Meet the Fossegrim, a being from Scandinavian mythology who lives in waterfalls and plays the fiddle. He plays it so well in fact that according to Jacob Grim, tables and benches, cup and can, graybeards and grandmother, blind and lame, and even babies in the cradle will begin to dance at one of his songs. Want to make babies and grandma's dance with your stellar fiddle playing? He is happy to teach you! You just have to sneak up to a waterfall on a Thursday and do one of two things: either throw a white he-goat into the waterfall with his head turned away from the water or come with mutton stolen from a neighbor's storage over the course of four consecutive Thursdays. This may be ridiculously complex, but if you get it right, you'll be rewarded with the Fossegrim drawing your fingers out over your fiddle strings till they bleed. However, you will be able to play so well that trees dance and waterfalls stop to listen. The legend was so perverse, that European fiddle players in the 1800s actually had to deny that they learned to play from the Fossegrim! The Fossegrim appears as a shapeshifting water spirit that often takes the form of an especially beautiful young man, though appearance and clothing varies story to story.
Meet the cactus cats, a species of feline from the American southwest that frequent the areas between Tuscan and Prescott, AZ. They are like normal bobcats except for two notable exceptions. Their tails are hairless, branching and armored. They also have long, curved, retractable knifelike bone blades in place of their outermost claws on both of their forelimbs. Unlike many mythological creatures, cactus cats do not use these blades for any nefarious purpose. Instead, they establish a circuit consisting of a large number of cactuses, which they visit one by one. When they visit a cactus they slash into it until sap starts to run. They design their circuit so that it takes them many nights to revisit any cactus, specifically exactly long enough that the sap will have fermented, becoming both sweet and intoxicating. They lap up this fermented sap until they become very drunk, at which point they will run around the desert, scraping their claws against rocks and screeching in a drunken haze.
Meet Baba Yaga, an ogress of Slavic folklore who steals, cooks, and eats her victims, usually children. A guardian of the fountains of the water of life, she lives in a forest hut that spins continually on birds’ legs. Her fence is topped with human skulls. Baba Yaga can ride through the air—in an iron kettle or in a mortar that she drives with a pestle—creating tempests as she goes. She often accompanies Death on his travels, devouring newly released souls.
Poster drawing for The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions.
