True. They are part of Italian folklore. The Malandanti were thought to be malevolent witches trying to destroy crops in the Friuli region of Italy. In the 16th and 17th Century, locals born with visonary powers, known as Benandanti, would fight the Malandanti and at other times use their powers for healing. The Benandanti were persecuted during the Roman Inquisition; one individual, Paulo Gasparotto, was found guilty but pardoned on the promise that he would give up his Benandanti activities.

In the TotenUniverse novels, Malandanti is a name given to an Interpol programme investigating a European network of covens dating back to the Bamberg and Wurzburg witch trials.

False. The original Book of Abramelin was a grimoire created by an Egyptian magician, Abramelin, and passed on to Abraham of Worms who lived in the 14th and 15th Centuries. The magic involves the uses of number and word squares to achieve specific outcomes. Aleister Crowley altered the Abramelin to summon the Holy Guardian Angel, but his efforts failed.

The Thomas Polder Variation was invented for the novel Who Among Us... and includes human sacrifice for summoning demons, which does not appear in the original.

True. In quantum mechanics the phenomenon known as a superposition has been achieved at the macro level. (Superposition was normally only seen at the micro or quantum level, in particles.) In 2010 physicists at the University of California in Santa Barbara forced a wafer of metal to exist in two energy states at the same time and in 2015 at the University of Bonn, scientists created an experiment in which a Caesium atom followed two different trajectories at the same time.

In the TotenUniverse, quantum mechanics is often used to explain the existence of occult phenomena and other locations not visible to living humans, such as Hell.

True. Blåkulla in Swedish means blue hill, but in Scandinavian folklore the Blokkula is sometimes described as a meadow with a house inhabited by the Devil. The location was first mentioned in witch trials during the mid-17th Century and thought to be a centre for sabbats and only accessible by flight.

In Lords of Misrule, Interpol agent Bernadette Maldini travels to Mora and Torsaker in Sweden, centres of witch mania in the 1600s, and believes the Blokulla could be synonymous with Heaven and Hell.

True. The pardon arrived from the Duke of Furstenberg thirty minutes after she was executed during the Bamberg witch trials. Dorothea Flock was married to a local businessman George Heinrich Flock who lost his first wife to the witch trials. Flock's execution led to the Holy Roman Empire demanding a greater adherance to the law and the court papers from witch trials.

In The Fine Art of Necromancy, Frieda Schoenhofer's mother has the same surname Flock, which inspires Frieda to find out if the families are related.

False. The Lesser Key of Solomon is a grimoire that includes a list of demons. Its correct name is Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, (little Key of Solomon) and divided into five volumes. The demons names, seventy-two of them, appear in the first volume, the Ars Goetia based on the earlier Pseudomonarchia Daemonum by Johann Weyer.

 The prime demon Eneliziel is made up and first appears in the novel The Fine Art of Necromancy.

True. They were seen by people in Arizona, Nevada and Sonora in Mexico, on 13th March 1997. The Phoenix lights were stationary and attributed to flares dropped by US Air Force A-10 Warthogs. A second group of lights flew in a triangular formation over Nevada.

In Who Among Us... a line of lights in the night sky was always seen shortly before demonic activity and first identified by Interpol agent Tipo Briess in Anderlecht, Belgium.

True. The term was used to describe events in Prague in 1618 when Protestant opponents of Catholic Ferdinand, King of Bohemia. Ferdinand opposed the building of Protestant churches and during a heated meeting in Prague Castle, four Catholic lords were thrown from third storey windows. The violence led to the Catholic Habsburgs and Protestant estates building up large armies and ultmately the Thirty Years War.

In The One Rule of Magic, Frieda Schoenhofer travels to Prague to buy a film prop and teases the seller by telling him to throw it to her from an upstairs window.

False. Numerology is considered to be a powerful tool in the occult and can trace its origins back to the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th Centuries. In addition to the sacred value of numbers, letters can also be given numerical values giving certain words and names magical properties.

The 7x7 arrangement to summon demons is a literary invention used by a team of Satanic assassins in the Malandanti novels Who Among Us... and Lords of Misrule.

False. The Vatican State has its own police force, the Corpo della Gendarmeria dello Stato della Città del Vaticano, but policing is outlined by Articles 3 and 22 of the 1929 Lateran Treaty. Article 22 is the arrangement by which crimes committed in the Vatican State are tried in Italy, and if found guilty, the criminals are imprisoned in Italy.

In Lords of Misrule, Interpol agent Bernadett Maldini considers the possibility of a special trial in the Vatican State for Malandanti members carrying out occult crimes.

False. Bram Stoker was bedridden in the first seven years of his life and in The Beaver Book of Horror, Daniel Farson suggests Stoker may have been told stories about people being buried alive. The vivid accounts leading to an imagination that would later produce Dracula.

Dracula is never mentioned in any of the TotenUniverse novels and most of the anti-vampire methods, garlic, crucifixes and holy water don't act as deterrents. Sunlight, however, is a constant threat.

True. The trouble followed an article on an ITV news broadcast on March 13th 1970 in which magician Sean Manchester offered to hold an exorcism to expel a vampire thought to be living in Highgate Cemetary. The offer and a simmering rivalry with another magician David Farrant, led to a mob invading the cemetary later that evening. The following August Farrant was arrested for carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake in a nearby churchyard, but the case was eventually dismissed.

Jonathan Knight's novel The Dead Heart Weeps describes four musicians being killed in a tomb in Highgate Cemetary and may have been the inspiration for Rob Wallet's account of Toten Herzen's disappearance in 1977.

False. It's a lovely thought, but a Monaco based yacht called Agnetha was entirely made up for Rob Wallet's boat in the fifth novel There Will Be Blood. Wallet was inspired to name the boat after the blonde Abba singer as a result of his continuing '70s fixation, which included collecting board games, old videos of television programmes and a peculiar knowledge of Jeux sans Frontieres.