Mental Floss

BOOKS

Novelists have used everything from real killers to newsworthy hostage situations to literal white whales to craft their fiction.

Erin McCarthy


Victor Hugo, Anne Rice, and Thomas Hardy were all believers.

Some, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Victor Hugo, believed they had communicated with spirits directly; others, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy, had ghostly encounters they couldn’t explain.

Lorna Wallace






Karl Aspelin, Public Domain // Wikimedia Commons

As is often the case when you look back into history, there’s more than one possible answer. But one of the leading contenders has a fairly predictable culprit: the Puritans.

Jake Rossen
















These offenses include everything from historical forgeries to audacious heists to cold-blooded murder—all with a bookish twist.

Lorna Wallace