Tobias Wren

Strange History Correspondent

Tobias Wren covers strange history and folklore: secret societies, unreadable books, and legends that turn out to be younger than everyone thinks. He checks the story against the record and reports which parts survive. He is happiest when a famous tale has a paper trail, and happier still when the paper trail contradicts it.

Stories by Tobias Wren

• The Wild Hunt: Europe's Ghostly Riders of the Night From Peterborough to Bohemia, people heard a spectral hunt pass overhead. Its famous name, and much of its shape, came from Jacob Grimm.
• Día de los Muertos: What Is Aztec and What Is Catholic Marigolds, sugar skulls, all-night vigils, La Catrina. Some come from the Aztecs, some from Catholic Europe, and historians still fight over which is which.
• Samhain: What We Actually Know About the Celtic New Year Samhain was real. The Celtic New Year and the pagan feast of the dead owe more to Victorian scholars than to any ancient record.
• War of the Worlds, 1938: Did America Really Panic? Orson Welles's Martian invasion made headlines as a nationwide panic. The ratings, the hospitals and the listener mail tell a much smaller story.
• Houdini Versus the Mediums Harry Houdini once staged séances himself. Then he spent his last six years exposing mediums, from a Boston parlor to a hearing room in Congress.
• The Dancing Plague of 1518 In July 1518 one woman began dancing in a Strasbourg street. Within a month, hundreds had joined her, and the city's cure made it worse.
• The Miracle of the Sun: What the Crowd Saw at Fátima In 1917 tens of thousands watched the sun spin over a Portuguese field. Their testimony, read closely, explains more than it proves.
• The Voynich Manuscript: The Book Nobody Can Read A fifteenth-century book in an unknown script has beaten codebreakers for a century. Here is what is known, and why every solution fails.
• Project Stargate: When the U.S. Government Paid Psychic Spies For two decades and about $20 million, American intelligence tested remote viewing. The declassified files tell a stranger story than the myth.
• The Eye on the Dollar Bill Is Not What You Think The pyramid and floating eye came from a 1782 committee, a Christian symbol and a Roman poet, not from the Freemasons or the Illuminati.