A Capuchin, a Franciscan, and Jesuit go to an exorcism ...

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but in seventeenth century France it was a deadly serious business for Urbain Grandier. Grandier was a parish priest in Loudun, France, accused of sending demons to possess a convent of Ursuline nuns. A worldly priest, Grandier was tall and attractive with a reputation for not exactly upholding his vow of celibacy to the letter. He had made a lot of enemies both through his sexual indiscretions and his political leanings. In 1618, he penned a sarcastic little piece criticizing Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu was not a man easily trifled with, and he was to become one of the most powerful political figures in France at the time. Known for his skills at intrigue and subterfuge, Richelieu may very well have been the driving force behind a scheme to destroy Grandier, using the wide-spread belief in demons and witchcraft to shatter Urbain's reputation.

She's not a mournful dark specter, but she once brooded over a cemetery and inspired strange tales of weird events. Black Aggie is a legend in ghost lore, and tied to one of the early presidents of the United States.

The story of Black Aggie originated with the suicide death of Marian Adams, the wife of Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. Depressed over the death of her father, Marian drank a fatal dose of potassium in 1885. She was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Her grieving husband commissioned the famous sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to create a piece for her gravesite.

The Dalai Lama is the governmental and spiritual leader of Tibet, now an occupied territory of China. Tibetan Buddhists believe that each Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of the last, running all the way back to the first, Gendun Drup, born in 1391. Each Dalai Lama's life is believed to constitute a portion of the unbroken chain of incarnations of the bodhisattva of compassion, Chenresig. Chenresig is thought to embody the compassion of all the Buddhas. There have been 14 Dalai Lamas. Each Dalai Lama is referred to as the number of his incarnation followed by "Dalai Lama." For instance, the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is addressed as "His Holiness, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama." After the death of each Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks search for his reincarnation. They know where to look based on various signs and visions. Each child who has been identified as the true reincarnation has exhibited extreme familiarity with the former Lama's possessions. Sometimes it has taken several years to find the child. Since the fifth reincarnation, the child has left his or her family to go to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to be trained by the other Lamas. Between the seventeenth century and 1959, the Dalai Lama led the Tibetan government. However, when China invaded and occupied Tibet in 1959, His Holiness fled to India where he currently remains in exile. Gyatso is still considered the spiritual leader of Tibet.

In the 1880s, a politician from Minnesota ensured that the world would always remember the tale of the lost continent of Atlantis. Ignatius Donnelly, who served variously as a senator, congressman and lieutenant governor of Minnesota authored several books on the topic, including Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly's work, and his reputation as a statesman, helped to bring the story of Atlantis out of the shadows of fringe myth, inspiring serious research into the question of whether Atlantis really existed.

More than a hundred years later, people are still wrestling with that question. Although it is attributed to an Egyptian source, the story of the lost continent of Atlantis first appeared in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato. In his works, Timaeus and Critias, Atlantis is described as an island nation that sunk beneath the seas in a terrible catastrophe that took place in the course of a night and a day. As compelling as the story of the sunken nation may seem, Plato recounted the story primarily as a cautionary tale for the city-state of Athens. Athens is the real focus of Plato's work, and Atlantis is, at most, an interesting aside. There is nothing to indicate whether or not Plato himself took the tale of the lost civilization as fact.

The Mayan people, who flourished between 200 AD and 900 AD, had an advanced calendrical system that calculated time in Short Counts and Long Counts. They looked at time as a series of cycles, and, according to their Long Count, our current age will end on the Winter Solstice in 2012. A lot has been made in recent years of the Mayan Calendar and this ominous date. There is a strong New Age current that looks upon this quickly advancing time as a promise of change. In their view of things, 2012 will be a great time of spiritual evolution when the collective vibration of humanity will ascend to something better, brighter, and more advanced. Some believers in this point of view go so far as to assert that our very DNA will undergo an evolutionary change as part of this planetary ascension.

According to another school of thought, however, 2012 is a dark date that could bring about world-wide upheaval and destruction. Much of this is based upon the belief in a mysterious Planet X, sometimes called planet Nibiru, that is supposedly orbiting our solar system on an oblique angle in a cycle that brings it catastrophically near to earth every 3600 years. The name for planet Nibiru, and the belief that is has ties with extra-terrestrial beings once worshipped as ancient gods owes much to the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, a proponent of the Ancient Astronaut theory, who further asserts that the gods and goddesses of ancient Sumer were extraterrestrials.

The Devil is a fiddle player. At least, that's what we learn in the classic song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia," where the Devil appears to challenge a young fiddle player named Johnny. Johnny, according to the song, is "the best that ever was," and he knows it — so the Devil takes advantage of his sin of pride, betting him a golden violin if Johnny can outplay Old Scratch. The song, covered dozens of times since it was written (and based, itself, on a Stephen Vincent Benét poem), is a rousing mix of story and melody. It draws upon a well-established tradition in Southern folklore where the Devil shows up to wage a bet for a boastful person's soul.

The Devil's connection with the violin is much older than this 1979 Charlie Daniels Band song, however. Around 1749, the Devil reportedly appeared to a real life fiddle player and offered a pact. The "fiddle" player was none other than reknown Baroque violinist, Guiseppe Tartini. Tartini was a composer as well as a master of the violin, and he created one of his most masterful works after a very peculiar dream.

There is a quarter-mile stretch of Interstate 4 in central Florida between Daytona Beach and Orlando that is known as the "The I-4 Dead Zone." How does a highway get a nickname like this? It's haunted, of course.

Interstate 4 is one of the most traveled roads in Florida. While mediums have claimed that a family of four fraught with bitterness is buried at the site, the nearly 2,000 accidents that have occurred along this small stretch of roadway since the mid-1960s certainly enhances the possibility of a curse — or just a poorly constructed section of the road? There are far more accidents per year on this stretch of highway than all of I-4 between Daytona and Tampa. Regardless, people have been claiming to see strange things at this very spot on I-4 for several decades — everything from orbs cruising over the road, to hitchhiking ghosts and phantom trucks.

The phoenix is a sign of immortality, grace and beauty. This mythical creature is a bird with colorful plumage that decides its own death, building itself a nest in which the bird burns and turns to ash. Legends vary, but usually the phoenix lives for 1,000 years before building its own funeral pyre. From the remnants of the fire, a new, young phoenix emerges that will live for another 1,000 years.

The phoenix is an enduring figure from a wide variety of mythological traditions.
In ancient Egypt, the phoenix was known as a benu, associated with the rising sun and the sun god Ra. The Greeks and Romans adapted the bird, creating a new image of a peacock-like animal with a song that made the sun god Apollo stop his daily carriage of the sun. In Persian mythology, the phoenix also makes an appearance, and in Lebanese culture the phoenix is a representation of the city of Beirut, destroyed and rebuilt seven times. In Christian theology, the phoenix represents Christ's resurrection and immortality in art and literature. The phoenix is also central to Chinese and Japanese mythology.

A Marathon is a 26 mile long race that has been an integral part of the Olympic games since the 1896 games in Athens. But the race is also a part of both history and myth. In 490 BCE, a messenger was sent from the field of Marathon to Athens in order to report the Greek victory over the invading Persians. The messenger is said to have been a professional long-distance runner named Philippides who supposedly dropped dead in a typically heroic fashion immediately after completing his grueling run and, of course, delivering his important message. The news about the victory was of great importance to the city-state of Athens, and the historic Battle of Marathon was a key victory in the establishment of early Greek power.

In addition to its connection with long-distance running and Olympic games, the Battle of Marathon is one of the earliest recorded battles in history. The field saw an intense conflict unfold between the warriors of Athens and the invading force of Persia. Much like the American field of Gettysburg, the strength and intensity of the battle at Marathon may well have imprinted itself upon the surrounding countryside. Certainly, there are a number of historic reports that describe ghostly soldiers appearing at Marathon to relive the decisive battle. There are many reports about ghostly encounters in Greek and Roman literature, but the story of the Field of Marathon remains one of the most compelling.

"In those days, there were giants in the earth." This passage, which opens Genesis 6:4 is one of the most compelling and mysterious statements in the Bible. The passage continues, growing even more peculiar, for it says, "...the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they; bare children unto them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." In some translations, the so-called "sons of God" are called the Nephilim. But who are the Nephilim, and what was their relationship with mankind in the early days of the Biblical world?

A lot of ink has been spilled over the issue of the Nephilim. The Bible itself says very little about them, mainly mentioning that they were attracted to the "daughters of men" and eventually took wives from among these beautiful daughters. But there is more to the story than the fragmentary passages that appear in Genesis. The Book of Enoch is a pseudopigraphal text written several hundred years before Christ's birth. It tells of the coming Messiah, and it further elaborates on the compelling story of the Watcher Angels, beings who are cognate to the "sons of God." This lost book of the Bible, once viewed as sacred scripture by the early Church Fathers, was eventually cut out of accepted Biblical literature and lost to the world — until a version was rediscovered in Ethiopia by the famous explorer, James Bruce.

In their heyday, powwowers healed everything from bewitched cows to warty hands to serious human ailments. Powwowing still flourishes in some parts of America. But don't let the name fool you — it has little to do with Native Americans.

Powwowing is the term adopted by German folk healers who settled in Pennsylvania, especially in the Lehigh Valley and Lancaster County. The immigrants became known in general as the Pennsylvania Dutch, a corruption of the word "Deutsch," or German. They began arriving in the late 1600s, and most of them came to America in the 1700s.

Back home, their healers were called braucherei, and their trade was a mix of herbal lore, folk magic, spell-casting and Christianized prayers or "charms," combined with hand passes. A braucher came from a hereditary line of a family who had the "power," and the arts were taught orally.

When it comes to abandoned hospitals, Kings Park Psychiatric Center in Long Island, New York is the mother of them all. Founded in 1885, at its peak the Kings Park Psychiatric Center was comprised of 150 buildings and housed over nine thousand patients. In its current abandoned state, it is believed by many to be haunted by its former patients.

Kings Park Psychiatric Center was founded as the Kings Park Lunatic Asylum, and was built to alleviate overcrowding in other asylums nearby. At the time, it was believed that fresh air, rest, exercise and manual labor were effective cures for mental illness. As a result, Kings Park quickly became a self-sufficient farm community, where patients would tend crops, milk cows and make their own clothing. But the facility kept growing until it became overcrowded in the 1950s, and doctors began to use more invasive treatment methods such as prefrontal lobotomies and electroshock therapy, making the hospital a fairly miserable place to live. With the introduction of Thorazine as an approved medication for mental illness, patients that had been unable to function independently in society were now able to live on their own, and the patient population began to diminish. Throughout the '70s and '80s several of the Kings Park buildings were shut down, and in 1996 the entire facility was abandoned.

Is there a monstrous being haunting the Pine Barrens in New Jersey? The sightings started in the early years of the twentieth century. According to the Devil Hunters, official researchers of the Jersey Devil, in 1909 the Devil was sighted almost daily for a week in the month of January. How can a cryptid manage to exist hidden away in an area so close to civilization? It's hard to say, but the Jersey Devil continues to haunt the imaginations of investigators, as this video clip attests.

Ever hear a disembodied voice call your name out loud? If so, take care — it may be a bad spirit luring you to doom.

At least, that's the explanation given in a long tradition of folklore. "Calling ghosts," as they are sometimes called, speak out the name of a person to attract his attention. Sometimes people who live in or investigate haunted places say they hear their names called out, but no one is visible.

In folklore, calling ghosts lure people to their deaths. They are related to evil-minded spirits in mythology, as such the sirens of Greek lore: water nymphs whose beautiful singing lured sailors to their deaths. The sirens lived on an island between Circe's isle and Scylla. They sat on a flower bed surrounded by the rotting corpses of the men they killed.

In 1836 during the Texas Revolution, the 13-day battle at the Alamo mission in San Antonio left nearly 2,000 dead and the ground soaked in blood. Many of the dead are still buried in the space around the Alamo, a space now covered in newer and taller buildings, one of which is the reportedly haunted Emily Morgan Hotel. According to legend, the hotel's namesake is the woman who inspired the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas," but the real story of Emily Morgan is much sadder.

Emily West, a free black from Connecticut, took a boat to Galveston, Texas in 1835 to work for James Morgan as a servant in a hotel. While in Galveston, West and her fellow servants were captured by members of the Mexican army and forced to travel with them to the place where the Texan army had made camp. It was there that the Texans charged the Mexican camp, defeated the Mexican army, and won Texas its independence from Mexico.

Countless legends that go centuries back have prompted the release of far too many cheesy movies on the topic of ghost ships. Then of course, there's always The Flying Dutchman, captained by a man doomed to travel the seas forever. This ghost ship should be a genre all by itself when you look at how many books, cartoons and movies play off of the legend. So many that you probably don't even know the original story. You do know this: The Flying Dutchman can sometimes be seen on the horizon, emitting a strange light, and it signals doom for whoever can see it. Nautical folklore is swarming with talk of phantom vessels. When it comes to the legends as old as these, however, there's no way of knowing where the truth rests.

Even so, sightings of alleged ghost ships persist. Is there something legitimite behind these sightings or are they just fantastical stories that make good fodder for storytellers and movie scripts?

In the Middle Ages, the Devil seemed to be everywhere in Europe. If one credits the witch craze, Satan himself spent a great deal of time touring the countryside and seducing hapless old women into flying off with him to have wild orgies in the woods. Through a liberal application of torture, witch-finders would pull colorful, elaborate and wholly incredible confessions from suspected witches, and many of these detailed the varied and devious ways in which the Devil and his many demons sought to corrupt and obtain human souls.

According to some folklore, however, demons weren't always a nuisance to humanity. Occasionally, the Devil or one of his cohorts could be put to productive use. Grillot de Givry, in his lavishly illustrated collection, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, recounts a number of tales that attribute feats of great industry to demonic beings. A variety of bridges and other building projects were supposedly constructed with the help of the Devil. His traditional payment? Old Nick would request the soul of the first living being to make use of his work. Wily villagers would apparently take the Devil's help, but then find a way to trick him of his due. This gave rise to the tale of the Wolf's Door at the cathedral in Aachen, Germany, where a wolf was supposedly driven into the new cathedral upon its inauguration, so that this wild beast could fall prey to the Devil in place of some righteous soul. A similar folk belief is recorded in the stained glass at the old church in St. Cado, France. Here, the Devil finished construction on a local bridge, and requested the soul of the first living being to walk across. St. Cado came on the day that the bridge was finished and released a cat, cheating the Devil.

February puts the spotlight on love and ways to secure it. Since ancient times, people have tried to lure love and even force it in order to satisfy their heart's desires. A box of chocolates just won't do the trick. One of the oldest and most-tested love-attracting tools is the philtre — a magical brew that, when drunk, will cause a person to fall in love.

Philtres, also called love potions, usually consist of wine, tea or water doctored with herbs or drugs. According to tradition, they are best made by a witch or sorcerer, someone who has the natural magical mojo to make the potion work.

Love potions are no warm and fuzzy cocktails. Recipes call for all sorts of bizarre and even health-threatening ingredients. The most common ingredient has been the smelly mandrake root, also called "love apples," a poisonous member of the nightshade family. Other common ingredients are vervain, an herb; bryony, similar to mandrake; fern seed; dragon blood (a red gum); ground-up animal testicles and hearts; and flavorings such as orange and ambergris. It's no surprise that ginseng, which supposedly boosts libido, is also a favored ingredient.

From hundreds of popular stories and movies, as well as thousands of collectibles, we have our image today of the unicorn. Gentle and beautiful, this creature seems the height of grace and mythic belief. But the mythological origins of unicorns reveal a long and tempestuous past.

In both Eastern and Western mythology, the unicorn has made its appearance as an archetypal monster. In Chinese mythology, the unicorn (known as Kilin) appeared in many forms. Most commonly the unicorn was described as an animal with the body of a deer, tail of an ox, hooves of a horse and single horn growing out of the middle of its forehead. The hair on its back was five-colored to represent the five sacred Chinese colors, and it lived for 1000 years. The unicorn was an animal of good omen that came to humans only on important missions. In fact, the unicorn often foretold the birth of great men, including Confucius.