European folklore in the context of "All Souls' Day"

A black cat is a domestic cat with black fur. They may be a specific breed, or a common domestic cat of no particular breed. Most black cats have golden irises due to their high melanin pigment content. Black cats are the subject of mythology, legend, and superstition. They are often associated with witches and good or bad luck in European folklore.

The Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA) recognizes 22 cat breeds that can come with solid black coats. The Bombay breed is exclusively black.

A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead humanoid creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods which they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century.

Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world, but the term vampire was first popularized in Western Europe following reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria drawing on a pre-existing folk belief in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. This delusion led, in certain cases, not only to individuals being accused of vampirism, but also to the corpses of such suspected vampires being pierced with stakes.Local variants in Southeastern Europe were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania, cognate with Italian strega, meaning 'witch'.

In folklore, a werewolf (from Old English werwulf 'man-wolf'), or occasionally lycanthrope (from Ancient Greek λυκάνθρωπος 'wolf-human'), is an individual who can shapeshift into a wolf or therianthropic hybrid wolf–humanlike creature, either voluntarily or involuntarily due to a curse or other affliction. In modern fiction, especially film, transformations are often depicted as triggered by the full moon and transmitted by a bite or scratch from another werewolf. Early sources for belief in this ability or affliction, called lycanthropy, are Petronius (27–66) and Gervase of Tilbury (1150–1228).

The werewolf is a widespread concept in European folklore, existing in many variants, which are related by a common development of a Christian interpretation of underlying European folklore developed during the Middle Ages. From the early modern period, werewolf beliefs spread to the Western Hemisphere with colonialism. Belief in werewolves developed in parallel to the belief in witches during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Like the witchcraft trials as a whole, the trial of supposed werewolves emerged in what is now Switzerland, especially the Valais and Vaud, in the early 15th century and spread throughout Europe in the 16th, peaking in the 17th and subsiding by the 18th century.

A hinny is a domestic equine hybrid, the offspring of a male horse (a stallion) and a female donkey (a jenny). It is the reciprocal cross to the more common mule, which is the product of a male donkey (a jack) and a female horse (a mare). The hinny is distinct from the mule both in physiology and temperament as a consequence of genomic imprinting and is also less common.

Many supposed examples of the jumart, which were thought to be a hybrid between a horse and a cow in European folklore, were found to be hinnies.

Continental Germanic mythology formed an element within Germanic paganism as practiced in parts of Central Europe occupied by Germanic peoples up to and including the 6th to 8th centuries (the period of Germanic Christianization). Traces of some of the myths lived on in legends and in the Middle High German epics of the Middle Ages. Echoes of the stories, with the sacred elements largely removed, may appear throughout European folklore and in European fairy tales.