Dan in San Diego wondered whether the mare in nightmare is a horse. It isn’t. In old folklore, a mare, German Mahr, was a goblin or demon thought to press on a sleeper’s chest and bring terrifying dreams. The same heavy image turns up in Spanish...
Savannah from Richmond, Virginia, heard a home video in which her great-grandmother from rural Central Texas called a male relative someone’s old scratch, then seemed embarrassed. Old Scratch means the devil or Satan, and in that family context, it...
Kara from Rockwood, Tennessee, asks about boogeyman after hearing in Port-au-Prince that the word came from a Haitian slave-revolt leader named Bokman. That story is unlikely, because related words are older than the revolt that led to Haiti’s...