/07/2025), [Accessed 24/10/2026]
• Louis D. Zeidberg and Bruce H. Robison, ‘Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, in the eastern North Pacific’, PNAS, 104:31, (2007), 12948-12950

Myths, Legends, Religion, and Faith: Onryō

Japanese cinema in the 1990s and 2000s produced two of the scariest movies put to film. The first was Ring (1995) which featured a cursed tape that, when watched, would cause the vengeful spirit of a woman called Sadako to kill the viewer. The second, released in 2002 was Ju-On which depicted a cursed house in Tokyo where the spirits of a murdered family come back and kill whoever steps foot in the house. These two films spawned entire franchises including video games, American remakes, and even a crossover film. However, both depict a staple of Japanese folklore, the onryō. Onryō are not just simply ghosts, but specifically venegful ghosts. On means ‘grudge’ and ryō means ‘spirit’ meaning onryō literally translates to a vengeful spirit. For 2026’s Month of Horror we will focus on these spirits and specific ideas of onryō in Japanese folklore.

Ghosts in Japan

The Ghost of Oyuki

One thing common across world cultures are beliefs that an aspect of the dead can come visit the living, crossing the mortal veil between the afterlife and the mortal world. The Irish celebration of Samhein, which evolved into Halloween, is celebrated at a time when it is believed that the veil between our world and the afterlife is at its thinnest, and the spirits of the dead can pass into our world. While this is potentially a time to be fearful in Ireland, in Mexico it is a time of joy. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) combines indigenous festivities with the Catholic All Saints’ Day, and people celebrate the spirits of their deceased loved ones returning. Japanese belief in spirits has been influenced by both local beliefs and Confucian and Buddhist concepts introduced from China and Korea. Principally, as Michiko Iwasaka and Jennifer Yoo both highlight, there is the konoyo (the world here) and the anoyo (the world over there) creating a spatially indistinct spirit world that Shinto, Confucian, and Buddhist beliefs can all accept.

Japanese spirits can be classified as yōkai, bakemono or yūrei. Yōkai and bakemono are broad categories of supernatural and preturnatural beings, both which can include ghosts. However, for the purposes of today’s post the more important category is that of yūrei meaning ‘faint spirit’. Some of the stories of yūrei developed from early-Shinto ancestor cult practices, some of which continue today with the Obon festival, sometime between August and September, where the living come together and honour the spirits of the ancestors. As Iwasaka argues, the dead have a keen interest in the living, so will return to intervene in the lives of their descendants. However, not all yūrei are simply ancestors visiting their living relatives, but are instead those trapped in some form of liminality. These are the spirits of the living tied to a specific place, but are not truly in our world and cannot move onto the anoyo. Being unable to pass on could be caused by a violent death, improper burial ritual, or having unfinished business. Most of these stories came from either the Heian era (794-1185) or the Edo era (1600-1868) which were periods of unprecedented peace and political centralisation. The Heian set the groundwork and the Edo made the genre flourish. During the Edo yūrei stories became an entire genre called kaidan, or strange tale, that even began a game. A group would gather at night and light 100 candles. The group would tell kaidan, and with each story they would snuff out a candle until all light was put out, and potentially summoned a yūrei. One famous depiction of a yūrei was by painter Ōkyo Maruyama’s The Ghost of Oyuki, which we have discussed here, in 1750 after he was visited in the night by the ghost of a deceased mistress called Oyuki.

The Vengeful Spirit

When you die, according to Japanese spirit beliefs, the last thoughts going through your mind determine your afterlife. Those who die with feelings of hatred or burning vengeance return as onryō, although political elites who died because of political intrigue will come back as the similar goryō. Most depictions of onryō are of women, often wearing a white robe or burial kimono, and in more recent depictions with their hair loose covering most of their face. These are the onryō you will more likely see in media as this is the form popularised during the Edo period, and was then spread through kabuki theatre and kaidan. However, the earlier depictions of onryō were mostly male and were goryō during the Heian period. One of the most notable goryō was Michizane no Sugawara (854-903). He had been a key minister who threatened the monopoly of power of the Fujiwara clan in the Heian court, so they accused him of treason leading to his exile to Kyushu in 901. In 905 one of his attendants built a shrine to Michizane in what Allan Grapard described as one of the earliest goryō cults. In the next two decades members of the Fujiwara clan who had plotted against Michizane died under mysterious circumstances culminating in the imperial palace catching fire in 930 during a thunder storm. One of Michizane’s accusers died in the fire. One of the courtiers apparently had a dream where Michizane said he would continue to plague the court unless given a cult following which evolved into the Kitano shrine-temple complex by the 980s.

Most of the most noted stories of the onryō come later during the Edo period. Many of the older stories were now applied to the masses, where kabuki theatre especially allowed stories of onryō to cross class boundaries. With the onryō the area is cursed where the vengeaful onryō could cause natural disasters like earthquakes, forest fires, and storms. The onryō was either invisible or appear as they did in life, except that they were pale and wearing white (either a robe or burial kimono). In kabuki theatre the performers often wear masks so people sitting further away from the front could tell the emotions of the performers. This has meant that onryō have been associated with hannya masks which are typically feminine and associated with demons. While most stories of onryō feature a victimised woman, as Jennifer Yoo has argued, we are not meant to sympathise with the onryō. They are meant to be harmful beings even if they started out as a victim.

Oiwa and Okiku

Oiwa as an onryō

There are two notable stories of onryō, although one could be more accurately described as a regular kaidan instead of an onryō story. We will return to analysing the tales after we go through the narrative. The main oryō story that I want to discuss is the murder of Oiwa. From the Yotsuya Kaidan, first performed in 1825, that features a samurai called Iemon who wishes to abandon his sickly wife Oiwa for another woman, Oume, who also is in love with him. This is despite the fact that Iemon murdered Oiwa’s father when he refused to grant Iemon the right to marry his daughter, and ever since Iemon has been claiming to Oiwa that he is trying to find her father’s killer. Meanwhile, Oume’s granfather, Kihei, as a way to make it easier for Iemon to abandon Oiwa has a nurse visit the sickly Oiwa with ‘medicine’ which disfigures her. Seeing her reflection drives Oiwa to desperation and she kills herself. This causes her to return as an onryō, haunting Iemon and causing the deaths of the members of Kihei’s family. Performers would play her wearing a mask with a large eye to represent her injuries from the poison. The play ends with Iemon, isolated in the mountains, being driven insane by Oiwa until he is mercy killed.

The other tale has been classified as an onryō one, although it is not as explicit as Yotsura Kaidan so has been seen as being another kaidan. Banchō Sarayashiki began life as a folk story that in the mid-1700s was formally recorded and turned into a full play which has been adapted several times. This kaidan revolves around Okiku, a maid working in a castle, something Himeji Castle, who caught the eye of the castle’s samuari lord. The samurai had ten ceremonial dishes which Okiku was in charge of taking care of, so he used this to force her into a relationship. One day he hid, or broke, a dish, and a distraught Okiku kept counting to nine as she tried to find the last dish. The samurai offered her a chance to ‘redeem’ herself – become his lover. Okiku refused so the angered samurai had her beaten and thrown into a well where she died. From there Okiku became an onryō, but her haunting would be different. From the well every night she would repeatedly count to nine and scream at ten. Depending on the telling changes what happened next. In some tellings the samurai’s guilt drove him to suicide, in others a monk came to perform an exorcism before the samurai did this. The monk broke the curse by yelling ‘ten’ – Okiku now had the tenth dish and her soul became at peace.

Especially with Banchō Sarayashiki, these tales have slight changes depending on the adaptation, and with it they became two of the three ‘great kaidan’. These two stories also inspired the famous J-horror franchises – The Ring and Ju-on. In both tales the onryō were depicted with long, unkempt hair in white clothing which came to influence both Kayako from Ju-on and Sadako from The Ring. Like Oiwa, Kayako was a wife murdered because of a selfish husband whose eye becomes a noted part of her image, and, like Okiku, Sadako was beaten and cast into a well where numbers came into their story. The introduction of both Oiwa and Okiku represent the preservation of societal hierarchies. Oiwa is the devoted wife and daughter respecting her position while Okiku is a diligent worker who respects her class standing. Their deaths cause an inversion of societal norms, so much so that we are expected to lose sympathy for the onryō and see them as antagonistic. Instead of patriarchal and class hierarchies the female onryō upend this, even down to their hair. In Edo Japan hair styles were a marker of class, so the mass of hair of the onryō fully disrupted class as now their class could not be seen.

Gender and Onryō

Technically, onryō are not gendered, and anyone who died with strong feelings of vengeance or hatred could become an onryō. However, from the Edo period onryō in particular came to be associated with women. As Jennifer Yoo has argued, the female onryō represents a patriarchal attempt to maintain control over a monstrous female. We would naturally be sympathetic to onryō – they are often women who have faced abuse and have been murdered by their spouse. However, their femininity is broken down and transformed into the monstrous whose anger impacts all those around her. Oiwa wipes out an entire family; Okiku’s counting torments others, not just the samurai. In some adaptations the samurai is not punished – one adaptation from the 1910s has the samurai kill himself to specifically be with Okiku. Far from punishing him he is rewarded by being with the woman he brutalised. This is especially the case when we compare onryō to the more traditionally masculine gonryō. The gonryō are appeased by becoming figures of worship, kami, whereas onryō face exorcism.

Onryō Today

The inclusion of onryō in popular culture has continued, the kabuki theatre and kaidan stories of the previous century ensuring their place in contemporary culture. Kaidan stories featuring onryō were some of the first to be adapted to Japanese cinema, and the earlier mentioned Edo onryō stories have been adapted several times into movies. As referenced throughout we also have two major J-horror franchises revolving around onryō: The Ring and Ju-on. The Ring began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, and revolves around a cursed video tape featuring horrific images and a well. The video tape is a vector for an onryō called Sadako, a young psychic woman who was abused by her adopted family and cast down a well. She would eventually die down there and her vengeance would transform her into an onryō through a cursed video tape. Whoever watched the tape would have seven days to live before Sadako made them die of fright; the only way to break the curse would be to make a copy of the tape and continuing the cycle. In 1998 two short movies, Katasumi and 4444444444, would provide the basis for Ju-on. This franchise revolves around a cursed house, whoever enters the house is destined to die, and wherever they die also becomes infected by the curse. This curse is caused by an onryō called Kayako who was murdered by her jealous husband alongside her son, Toshio, and cat. The spirits of the three victims became a vengeful curse.

Both Sadako and Kayako reflect many of the earlier stories of onryō where their hatred spills over from those who wronged them to impact those around them. However, while in many onryō tales feature a way to break the curse this does not work in Ring and Ju-on which, instead, sees the curse expanding. The only time that it seems that the curse is broken was the movie that set them against each other, and instead of breaking the respective curses it fuses them together. However, what continues with older stories is that by becoming onryō we can only see them as monsters, not as beings to pity. Onryō continue in popular culture with the recent video game Ghost of Yōtei picking up the story. Set in early-Edo Japan the protagonist is avenging her murdered family becoming a physical onryō.

Bibliography:

• Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Spirits and Ghosts in World Mythology, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016)
• Zack Davisson, The Ultimate Guide to Japanese Yokai: Ghosts, Demons, Monsters and Other Mythical Creatures from Japan, (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2024)
• Allan G. Grapard, ‘Religious Practices’, in Donald Shively and William McCullough, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 2, Heian Japan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 517-575
• Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken, Ghost and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends, (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1994)
• Keisuke Nishimoto, Strange Tales from Japan: 99 Chilling Stories of Yokai, Ghosts, Demons and the Supernatural, Translated by William Scott Wilson, (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2021)
• Dan O’Sullivan, ‘Japan’s Onryō Spirits Inhabit a Purgatory of Revenge and Cosmic Rage’, Atlas Obscura, (27/10/2020), [Accessed 19/10/2026]
• Jennifer Yoo, ‘Hair becomes her: Presenting the ‘monstrous’ feminine in Japanese horror’, Asian Cinema, 36, (2025), 225-237
• Jennifer Yoo, ‘Monstrous Wives, Murderous Lovers, and Dead Wet Girls: Examining the Feminine Vengeful Ghost in Japanese Traditional Theatre and Horror Cinema’, Unpublished PhD in Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, (2022)

Fungapedia: Devil’s Fingers Fungus

Welcome back to 2026’s Month of Horror, and this week we are looking at perhaps the most freaky looking fungus on the planet. With its red body and tendrils this fungus has earned its name of ‘Devil’s fingers’, and the smell of the fungus has helped it earn this title.

Taxonomy and Evolution

The Devil’s fingers fungus has several other common names including the octopus stinkhorn and the squid stinkhorn. All these names refer to the same species which have the scientific name Clathrus archeri. It is one of just over 20 species of fungi belonging to the genus Clathrus, and this genus belongs to a family of fungi called Phallaceae. This family is better known as the stinkhorns for their strong and awful smelling odour, although the family name is in relation to something else. Biologists thought most of the stinkhorns resemble a certain…appendage and named the family after this. Stinkhorns are unique fungi and convergently evolved to have a similar biology to certain species of flowering plant.

Biology

Devil’s fingers go through two very different stages in their life. Like other stinkhorns, they begin life in the ‘egg stage’. In this stage, they resemble small eggs and somewhat are like eggs as the arms of the fungus will eventually grow from these eggs. The eggs range in colour from a light brown to white, although the brown colouration is far more common. Fungi often survive by breaking down organic matter, and Devil’s fingers take nutrients from breaking down decaying plant matter. Not only does this help the fungus grow and develop, but it also helps key nutrients to break apart and return to the soil. Coming from the Devil’s fingers eggs are root-like structures called mycelium which spreads across a wide area and transports both water and nutrients to the main body. The eggs are between 4 and 5 centimetres high. During the summer the eggs ‘hatch’ and the famous arms come out. These arms, or tentacles, are a dark red, and generally Devil’s fingers have between 4 and 8 tentacles. Devil’s fingers’ tentacles can reach up to 14 cm in length.

When the Devil’s fingers burst from their eggs it is clear that they belong to the stinkhorn family. Their smell has been described as resembling a mixture of rotting meat, poo, and garbage. On the tentacles are black patches covered in a slime which gives the fungus its horrific smell. This slime is called ‘gleba’ and is vital in reproduction. The gleba is full of spores and develops that strong smell as a way to attract flies like certain species of flowering plants. Flies will land on the tentacles, eat up some gleba, and ingest spores. The flies will fly off with the spores ready to germinate in their digestive system, and the fly will soon defecate as gleba acts as a natural laxative. As the fly poops the spores are released allowing the next generation of Devil’s fingers to begin growing. There are some debates about whether Devil’s fingers taste nice, but they are edible. Why you would want to eat a fungus that smells of dog poop is beyond my understanding, but that has not put some scientists off.

Distribution and Habitat

Devil’s fingers have to rely on dead plant matter and are found in more temperate climates. However, where Devil’s fingers are naturally found has been up for debate. It seems that they certainly come from Tasmania, but it is unclear if the Devil’s fingers found in Aotearoa are naturally found there or were introduced. The First World War would accidentally introduce this fungus to so many more countries as their spores were accidentally transported in bundles of Australian cotton. In 1980 the first of the fungi were found in the Colombian Andes, and in 1982 the first sighting of Devil’s fingers in the USA happened, in Santa Cruz County, California.

Conservation and Threats

The IUCN Red List has not evaluated the Devil’s fingers, but it has identified the Devil’s fingers as being a highly invasive species. From potentially a small an area as Tasmania the spores have spread across the world as far apart as the UK to Colombia to Madagascar. They were properly introduced to Europe, by accident, thanks to the First World War with sightings of them taking place in France and the UK in 1914. From there it spread to Belgium and east across Europe to Romania and Ukraine. A 2021 paper has argued that the fungus will likely be spreading further north in the next few years as global warming turns the normally seasonally freezing temperature into temperate climates.

Bibliography:

• ‘Devil’s Fingers Fungus’, The Wildlife Trusts, [Accessed 17/10/2026]
• Animalogic, ‘The Devil’s Fingers Fungus is Straight Out of Alien‘, YouTube.com, (26/02/2021), [Accessed 17/10/2026]
• David Arora and William Burk, ‘Clathrus Archeri, A Stinkhorn New to North America’, Mycologia, 74:3, (1982), 501-504
• S.D. Johnson and A. Jürgens, ‘Convergent evolution of carrion and faecal scent mimicry in fly-pollinated angiosperm flowers and a stinkhorn fungus’, South African Journal of Botany, 76, (2010), 796-807
• Marcin Pietras, Marta Kolanowska, and Marc-André Selosse, ‘Quo vadis? Historical distribution and impact of climate change on the worldwide distribution of the Australasian fungus Clathrus archeri (Phallales, Basidiomycota)’, Mycological Progress, 20, (2021), 299-311
• César Augusto Pinzón-Osorio and Jonás Pinzón-Osorio, ‘Primer registro de Clathrus archeri (Berk.) Dring 1980 (Phallales, Clathraceae) para los andes colombianos’, Boletin Cientifico Centro de Museos, 24:2, (2020), 15-24
• Gill Pitts, (ed.), The Natural History Book, Second Edition, (London: DK, 2021)
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, ‘The Devil’s Fingers, Dig Deeper Episode 15, Kew’, YouTube.com, (21/10/2025), [Accessed 18/10/2026]

Crime and Punishment: The Hammersmith Ghost

In October 1803 the village of Hammersmith, now a part of London, was being haunted. A ghostly image was stalking the village and had apparently started attacking the people of Hammersmith. After several months of being haunted an excise officer called Francis Smith took a musket and began hunting for the ghost, and when he saw a man in white he fired thinking he had hit the ghost. In reality, he hit a bricklayer called Thomas Milwood, killing him. As part of 2026’s Month of Horror we will look at the case of the Hammersmith Ghost which caused a legal debate in Britain on the position of self-defence under false impressions.

The Ghost

The first reported cases of a ghost that would haunt Hammersmith for the next few months would first be reported in either late-October or early-November 1803. A white shrouded figure was spotted around the graveyard of the local church and in some of the alleys. What actually happened with these sightings is unclear due to the stories only being written down in the aftermath of the shooting. Regardless of their veracity, these stories created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia among the people of Hammersmith. This led to varying descriptions of the Ghost. While they all claimed to see a white shrouded figure some reports described the Ghost as wearing the ‘hide of a calf, with a pair of enormously large horns and cloven feet.’ This description was perhaps even more terrifying for the locals as the horns and cloven feet would have evoked a more terrifying figure – the devil himself.

The Ghost put fear into the hearts of anyone who saw it. In one story a pregnant woman saw the Ghost and was grabbed causing her to faint. A few days later she would die from the shock. Whether this was true was debatable as there are no reports dating to before the trial that can corroborate this – we do not even have a name for the woman. London newspaper The Morning Post would report that the Ghost had made women and children ‘So terror-struck…that not one will venture over the threshold after five o’clock in the evening’. Despite the belittling approach of the newspaper it was apparent that men also were terrified of the Ghost. In another unverified story a cab driver saw the Ghost and was so scared that he ran away leaving his horses and passengers to the mercy of the Ghost.

Ghosts in England

Ghosts were far from unheard of in English history. Susan Owens has considered the appearance of saints following the Norman Conquest as a form of ghost sighting, and ideas of spirits returning to the land of the living appear in records dating back to the Romans. Romans, who also had their own ideas of being visited by apparitions, had reported local British beliefs about spirits which merged with their own ideas. Most famously, in nearby Ireland there was Samhain, which evolved into Halloween, where the spirits of the dead would return to visit the living when the line between the living and the dead was at its weakest. Ghosts in pre-Reformation Europe were often regarded as the souls of the dead who were trapped in Purgatory, being unable to pass onto either Heaven or Hell. While the post-Reformation educated elite tried to dispel notions of ghosts as optical illusions, as under Protestantism Purgatory was no longer a thing, popular ideas of ghosts persisted.

Popular stories going into the 1700s explained ghosts as the spirits of the departed who were unable to pass on to the next life for whatever reason. A popular genre was a haunting by a deceased lover who were displeased that their living partner had moved on. Ghosts could also visit the living to give warnings, advice, or information. They even went to court. In 1757 the Edinburgh High Court put Duncan Terig and Alexander Bain MacDonald on trial for the murder of Sergeant Arthur Davies five and a half years earlier. The ghost of the deceased apparently visited Alexander MacPherson to tell him where the ghost’s body was buried and who had killed him – somehow Davies had learnt Gaelic beyond the grave as he spoke to MacPherson in Gaelic. This belief allowed the people of Hammersmith to identify who the Ghost might have been in life. A few years prior a Thomas Flynn assaulted his estranged wife, went to the cemetery, and slit his throat and stabbed himself. Flynn’s violent death and with his death being by suicide meant that his spirit would be unable to pass on and would be barred from Heaven.

Assault and Murder

Through December 1803 and early-January 1804 the people of Hammersmith were increasingly paranoid thanks to the Ghost. This was especially the case as there had been reports that the Ghost had been assaulting people, mainly women. However, one case had a man being violently attacked by the Ghost. Thomas Groom, a brewer’s servant, was walking through the cemetery with a friend when the Ghost grabbed him from behind and held him by the neck. The Ghost eventually ran off and Groom reportedly got ill from a mix of shock and being throttled. As Groom had described the Ghost being soft and wearing felt certain members of the community became convinced that the Ghost was actually a man. By the end of December local night watchman William Girdler began organising patrols to look for the Ghost, and on December 29 he apparently saw the Ghost. He gave chase and managed to grab onto the Ghost who shook off its shroud. Due to the darkness Girdler could not see the Ghost’s face who managed to run off into the night.

Things would deadly on 3 January 1804. Tax excise officer Francis Smith wanted to take part in the patrols and had spent the evening talking to locals in the pub. He had approached Girdler to ask the night watchman to join him on a patrol, something Girdler agreed to when he had finished his rounds. By this time Smith had not only declared to the pub that he intended to hunt down the Ghost, but he had grabbed and loaded a musket. Upon entering Black Lion Lane Smith saw a man in white, yelled out a warning, and fired. However, the figure was not a Ghost, but a bricklayer. Smith had just shot and killed Thomas Milwood. The young bricklayer was wearing the white clothing of his profession, and had actually ignored his mother-in-law who advised him to wear a coat after Milwood had already been mistaken for the Ghost. He had just left the house of his parents and sister looking for his wife who had not yet arrived at home. Upon realising that he shot and killed Milwood the new murderer collapsed and let himself be arrested.

Trial of the Ghost-Killer

The ensuing court case would propel the Hammersmith Ghost from a local story to a national one. Francis Smith never denied that he shot and killed Thomas Milwood, he instead argued that he thought Milwood was the Ghost and had fired. This would become a major bone of contention during the trial. Although the papers said that Smith was sober, he had spent the evening in the pub and was clearly not sober. Milwood’s sister testified that she heard Smith cry out a warning to Milwood, but that he fired immediately without getting a response. He would have been close to Milwood because Milwood had gunpowder on his face! Again, as Smith never denied killing Milwood the real question was if he had done it meliciously. Alcohol, a dark night, and a desire to end the Ghost had driven Smith to kill, but he would claim it would be in self-defence. The jury decided that, while he did kill Milwood, that Smith had done so under mistaken identity, and they gave a verdict of manslaughter. However, the sitting judge Archibald MacDonald was not happy. He sent it back to the jury with a comment, later reported on in the press:

However disgusted the jury might feel in their own minds with the abominable person guilty of the misdemeanor of terrifying the neighborhood, still the prisoner had no right to construe such misdemeanor into a capital offence, or to conclude that a man dressed in white was a ghost … In this case there was a deliberate carrying of a loaded gun, which the prisoner concluded he was entitled to fire, but which he really was not; and he did fire it with a rashness which the law does not excuse. In all the circumstances of the case, no man is allowed to kill another rashly.

The Newgate Calendar

Effectively, the judge meant that there was no actual law broken if Milwood had been the Ghost, other than being a public nuisance, and that did not give anyone the right to become a vigilante. It was to be a black-or-white verdit: guilty or not guilty. With that the jury returned a guilty verdict, and with a guilty verdict for murder this meant Francis Smith was sentenced to death. Luckily for him the reporting of the trial had reached the highest office in Britain, that of the king. A royal pardon reduced the sentence from the death penalty to a year in prison.

The Ghost and Ghosts

Whether there ever was a genuine Hammersmith Ghost is up to whether you believe in ghosts or not. In my opinion, there was more than one Ghost as locals realised they could have fun and play pranks at their most innocent, or use it as a cover to assault women. This is not out of the question. Just a decade before London had been plagued by the ‘London Monster’ who would assault women for his own sexual pleasure before he was arrested and imprisoned. It is not out of the question that someone used the Hammersmith Ghost hysteria to assault women for their own pleasure. After all, most of the sightings involved just a white sheet so it would not be difficult for someone to replicate the Ghost. One person did confess to being the Ghost. During the trial a cobbler called James Graham confessed to have dressed up as a ghost to scare his apprentice in revenge for his apprentice scaring his children with ghost stories. Around three years later Graham would be arrested for being drunken and disorderly after Graham and another man tried to stop the police from arresting a sex worker.

The press coverage of the Hammersmith Ghost would have ripple effects. Other ‘ghost’ sightings and copycats would crop up during the trial itself. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal would report another apparent ghost in St. James’s Park in London, something which the paper linked to the Hammersmith Ghost. Eight years later another wave of ghost sightings broke out in Hammersmith and several nearby villages, all of which are now part of London, and the police soon arrested a man. Described as a ‘noted sporting figure’ we do not know who this man was as he skipped his trial. Ironically, the White Hart, where Thomas Milwood was brought when his body was found, is apparently haunted by the ghost of Milwood.

Law and Mistaken Identity

The Hammersmith Ghost would establish a legal precedent in the UK that would last until the 1980s. The conviction of Francis Smith began the precedent that acting on mistaken belief did not absolve someone of committing a crime, even in self-defence. For the next 170 years the Hammersmith Ghost haunted the UK legal system, but a court case in 1983 would change that. A man called Gladstone Williams witnessed one man assaulting another, and ended up assaulting the assaulter. However, it turned out the assaulter was preventing a man who had just mugged someone from getting away. The Hammersmith case initially held up and Williams was sentenced for assault, but he appealed and legal history was made. The following year the court heard the appeal and the judge made this verdict:

In a case of self-defence, where self-defence or the prevention of crime is concerned, if the jury came to the conclusion that the defendant believed, or may have believed, that he was being attacked or that a crime was being committed, and that force was necessary to protect himself or to prevent the crime, then the prosecution have not proved their case. If, however, the defendant’s alleged belief was mistaken and if the mistake was an unreasonable one, that may be a peaceful reason for coming to the conclusion that the belief was not honestly held and should be rejected. Even if the jury come to the conclusion that the mistake was an unreasonable one, if the defendant may genuinely have been labouring under it, he is entitled to rely upon it.

This effectively means that if someone performed some form of criminal act believing they were going to stop a crime, if it can be proved that the accused genuinely thought they were stopping a crime could absolve them. In the early-2000s this would be written directly into British law. The Hammersmith Ghost had been exorcised from the British legal system, and the precedent set by Francis Smith two centuries earlier was no longer relevant.

Bibliography:

Primary Sources

• Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, (21/01/1804)
• The Monthly Visitor, (01/1804)
• The Morning Post, (06/01/1804)
• ‘Francis Smith. Killing, murder. 11th January 1804’, (11/01/1804), The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, [Accessed 14/10/2026]
• Jonathan Goodman, (ed.), ‘A Surfeit of Spirits’, in Jonathan Goodman, (ed.), The Supernatural Murders, (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2011)
• Edwin Valetine Mitchell, (ed.), The Newgate Calendar, (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1926)

Secondary Sources

• Kelly Buchanan, ‘The Case of a Ghost Haunted England for Over Two Hundred Years’, Library of Congress Blogs, (30/10/2015), [Accessed 13/10/2026]
• Maureen Mackay, ‘The Hammersmith Ghost’, Regency Fiction Writers, (03/10/2023), [Accessed 13/10/2026]
• P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls and Other Spirits of the Dead, (Chalford: Tempus, 2007)
• Susan Owens, The Ghost: A Cultural History, (London: Tate Publishing, 2017)
• Storied, ‘Why This Ghost Sighting Was Different’, YouTube.com, (09/09/2026), [Accessed 15/10/2026]

Zoopedia: Red-bellied Piranha

Continuing the 2026 Month of Horror theme we are looking at a fish which has become infamous in the media for being a ravenous monster – the red-bellied piranha. Like most things in life the red-bellied piranha is not the monster that Hollywood has portrayed it as. This week we will look at this remarkable fish, and how it is not actually a monster.

Taxonomy and Evolution

The red-bellied piranha has the scientific name Pygocentrus nattereri with it sharing this genus with two other species. They belong to an order of fish called Characiformes which is a diverse order of fish that also includes tetras, but they specifically belong to a family called Serrasalmidae. This family is found exclusively in South America and not only includes piranhas, but also includes silver dollars and the very strange pacu. Around 92 species belong to this family, with piranhas first appearing in the fossil record during the Miocene, sometime between 15 and 11 million years ago.

Biology and Behaviour

Red-bellied piranha are large for piranhas reaching around 30 cm (around a foot) in length and reaching 1.81 kilograms (4 pounds). This might seem quite small, but that is largely because piranhas are actually quite small fish. These piranhas have an oval-shaped body which is strangely thin. Piranhas change colour as they age beginning life having silver scales with dark spots. As they age the red-bellied piranha develops black and gray scales which are actually incredibly shiny. This is something often overlooked with piranhas – their scales are highly reflective. What gives this piranha their name is their iconic belly which is a red or orange colour, something which is darker in females than the males. Their dorsal fin is quite small and black with an orange anal fin. Red-bellied piranhas have faces with a projecting lower jaw full of their infamous sharp teeth.

Piranha teeth are quite amazing. Piranhas have interlocking serrated teeth directly part of the jaw, and these sharp teeth are attached to strong muscles. This gives piranhas a strong bite, and for their size piranhas have one of the strongest bite forces of all vertebrates. The red-bellied piranha is overshadowed by the black piranha which, if scaled-up, would have a bite force more powerful than that of a great white shark. Red-bellied piranhas obviously use their jaws to tear apart prey, but they are also used for communication. Primarily, piranhas use their swimbladders in conjuncture with various muscles to produce sounds, although most of these sounds have been noted as being made when they are held in gillnets. However, other sounds are made by the snapping and contracting of the jaws which are especially used during the breeding season when they become more territorial. Piranhas have noticeably large eyes and nostrils as it gives them a way to navigate through the murky waters of the rivers they call home.

Red-bellied piranhas are shoaling fish, forming shoals of up to 30 fish. These shoals are not formed to attack animals as they swim through the water, if anything it is the opposite. Piranhas form shoals as a way to defend themselves from predators. The older, and larger, fish stick to the centre while the younger and smaller fish are on the outside of the shoal. A 2005 paper found that red-bellied piranhas in smaller shoals exhibit higher levels of anxiety compared to those in larger shoals. Piranhas are monogamous and form breeding pairs. Courtship involves swimming in circles in line with one another, and if successful the male will make a circular nest in sediment with vegetation reaching 15 cm in diameter. The female will lay thousands of eggs on the vegetation which the males then fertilise. The parents will protect the nest and this is when they are most aggressive. Most bites on humans happens at this time as the piranhas bite those who get too close.

Diet and Predators

We have seen it in the media – a shoal of piranhas reduce an unfortunate soul to a skeleton in seconds. Piranhas can certainly do this, but not to large animals. This myth was started by former US president Theodore Roosevelt who saw piranhas tear apart a cow. However, in reality locals had cornered off a shoal for a long period of time so they were starving. Normally, red-bellied piranha will only tear apart fish and sometimes smaller birds like egrets. On the show River Monsters, in a famous scene, the presenter Jeremy Wade poured blood into a piranha-filled pool and got in, and the piranhas swam away from him. Unless you are a fish or bird, or maybe a capybara, then piranhas will not tear your apart. Even then, red-bellied piranhas are more likely to nip at the fins of larger fish than eat them alive. Small fish, crustaceans, and insects make up most of their diet, and they eat a lot of fallen fruit. They are eaten by a lot of animals including larger fish, storks, caiman, otters, and river dolphins. There is another species of piranha which relies on the red-bellied piranha for food, but they are cleaners. The spotted piranha will eat parasites on the sides of red-bellied piranhas keeping the larger species clean and healthy.

Distribution and Habitat

Red-bellied piranha are freshwater tropical fish living in waters between 15 and 35 degrees Celsius in temperature. They are found in what is called ‘whitewater’ which is water with a neutral pH with a lot of sediment floating in it. This is mainly because their habitat is constantly shifting as rivers change course flooding forests that previously was on the land. Red-bellied piranhas are found across most of tropical South America reaching from Colombia and Venezuela in the north, across the Guianas and Brazil, and down through Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay to north Uruguay and Argentina. Some have been introduced to lakes in the US and China.

Conservation and Threats

The red-bellied piranha was last assessed by the IUCN in 2020 when they gave a classification of ‘Least Concern’ with their population being stable. Being hardy, adaptable fish found over a wide area they have managed to survive changes to their environment. For more specialised fish keepers they have become popular, although difficult. Their need for red meat and for biting the fins of other fish make them an expensive and difficult to care for fish. There is a captive breeding market which also means that they are not being taken from the wild to meet the demands for the pet trade.

Bibliography:

• ‘Red-Bellied Piranha’, Smithsonian Zoo, [Accessed 10/10/2026]
• G.L. Brejão, ‘Piranha-Vermelha’, IUCN Red List, (21/12/2020), [Accessed 10/10/2026]
• LivingZoo, ‘Piranhas: The Animal That Just Doesn’t Make Sense’, YouTube.com, (31/05/2026), [Accessed 10/10/2026]
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• Helder Queiroz and Anne E. Magurran, ‘Safety in numbers? Shoaling behaviour of the Amazonian red-bellied piranha’, Biology Letters, 1, (2005), 155-157

Sinners and History

Last year Ryan Coogler’s Sinners took the world by storm for its interesting plot, amazing acting, soundtrack, and world the movie is set in. It immediately became one of my favourite movies and this period drama set in an African-American community in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 took immense care to represent the time period in which it is set. Well, except for the vampires. It is Black History Month here in the UK and being October it is the Month of Horror. Sinners is a perfect vehicle to look at history. As I will be talking about key plot points in the movie this post will contain multiple spoilers.

Vampires

Vampires led by the Irish vampire Remmick are the main antagonists of Sinners, and for the most part they are representative of how we imagine vampires in the media. They burn in sunlight, drink blood, need to be invited in, and are weak to garlic and silver. Sinners does change up some of the vampire lore. Largely influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, media has created the concept of the ‘head vampire’, a progenitor or powerful vampire that can control other vampires. Sinners portrays the head vampire Remmick as leading a quasi-hive mind. When bitten Remmick has access to the memories of those he turned – speaking in Mandarin and revealing knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan based on those he turned – and those turned can likewise access his memories. This led to one of the most iconic scenes in the movie when Remmick led a traditional Irish folk dance for a congregation consisting of Deep South African-Americans, two Klansmen, and one Chinese man. This idea feeds into one of the themes of the movie itself – American ‘melting pot’ against the identity of minorities. The ability of ‘Preacher Boy’ Sammie to transcend time and space with his music attracted Remmick who wanted to reconnect with his lost past and promises the black community a world without racism, Jim Crow, or exclusion. However, this comes at the expense of them losing the ability to be themselves; their identity is subsumed into Remmick’s community. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourse of America being a ‘melting pot’ expected migrants to abandon their identity and become ‘American’. Instead of being African-American, Chinese, Choctaw, or Irish they had to be ‘American’, and communities that kept their culture were treated with distrust or, for Native Americans, genocide. We will expand on this idea later.

The characters are fully aware of what vampires are, which thankfully means that Sinners avoids the trope of going in depth of what vampires are, as by 1932 vampires were well known in the English-speaking world. A decade earlier Germany produced one of the first film adaptations of Dracula with Nosferatu, and in 1933 Universal’s famous Dracula starring Bela Lugosi would be released. However, what is unique about Sinners is that the lead vampire, Remmick, is Irish. Cultures across the world have developed stories of blood-sucking nocturnal demons independently – before consistent street lighting was available the dark was genuinely scary and dangerous, and blood keeps us alive. Ireland also had several tales of blood-sucking revenants such as Abhartach, a lord who rose from the dead and demanded blood from his town. There have been unconfirmed stories that Abhartach inspired a later Irish author – Bram Stoker. However, ‘vampires’ as we understand them emerged in popular culture largely from the popularisation of eastern European tales from Poland, Serbia, and Romania. Somewhat like we discussed with American culture and the melting pot, these ideas of vampires saw local blood-sucking creatures subsumed into the title of ‘vampire’. Abhartach became a vampire and another tale by an Irish writer brought together several ideas creating the modern vampire.

Music and Stories

Perhaps the most important part of Sinners is the importance of music and stories to identity. We see it in the very first lines of the movie:

There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past… and the future. In Ancient Ireland, they were called Fili. In Choctaw land, they call them Firekeepers. And in West Africa, they’re called griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities but it also attracts evil.

Sinners plays around with music regularly featuring blues, soul, jazz, Southern gospel, and Irish folk throughout. It reflects how integral music is to culture and identity, and how history is told through these means. For most of history identity and community has been passed on via oral stories, even in societies with written sources it is only within the last century that the majority of the population were literate. Sammie’s ability to play so well allowed him to pierce the veil between time and space which attracts Remmick. The vampire, isolated from his family and heritage, sought out Sammie to use his ability to reconnect to the vampire’s past. Meanwhile, it also created one of the best scenes in the movie. As Sammie plays the blues his music pierces through time connecting the blues of the 1930s to hip-hop of the 1990s and to West African dances from centuries ago. As Grace and Bo Chow enter the scene their histories are brought into the dance with Beijing opera performers re-enacting Journey to the West are seen. Sinners demonstrates how people have managed to keep their culture alive, and, in the case of African-Americans, Choctaw, Chinese, and Irish depicted in the movie, survive colonialism, genocide, and forced migration.

A Mississippi juke joint

Sinners further depicts the competing musical trends in 1930s African-American communities – the Church against the juke joint. While this was not a binary – plenty of African-Americans would go to church on Sunday and in the evening enjoy jazz and the blues – they represent how African-Americans used music to create their own space in Jim Crow. Since the end of slavery the church served as a way to connect the community together and forge that sense of community. It is for that reason why so many churches were targeted by white supremacists when they wanted to attack the black community. It is also for that reason that much of the civil rights movement, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, came from black churches – Martin Luther King, after all, was a reverand. As Brendan Payne has argued, during the rise of Prohibition white wet politicians reached out to the black church as potential allies, as the evangelical roots of the dry movement was deeply tied to white supremacists. A minor antagonist of Sinners is Sammie’s father Jebediah who tries to keep Sammie out of the juke joint and in the church. While abusive, Jebediah genuinely believed that the gospel music of the church would protect his son and community. The church was the centre of the community and a way to protect the community – it was their own space away from a white supremacist society and was a safe space. This is why gospel music is so uplifting, it was, and is, an expression of joy. In the words of Elijah Ward:

Anyone who has seen a great gospel show in a black church will feel the shock of recognition, not only at the power of the performer to move and speak for her audience, but at the way the truth and soulfulness is supported by broad, self-conscious theater. Working for a public that still has its roots in the world where Rainey held court, gospel stars continue to surround themselves with the flashing lights and rolling bass drums, and the gaudy array of gold and diamonds, which a more urbane performer might consider “cheap.”

Ward, Escaping the Delta, 43

The crux of the movie surrounds the new juke joint opened by Sammie’s cousins Smoke and Stack, effortlessly played by my Hollywood crush Michael B. Jordan, newly returned Chicago. Juke joints were, at times, impromptu venues where the black community in the Deep South could play music, gamble, drink, and party. Sometimes these joints received black and white patrons – one in the Mississippi Delta accepted white patrons in the early evening and black patrons later. It as the character Delta Slim says in the movie: See, white folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it. The blues emerged from the oral histories and resistance we have already discussed. West African stories of tricksters became the lyrics of the earliest blues songs as a way to resist Jim Crow and white supremacist violence. Blues itself was part of a heritage of communal singing that can be traced directly back to West African singing traditions. Singing in plantations as a group while working was a way to build community in resistance to the crushing horror of slavery, and from there African-American music genres emerged. Migration after slavery allowed northern music trends to travel south bringing the music of Harlem and Chicago to the Deep South where it blended with local musical genres. This movement between North and South allowed the emergence of blues and jazz creating a symbiotic heritage. We see this reflected in Sinners. Smoke and Stack return home from Chicago bringing a specifically northern style to the southern juke joint, and at the end an elderly Sammie is played by Buddy Guy. A blues musician from Louisiana he moved north to Chicago bringing the southern musical flare to the north.

Race and Community

Mary and Stack

Sinners features several characters who did not fit the black and white binary that the Jim Crow South presented itself. First, there is Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld. Mary is mixed race and is described as an ‘octoroon’, meaning that she had one black grandparent. Mixed-race people undermined the strict binary that Jim Crow aimed to create, hence the ‘one drop’ law which stated that if someone had just ‘one drop’ of African-American blood they were legally ‘black’. However, on the ground things were more complicated. Mixed-race people with lighter skin could theoretically ‘pass’ as white and evade the worst aspects of Jim Crow, but at the cost of either buying into the logic of Jim Crow, or by alienating themselves from family. Women in particular were at risk from increased violence if found communicating with their black relatives if their skin was light enough to be considered ‘passing’. Kathryn Schumaker found that in court records from Natchez, Mississippi white men who married black women would face far fewer restrictions compared to if a white woman married a black man, or had his baby. As Schumaker argues, patriarchy and the supremacy of men over women trumped white supremacist fears of miscegenation. This is represented in Sinners. Stack pushed Mary away to protect her from the white community – as she was passing the whites would just see a white woman with a black man.

Jim Crow viewed America to either be black or white, and alongside mixed-race people there were also other minorities. Jim Crow simply did not know what to do with Native Americans, Mexicans, and Asians. While some states, like Texas, enacted ‘Juan Crow’ laws against Mexicans or, like California, campaigned to exclude Asian migrants, in the Mississippi Delta they were not present enough in large numbers for white supremacists to understand where they fit. Grace and Bo Chow represent the little known Mississippi Chinese community. Chinese communities began being brought to the Deep South by plantation owners as a way to supplant black labour following Emancipation in the 1870s. As plantations found a way to legally enslave African-Americans many Chinese moved on or settled to open their own businesses. Chinese-Americans did not fully fit into the racial dynamic that Jim Crow created. They faced discrimination because they were not white, but they were not black. This resulted in Chinese stores opening that would actually serve African-Americans, often on credit due to the economic constrictions placed on many rural African-Americans. This is why the Chows had two stores in Sinners – one to serve African-Americans and one for whites. As Shaolu Yu has argued, Delta Chinese faced racial discrimination from whites, such as being barred from owning homes in the white part of town, but their own desire to retain their culture meant marrying African-Americans was openly discouraged. The Delta Chinese sat in an unusual position where they were considered both ‘close to white’ and ‘close to black’.

Irish, Whiteness and Americanness

Returning to Remmick his character offers a unique metaphor for migration and Irish oppression, and also the assimilation to the American idea. Remmick represents how an oppressed people can become the oppressor. Remmick says that he remembers the Christianization of Ireland as when Sammie says the Lord’s prayer he says:

Long ago… the men who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a Devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth. We are earth and beast, and god. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I – to everything.

There is some debate among fans if this was actually in reference to the English colonization of Ireland with the ‘forced these words upon us‘ being English instead of the Lord’s prayer. In an interview Remmick’s actor Jack O’Connell mentioned that Remmick was 600 to 700 years old meaning this date was likely sometime in the mid-1100s when Henry II used Ireland’s apparent lack of Christian orthodoxy to invade. Since then the Irish was oppressed and faced genocide by a new landed class that, from the 1500s would see Protestants expel Catholics from their land. Thanks to generations of English, later British, exploitation an Irish diaspora emerged, especially from the 1840s when British policies led to the infamous Potato Famine. One million Irish starved to death and another million left thanks to the British-caused famine. Upon arriving in Protestant America many Irish continued to face discrimination as anti-Catholicism caused violence against Irish communities. This would continue through the next century with the second Klan expanding their targets to also include Catholics. As late as the 1960s people were debating John F. Kennedy’s loyalties as he took the presidency. For many Protestant Americans the Irish were not white, an idea shared by Protestants back in England. Remmick famously has his vampires dance to him singing Rocky Road to Dublin – a song how a poor Irishman from a rural community goes to Dublin where he is robbed and then to Liverpool where he is attacked for being Irish. Remmick’s story, like the African-Americans and Choctaw, was one of being beaten down by hegemonic white supremacist powers.

The Irish-American community, however, did not remain the oppressed. Irish migrants used the Civil War and their enlistment into the Union Army to prove their ‘Americanness’ and began buying into the racial capitalist system of the US. As Noel Ignatiev argued, by proving that they could oppress black and indigenous communities the Irish began shifting to the ‘whiteness’. We can see this in regards to Joe Biden and the Irish government. While Ireland does have a racism issue the Irish government has shown solidarity with Palestine during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, being one of the only European nations to walk out of genocider-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu’s United Nations speech. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who prides himself on having Irish ancestry, actively supported Israel’s genocide. The long history of Ireland’s oppression meant that, despite domestic racism, Ireland showed solidarity with Palestine, whereas Irish-American shift into becoming white Americans meant that a self-proclaimed Irish president aided and abetted genocide. Remmick represents the shift. As mentioned above, his anti-racism rhetoric means the black community is subsumed into his identity, an identity where he actively hid his Irish accent through most of the movie. Remmick, the abused migrant who was displaced by settler colonialism, did not reject racial supremacy but embraced it. This is also where the Choctaw come in. The Choctaw Nation famously sent money to Ireland during the Famine, which Ireland reciprocated during Covid, and this Irish vampire is hunted down by Choctaw where he seeks refuge with Klansmen.

Racial Violence

Sinners is set during Jim Crow Mississippi and does not shy away from showing the horrors of racism that black communities faced. Smoke and Stack buy the juke joint from Hogwood who turns out to be the local leader of the KKK, and his nephew and niece-in-law are KKK members who become the first to be turned by Remmick. Hogwood’s lie that ‘Klan don’t exist no more‘ was not entirely incorrect in real life. During the 1920s the second KKK was a widespread political force exceeding over 3 million members at its peak in 1925/26, but just a few years later it was collapsing. Overt violence, financial incompetence, and several rape scandals had dinted the popularity of the Klan, and the Depression sapping everyone’s funds led to the Klan shrinking to just a few thousand. That did not mean that Klan or racial violence had stopped. Lynchings still terrorised black communities and the Klan in Camp Hill, Alabama in 1931 murdered a labour organiser who was trying to organise 200 black sharecroppers. The Klan’s attempt to burn down the juke joint, only to be met by a furious Smoke armed to the teeth with World War I weaponry, was incredibly common. They were a terror group that aimed to put fear in the hearts of the black community.

Sinners shows another form of racial violence other than the lynchings and Klan terror that still impacts many African-Americans – economic racism. The character Cornbread is a sharecropper, it is implied that the plantation Sammie lives on is a sharecropping plantation, and we see a chain gang early on. During Reconstruction the white planter class were looking for a way to suppress the now free black population, and a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment allowed them to do this. Forced labour without pay is perfectly legal in the United States if someone has been found guilty of a crime, so white law enforcement used vague charges of ‘vagrancy’ to re-enslave African-Americans. Alongside this was sharecropping. This, at times, was effectively a form of peonage where poor farmers rented land from landowners, and in return the farmers would give the landowner a percentage of the crop. However, high interest rates and payment in company scrip, in the movie this is when the elderly patron pays using a button, turned many sharecroppers into peons. By 1930 there were 1.3 million sharecroppers, most of whom were poor whites, but black sharecroppers were in worse conditions and higher levels of debt. This was restoring the plantation system under the guise of the law. In Mississippi sharecropping was only abolished in the 1990s, but the use of slave labour in the form of prison labour is still perfectly legal in the US.

Hoodoo

There is so much more that I could write about Sinners, but one last thing I want to write about today is Hoodoo. Throughout Sinners the character Annie practices Hoodoo which gave her insight into what Remmick effectively saving the characters from certain doom. Hoodoo, sometimes referred to a rootwork and conjuring, is an African-American spirituality which emerged from the encounter between West African religion, Native American herblore, and European folk remedies. Key to Hoodoo is the oral tradition of herbal healing and remedies, as well as belief in spirits and conversing with the other side. For many practicioners Hoodoo is not distinct from Christianity, the power of protection comes from God, although Hoodoo is not accepted by certain churches. Annie further describes the vampires as ‘haints’, a concept from Hoodoo of a spirit or witch that exhausts a victim until they die. Hoodoo further reflects the theme that goes through Sinners. It was born from oppression and colonialism. African beliefs were brought to the US thanks to slavery, and these believes mixed with the belief of poor Europeans and displaced Native Americans creating a syncretic belief that offered agency to Africans. Especially women. Women, like Annie, found a niche with Hoodoo giving them an important role in resistance to oppression.

Bibliography:

• Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, (Warner Bros.: 2025)
• Kristofer Allerfeldt, The Ku Klux Klan: An American History, (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2024)
• Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010)
• Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)
• Stephen A. Berrey, The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
• Kinitra Brooks, ‘Haints, Hollers, and Hoodoo’, Southern Cultures, 29:4, (2023), 2-7
• Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969, (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)
• Khalil Greene, ‘Everything You Missed in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners—COMPLETE Historical Reference Guide’, History Can’t Hide, (16/03/2026), [Accessed 02/10/2026]
• Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)
• Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013)
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995)
• Serap Ayșe Kayatekin, ‘Credit and Its Legal Context in Sharecropping Relations in Postbellum Mississippi Delta: From Ownership to Controlling of Laboring Bodies’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 57:2, (2025), 157-175
• Brendan J.J. Payne, Gin, Jesus, & Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2022)
• Robert Seto Quan, Lotus Among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1982)
• Kathryn Schumaker, ‘“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi’, Law and History Review, 41, (2023), 773-794
• Rachel Stuart, ‘Sinners: How Real Stories of Irish and Choctaw Oppression Inform the Film’, The Conversation, (29/04/2025), [Accessed 04/10/2026]
• Aisling Walsh, ‘Sinners sinks its teeth into Irish settler colonialism’, Red Pepper, (03/03/2026), [Accessed 07/10/2026]
• Elijah Ward, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, (New York, NY: Amistad, 2004)
• Amy West, ‘Sinners‘ Michael B Jordan says he would be “up for” doing a prequel about his characters’ adventures in Chicago – but Ryan Coogler prefers a little mystery’, Games Radar, (17/04/2025), [Accessed 05/10/2026]
• Shaolu Yu, ‘Placing Racial Triangulation, Triangulating Place and Race: Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow Era’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112:1, (2022), 97-122

Zoopedia: Ghost-Faced Bat

It is our first Zoopedia post for 2026’s Month of Horror, and to mark the occasion we are looking at when you mix a bat with a ghost. This is the ghost-faced bat, or Peter’s ghost-faced bat, from the Americas which, quite frankly, has a face that only a mother could love.

Taxonomy and Evolution

The ghost-faced bat has the scientific name Mormoops megalophylla, and it shares this genus with one other species, the Antillean ghost-face bat. The Antillean species is smaller than the species we are looking at today. There was a third species simply called the giant ghost-faced bat that went extinct around 70,000 years ago, and it was much larger than the ghost-faced bat. They belong to a family called Mormoopidae which consists of other species of bats known for having faces like they have had a skillet to it. These are small echolocating bats whose messed up faces act as radar dishes as they fly through the night.

Biology and Behaviour

Ghost-faced bats are medium-sized bats reaching around 6.7 cm in length and weights between 13 and 19 grams. For a bat they are on the larger size, but they are generally quite small. Then there is their face which combines a bulldog with the Ferengi from Star Trek. This is due to them having short skulls with a flattened face, but also having a steep forehead and protruding lower jaw as well as with curved ears. They have brown bodies which they will moult every year producing a new layer of fur for the new seasons.

Why do ghost-faced bats have such strange looking faces? Simple, echolocation. Like many other species of bat they have a heavily specialised organ in their skull which emit calls that reflect off of surfaces. These waves are then reflected back at the bat which their scrunched up face can pick-up like an aerial dish. This gives them an ability to fly through the night as clearly as we can see during the day. These calls are just 50 kHz lasting just 4 milliseconds, but they are so sensitive the bats can pick up the calls.

Mostly due to where they live we have do not have much information about how ghost-faced bats reproduce. They need deep limestone caves for roosting which has made it difficult to properly observe them in the wild. A paper published as recently as 2025 managed to track reproduction in this species and found they breed sometime between October and December with birth taking place in early summer with lactation ending by the end of summer. Sensitive to the cold the newborns are born deeper in the cave which means it is harder to observe them. Ghost-faced bats seem to have just one baby at a time.

Distribution and Habitat

The ghost-faced bat is found in forests where they have access to plenty of insects, although they roost in caves and abandoned mines. They prefer limestone and deep caves, especially when breeding as it helps keep the babies warm. Ghost-faced bats prefer warmer climates, around 40 degrees Celsius, and their metabolism collapses when temperatures get cold. They are found as far north as southern Texas, with a lot being found in Big Bend, through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and then into northern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and very northern Peru.

Diet and Predators

Like many bats that use echolocation the ghost-faced bat is insectivorous. This means that their diet mainly consists of insects, especially moths. Their echolocation helps these bats detect flying insects and catch them while flying, never having to ever come close to the ground. It is hard to catch a bat so the ghost-faced bat has few predators with their main predators being owls, hawks, and other bats, such as spectral bats.

Conservation and Threats

The last time that the IUCN Red List would assess the ghost-faced bat was in 2016 giving them a rating of ‘Least Concern’, but with a warning that their numbers were decreasing. Deforestation and the loss of roosting sites through mining or land development has reduced the safe spaces where they can reproduce. The populations in Ecuador may even be at risk of entirely vanishing if actions are not taken.

Bibliography:

• ‘Peter’s ghost-faced bat’, Bat Conservation International, [Accessed 02/10/2026]
• M. Alejandra Camacho, Veronica Leiva-D, Ricardo López-Wilchis and Santiago F. Burneo, ‘Genetic diversity of the ghost-faced bat Mormoops megalophylla Peters, 1864 (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae) in Ecuador; implications for its conservation’, Therya, 8:3, (2017), 223-232
• L. Davalos, J. Molinari, H. Mantilla-Meluk, C. Medina, J. Pineda and B. Rodriguez, ‘Mormoops megalophylla, Ghost-faced bat’, IUCN Red List, (09/07/2016), [Accessed 02/10/2026]
• Robert S. DeBaca and Clyde Jones, ‘The Ghost-faced bat, Mormoops megalophylla, (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae) from the Davis Mountains, Texas. (General Notes)’, The Texas Journal of Science, 54:1, (2002)
• Gihovani Ademir Samano‐Barbosa, Ixchel Rojas‐Martínez, Sergio Leonardo Porto-Ramírez, Fernando Salgado‐Mejia, Ahiezer Rodríguez‐Tobón, Arturo Salame‐Méndez, Edith Arenas‐Ríos, Luis Manuel Guevara‐Chumacero and Ricardo López‐Wilchis, ‘Morphological and Histological Variations of the Reproductive Organs During the Annual Cycle in a Neotropical Bat: Peters’ Ghost‐Faced Bat Mormoops megalophylla (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae)’, Journal of Morphology, 286, (2025), e70066
• Matthew Steinway, ‘Mormoops megalophylla (ghost-faced bat)’, Animal Diversity Web, (17/02/2000), [Accessed 01/10/2026]
• Marianne Taylor, Bats: An Illustrated Guide to all Species, (London: Ivy Press, 2019)

Paleo Profiles: Megarachne

It is finally October 2026 so it is our annual Month of Horror, and to start off we are looking at an extinct animal that would have been terrifying to our modern eyes. This was the Megarachne, long thought to be a giant spider. However, since its initial discovery we have found that Megarachne was not in fact a spider, but something else entirely…

Discovery and Fossils

Megarachne in Walking with Monsters under the name ‘Mesothelae’

The first fossil belonging to Megarachne was described in 1980 from a fossil site in Argentina by Argentinian palaeontologist Mario Hünicken. The holotype was not complete but Hünicken recognised it was a very large arthropod. This made sense as the fossil site dated to the Carboniferous, a time of increased humidity and oxygen percentage in the atmosphere which allowed arthropods to grow to large sizes. At the time it was believed that this newly described arthropod was a giant spider, perhaps the largest in history, so Hünicken gave it the name Megarachne servinei meaning ‘Servine’s Giant Spider’. Servine was a fossil collector who found the fossil, and ‘Giant Spider’ as it was the largest known spider. For the next 25 years it would be known as a giant spider and would, sort of, be featured in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters. This specimen was soon locked in a bank vault leaving only copies for palaeontologists to look at. Then, in the early-2000s, another specimen was found which completely changed how we understand Megarachne. In a 2005 paper written by Paul Selden, Jose Corronca, and Hünicken it was found that Megarachne was not a spider at all, but was a member of a group called eurypterids.

Taxonomy and Evolution

Instead of being a giant spider we now know that Megarachne was a eurypterid, better known as ‘sea scorpions’. Despite their name eurypterids were not related to scorpions and were not even arachnids. However, they were somewhat related belonging to a different branch of a group called chelicerata which includes modern arachnids and horseshoe crabs. Unlike the arachnids, the eurypterids never ventured onto land, but they did for a long time dominate the waters. Yes waters. Much like the ‘scorpion’ part of their name the ‘sea’ part is inaccurate as eurypterids did move into freshwater, and the last few species were freshwater. Megarachne belonged to one of these later families, called Mycteropidae, that evolved a very different lifestyle to some of the more famous eurypterids, like Pterygotus. A 2010 paper has suggested that Megarachne was part of a growth stage alongside Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, both of which were used to help reconstruct Megarachne, so if that is the case Megarachne would be declared invalid. For now, Megarachne is classified as its own genus and is not synonymous with the other eurypterids.

Biology

Reconstruction by Nobu Tamura

For an arthropod Megarachne was large. Based on the two specimens that we have Megarachne reached lengths of around 54 centimetres (21 inches) which would have made them the largest known spider, but among eurypterids they are far from the largest. In contrast, the largest eurypterid Jaekelopterus reached over 2.5 metres in length! What allowed palaeontologists to realise that Megarachne was a eurypterid and not a spider was due to some notable parts of the body that are more commonly found with aquatic arthropods instead of spiders. The end of the body also had several segments called ‘tergites’ which were adapted for moving in the water. The 2005 classification compared the body to that of another eurypterid called Woodwardopterus which the authors used as a basis to create their reconstruction. Megarachne was reconstructed with four pairs of appendages, although the final pair has not been preserved in either specimens. These appendages were at the front of the body and away from the telson, the end segment of arthropods, avoiding the legs getting caught as it propelled itself through the water.

These appendages give us a good clue into the lifestyle of Megarachne. At the end of the appendages were blade-like structures which were not offensive structures. Megarachne, and for that matter its relatives, lacked the spikes and claws of earlier eurypterids meaning they were not active predators. Instead, Megarachne would swim or crawl along the floor wafting its appendages through the silt and mud capturing small invertebrates with these structures. They still had a good eyesight despite not using their eyes to hunt. Compound eyes on top of the head would be able to detect and spot threats such as large fish, including freshwater sharks, and amphibians.

When and Where

Megarachne is known from one formation, the Bajo de Véliz Formation in northwest Argentina. This formation dates to the latest part of the Carboniferous period, dating between 303.7 and 298.9 million years ago. Unlike many of the other known eurypterids the Megarachne was a freshwater eurypterid, not a marine one. Megarachne actually lived in a floodplain or swamps, moving from deeper to shallower water as the seasonal rains came and went.

Paleoecology

Instead of the terrifying giant spider depicted in Walking with Monsters, which had to be edited last minute to acknowledge the new paper, Megarachne was a freshwater animal that moved through swamp waters. We do not have much other aquatic life from the Bajo de Véliz Formation, but there was certainly vibrant life on the land with many species of insects and genuine spiders being found. Megarachne lived at a time of great changes during the Carboniferous. Compared to the early-Carboniferous where the climate was warm and wet, the end of the Carboniferous when Megarachne lived was becoming colder and drier. Quite possibly this is what resulted in the eventual extinction of Megarachne as cooling temperatures changed its habitat too much.

Bibliography:

• ‘Bajo de Veliz (CORD collection): Kasimovian – Gzhelian, Argentina’, PBDB.org, [Accessed 02/10/2026]
• ‘Episode 2: Reptile’s Beginnings’, directed by Chloe Leland, (BBC Studios: 2005)
• Riley Black, ‘Megarachne, the giant spider that wasn’t’, National Geographic, (20/12/2010), [Accessed 29/09/2026]
• Benjamin Gutierrez, ‘Megarachne‘, Prehistoric-Wildlife, (27/08/2012), [Accessed 01/10/2026]
• James C. Lamsdell, Linda Lagebro, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Graham E. Budd and Pierre Gueriau, ‘Stylonurine eurypterids from the Strud locality (Upper Devonian, Belgium): new insights into the ecology of freshwater sea scorpions’, Geological Magazine, 156:10, (2019), 1708-1714
• James C. Lamsdell, Simon J. Braddy and O. Erik Tetlie, ‘The systematics and phylogeny of the Stylonurina (Arthropoda: Chelicerata: Eurypterida)’, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 8:1, (2010), 49-61
• PBS Eons, ‘When Giant Scorpions Swarmed the Seas’, YouTube.com, (03/04/2019), [28/09/2026]
• Paul A. Selden, Jose A. Corronca and Mario A. Hünicken, ‘The true identity of the supposed giant fossil spider Megarachne‘, Biology Letters, 1, (2005), 44-48
• Ben G Thomas, ‘When Earth Was Ruled by Arachnids’, YouTube.com, (20/10/2024), [Accessed 30/09/2026]

Zoopedia: Tequila splitfin

Under the shadow of the Tequila volcano in Jalisco, Mexico there is a small pool near a village called Teuchitlán. In this pool a tiny species of fish can be found and is named after the volcano – the Tequila splitfin. This tiny fish is one of Mexico’s unique species of fish that evolved in the isolated lakes which has also meant they are at risk of extinction through the smallest of changes to their environment.

Taxonomy and Evolution

The Tequila splitfin, also called the Tequila fish, was discovered and named by science as recently as 1998. They have the scientific name Zoogoneticus tequila, named after the volcano, and they share their genus with two other species of fish. Zoogoneticus belongs to an order of fish called the Cyprinodontiformes, which is a bit of a mouthful but this order is commonly called the killifish after one of the notable families belonging to this order. Specifically, Tequila splitfins belong to a family called Goodeidae which consists of around 50 species of fish. These fish are unique to specific lakes, streams, and isolated bodies of water and evolved due to this isolation. As the common ancestor was caught in these bodies of water millennia ago in Mexico and the western US they genetically diverged to adapt to whatever body of water they now lived in.

Biology and Behaviour

These fish are tiny. The females are larger just reaching 8 centimetres in length to the 6 centimetres of the males. Tequila splitfin have the basic fish body plan with the most iconic part of them being their tailfin which is crescent shaped. In the males the end of the tailfin is an orange or yellow coloured curved band, something that helps attracts females. Otherwise, this fish is a silver-blue colour having just a black band on their tail. Most of what we know about these fish come from studying them in captivity due to how quickly they became endangered after becoming known to science. As a result, scientists have only managed to research these fish relatively recently in their natural habitat, more on that later.

Again, we have only observed reproduction of Tequila splitfins in captivity. Unlike many other bony fish which spawn the Tequila splitfin, and for that matter their family, give birth to live young. A notched tail fin in the females, which gives the group the name ‘splitfin’, allows males to deposit sperm which is used to then fertilise the eggs. The female has one ovary in which up to 29 eggs are stored. After 65 days she will give birth to her young and from there her time as a parent comes to an end – parental care stops from here. The young are tiny and will initially rely solely on the yolk from their egg to sustain them. Like with many fish sexual maturity is more based on size than age, but Tequila splitfin will reach that size from 6 to 10 weeks of age.

Distribution and Habitat

The Tequila splitfin are currently known from one pool in near Teuchitlán that is just 4 metres in diameter. It is thought that this population is the remnant of a larger one that was found in the Ameca River that runs through the state to the capital of Guadalajara. These fish prefer warmer waters, between 20°C and 24°C, and prefer the shallower end of the waters. Their small size means that this makes them less at risk of predation from larger fish found in deeper water. The pool at Teuchitlán is only 20 cm deep and is made mostly of mud and sand.

Diet and Predators

Being so small it is hard to find good things to eat, but the Tequila splitfin do have options. They are not picky with their diet consisting of a mixture of plankton, insect larvae, and general biological detritus that comes their way. Their main predators are other, larger fish although birds and even the nymphs of dragonflies are capable of eating them.

Conservation and Threats

The Tequila splitfin are a remarkable case of rapid conservation efforts. Runoff from farming and the introduction of large invasive fish, mainly tilapia, wiped them out of the main river leaving the tiny population in Teuchitlán. Recognising that this population was at risk with only 50 adults being found in 2001. They were brought into a protective ‘Fish Ark’ ran by the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo and just in time. By 2011 no wild Tequila splitfin could be found. The Fish Ark recognised that only by working with and engaging with the local community could the reintroduction of Tequila splitfins be successful. Invasive fish were removed from a segment of the river and locals helped build a series of ponds to replicate their habitat. With a successful breeding programme in 2016 10,000 fish were released into the ponds, and a few years later 80 were released into the river on Day of the Dead. Much as Day of the Dead features the dead returning to visit their families this ‘dead’ species was returned home. In 2018 the IUCN declared Tequila splitfin to be endangered, up from being ‘Extinct in the Wild’. They are not out of the woods yet, but with local cooperation their future might be bright.

Bibliography:

• ‘Reintroducing the Tequila Splitfin’, Reverse the Red, [Accessed 25/09/2026]
• ‘Zoogoneticus tequila, Tequila splitfin’, FishBase, [Accessed 25/09/2026]
• Luis H. Escalera-Vázquez, Omar Domínguez-Domínguez, Demián Hinojosa-Garro and Luis Zambrano, ‘Changes in diet, growth and survivorship of the native Tequila Splitfin Zoogoneticus tequila in co-occurrence with the non-native Shortfin Molly Poecilia mexicana‘, Fundamental and Applied Limonology, 188:4, (2016), 341-351
• M. Koeck, ‘Zoogoneticus tequila‘, IUCN Red List, (13/04/2018), [Accessed 25/09/2026]
• Joseph Nelson, Terry Grande, and Mark Wilson, Fishes of the World, Fifth Edition, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016)
• John Pint, ‘How Mexico’s Celebrated Splitfin Fish were Rescued from the Brink of Extinction’, Mexico News Daily, (17/06/2026), [Accessed 25/09/2026]
• Shane Webb and Robert Rush Miller, ‘Zoogoneticus tequila, A New Goodeid Fish (Cyprinodontiformes) from the Ameca Drainage of Mexico, and a Rediagnosis of the Genus’, Occasional Papers of the Museum of Zoology the University of Michigan, 725, (1998)