myths

On this week's episode of 'Misconceptions,' Elliott debunks some commonly-held notions about the Greek and Roman gods.

Including stories like “The Ungrateful Children and the Old Father Who Went to School Again.”

9. Real or not, Nessie is big business—to the tune of $38 million in annual revenue for the Loch Ness region.

You can stop torturing yourself with classical music now.

Sam Fentress via WikimediaCommons // CC BY-SA 2.0

The first photo of Nessie was taken in 1934. But the first mention of the lake-bound monster? An account of a sighting back in 564 CE.

Michael Maggs via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 3.0

Like proud parents, scientists often give their discoveries the biggest, most impressive names they can think of.

Bloodofox, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

Sort of.

Harry Price, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Helen Duncan was known as a "materialization medium"—someone who could not just commune with the dead but produce physical manifestations of them.

Environmentalists protested the development of a road on both environmental and mystical grounds.

Trains were once considered hazardous to one's health.

Hold on to your uterus: Early modes of transportation had some fretting that their bodies would be forever changed.

The truth is out there.

Sucking out a viper's venom won't save your life.

From quicksand to free-falling elevators, these situations call for clear thinking.

There once was a time when uttering the name Kraken sent chills down a mariner’s spine. The legendary beast was known for dragging whole ships down into the watery depths of Davy Jones’s Locker. Today we see the monster largely as fiction, but that doesn’

John Green lifts the veil on some of antiquity's greatest—and most mysterious—civilizations.

It’s easy to see how people could have confused this elephant skull for the remains of a giant Greek monster.

These eight fossils have been displayed as “evidence” of imaginary beasts like unicorns, dragons, and sea monsters.

In a town in northern Germany, a dark piece of folklore has found new life.

Try it with a piece of paper nearby. Then get ready for some MATH, people!

They've been spotted all over the Himalaya, yet no one has ever captured living proof of a yeti. Here are a few fascinating facts about this furry, mountain-dwelling cryptid.

Yuki-onna is one of the most formidable figures from Japanese folklore.

Yuki-onna, Kuchisake-onna, and Hashihime are just a few of the fearsome figures from Japanese folklore that you don’t want to mess with.

Sharks are mysterious creatures. Even the origins of the word "shark" are unknown, though it might come from the Mayan word xok. Maybe that's what makes these 400 million year old denizens of the deep so captivating—and why they sometimes fill us with dre