In the traditional British folk tales, Black Shuck is a huge, rough-coated black hound with fiery red eyes and slavering jaws. Professor Carolyne Larrington writes how one cyclist believed he had a close encounter with the beast in 1960, when he was cycling along a lonely road between Tolleshunt D’Arcy and Maldon in Essex. He wasn’t the first; Shuck’s earliest recorded appearance is at Bungay in Suffolk in 1577. Read more about the chilling story, and eight more unusual British folk tales

One popular treatment in the early modern period was “mummy”, the dried, often powdered flesh of embalmed Egyptian corpses. “For reasons which are not wholly clear,” writes Dr Richard Sugg, “corpse medicine is strikingly absent from standard histories of medicine. Yet such treatments were far from superstitious folklore or calculated fraud”

The blister beetle (a collective term that actually includes around 2,500 species of beetle) excretes the fluid cantharidin, a poisonous agent that causes swelling when it comes into contact with the skin. As well being included in many other, earlier remedies, in the 19th century cantharidin found its way into several well-known brands of hair tonics on sale. “It was suggested that the resulting toxic reaction encouraged hair growth, stimulated the blood supply, and rebooted the follicle,” explains Lucy Jane Santos, who has also written on other dangerous cosmetics from history

Wright and Griffiths shot a series of garden photos with fairies in them. Elsie’s mother was the first to believe in the snaps’ authenticity – but she wasn’t the last. The images were declared genuine by experts and the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ fast became recognisable the world over. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the cousins confessed to their trickery – they had used paper fairies to trick the camera. Read more about history’s most famous hoaxes

The contraption known as the ‘Puss-and-Mew machine’ was a window was covered boarded over with a wooden cat. The gin-buyer would approach and place the coins in the cat’s mouth. These would slide inwards to the gin-seller who would pour the gin down a lead pipe that emerged under the cat’s paw. As nobody witnessed both sides of the transaction, no charges could be brought. This wasn’t the only oddity associated with the craze. As Mark Forsyth writes, “there are two documented cases of British ladies downing gin and going up in smoke…”

Netball is the only sport above not to have featured in the Olympic Games. Some of the other events to have briefly graced the Olympic programme include rope climbing, long jump for horses, club swinging, standing triple jump and croquet. Read more about the unusual Olympic sports from the past

A shock of wasps. Collective nouns are one of the most charming oddities of the English language, often with seemingly bizarre connections to the groups they identify. Many of them were first recorded in the 15th century in publications known as Books of Courtesy, and include a wide range of animals and birds and, intriguingly, an extensive array of human professions and types of person. Find out more collective nouns that originate from the Middle Ages

People from all over the world have made their way to a medieval castle in County Cork, in southern Ireland, climbed the tower and puckered up in order to give a particular stone on the southern wall a kiss. For set into the battlements of Blarney Castle is the famed Blarney Stone. Kiss it, so the legend goes, and you’ll be granted the gift of eloquence.