You might have noticed witches in your FYP. And cottages, and tarot decks, and grandmothers knitting by candlelight, or people lighting bonfires at solstice, or a man in a flat cap chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill in Gloucestershire.

Folklore is having a moment. But what does that actually mean? Who's driving it? Why has the pagan calendar quietly become the calendar of a smaller, cosier internet? And why should you care?

Wait, hasn't folklore always been around?

Yep! Folklore is the oldest content format going, but what's happening right now is different, it's not the version of folklore you might expect.

Across the last year (April 2025–April 2026), I tracked 911k English-language folklore mentions on TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky and Threads. The first thing I noticed when analysing the data is that the new folklore conversation is organised around the pagan wheel of the year — the eight ancient sabbats that mark the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days.

Every single one of those sabbats appears in our data as a measurable spike in mentions. And the biggest folklore day of the year? It isn't Halloween.

It's Yule.

The wheel of the year creates content spikes

On December 21, 2025 (the Winter Solstice), we recorded nearly 40k folklore-themed posts, the highest volume of any day of the year. Halloween/Samhain (October 31) generated 19k. Beltane (May 1) produced 30k. Even the Summer Solstice, Imbolc, Ostara and Lammas all show up clearly. The wheel of the year, made digital.

Folklore no longer shows up online as a Halloween-once-a-year thing. It's a year-round conversation that uses a calendar most marketers have never considered.

Folklore posts on TikTok across each sabbat's 3-day window. Source: Kim Townend.

Yule is the new Halloween. It generates 1.6x as many posts as Halloween on TikTok. On the single-day peak (Dec 21 vs Oct 31), Yule produced more than twice the views and nearly four times the engagement. The pagan winter, fires, evergreens, candlelight, slow rituals, has overtaken the secular spooky season as the dominant folkloric mood. 

Upcoming fire festival Beltane is closing in too: it’s now the second biggest folklore moment of the TikTok year, ahead of Halloween.

Witchcraft & Magic is an active practice, not just an aesthetic. Almost 15% of all mentions talk about witchcraft, and on TikTok specifically, that figure jumps to 19%. WitchTok has outgrown its origin niche and now drives mainstream witchy aesthetics across beauty, wellness and lifestyle.

Cottagecore is maturing from purely vibes into ritual-based content. Image analysis shows that people are doing needlework, knitting, cooking, reading, and walking in the forest. It's not just a vibe anymore. It's a lived practice.

This all tells us folklore isn't being consumed as nostalgia. It's being lived as an identity. The audience isn't purely reading about solstice; they're going to Stonehenge to mark it. They're not just buying a candle; they're casting a spell on Imbolc.

TikTok is ground zero for Folklore engagement

Compared to the rest of social channels, TikTok over-indexes on every folkloric theme; it’s where people discover and engage with this type of content. What we’re seeing on TikTok is a cluster of folklore sub-communities, each with its own creators, hashtags and visual codes:

TikTok folklore communities. Source: Kim Townend.

WitchTok is the largest. The community now sits at the intersection of beauty, wellness, occult practice and Gen Z spirituality.

Appalachian POV is the surprise hit of the year. Regional American folk horror  "POV: you live in Appalachia, don't look out the window"  is producing some of the platform's biggest viral moments.

Folk horror, traditionally a distinctly British/European theme, has its own native younger TikTok community now, with the tag #folkhorror often showing up alongside #urbanlegend, #ghoststories and #appalachia.

What about Beltane?

Those of you who are familiar with the wheel of the year will know that Beltane is coming up on May 1st. Beltane is a cross-quarter day, and, as we learned from our listening, the second-most-talked-about calendar event on TikTok.

Below, you’ll see the TikTok overlap data around Beltane 2025 between April 25th and 5th May last year, #beltane generated 12.4 million views. 

As you can see from the chart below, the festival itself is the epicentre of the various subcommunities. We see mentions of folklore, pagan, tradition, witchcraft, tarot, manifestation, and the Germanic “Walpurgis Night” (witches' night), which is celebrated two days earlier, all showing up alongside #beltane.

So why is this happening?

This is the question that interests me most as a strategist. The widely held theory that folklore is rising because people are disillusioned with capitalism proved only partly true. Explicit anti-capitalism / hustle-critique language appears in just a miniscule  0.2% of posts.

What dominates instead is re-enchantment: 15% of TikTok folklore posts use language around magic, meaning, intuition, manifestation, and synchronicity. Folklore is providing a layer of meaning to help make sense of modern life, not as an alternative to it. 

Then came belonging (7%, talking about community, sisterhood, coven and villages), and our third theme is nervous-system regulation (6% of all posts mention anxiety, burnout, and healing).

We also found that the anti-hustle sentiment is there in the data, it just shows up in spiritually coded TikTok language:

“For witches with executive dysfunction. Aka: me! Burnout is NOT a moral failure. Stillness is sacred this time of year. You don’t owe productivity to be worthy.” 

TLDR: folklore is rising on TikTok because it offers re-enchantment, belonging and regulation, and 2026 demands all of these things in spades.

What could all of this mean for brands?

Folklore is becoming increasingly more relevant and offers brands with the right audiences a way to engage with people year-round. 

Instead of just focusing on typical Halloween-style marketing, brands can tap into the themes and stories of folklore to connect with a wider audience. 

This approach allows for a more meaningful interaction with customers, making their experiences more relatable and personal. It’s a chance to explore something different and create unique content throughout the year.

This is a guest article compiled by Kim Townend, an award-winning social strategist and social listening consultant with 20 years of social-specific experience. She's worked with brands, broadcasters, and governments worldwide and is an expert in turning data into insights and insights into strategy. Find her at her website: https://kimtownend.com/ or LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimtownend/