20 Saints Whose Real Origin Stories Are Far Stranger Than Their Statues

St. Nicholas was a 4th-century bishop of Myra, the real-life prototype for Santa Claus, and he is commemorated as a patron saint of gift-givers. However, another, less appealing legend about him involves a cruel innkeeper who slaughtered three schoolboys during a famine, hiding them in a barrel intended to pass off as meat. St. Nicholas exposed the innkeeper’s crime and resurrected the boys. This legend first appeared in religious plays in France 800 years after Nicholas died.

St. Denis was a 3rd-century missionary who became the first bishop of Paris. He was decapitated by Roman soldiers on Montmartre Hill during their persecution of Christians. The 9th-century Abbot of Saint-Denis, Hilduin, wrote that St. Denis’s headless body arose, picked up its own severed head, and walked about six kilometers while preaching about repentance until it reached the spot that would become the Abbey of Saint-Denis. He remains France’s patron saint.

St. Margaret of Antioch was a 3rd-century Christian in modern-day Turkey who refused to marry the local Roman governor. When he had her imprisoned in a dungeon, the Devil allegedly appeared to her in the form of a dragon that devoured her whole. However, Margaret made the sign of the cross inside its stomach, and it split apart, leaving her completely unharmed just moments before she was martyred. Pope Gelasius I dismissed the story as fictitious in 494, but the tale continued to be among the most popular stories in medieval Europe.

St. Lucy was a Christian noblewoman in Syracuse, Sicily, during the 4th century. She was wealthy, but vowed never to marry, giving her dowry instead to the poor. When one suitor proposed to her and was refused, he denounced her as a Christian. She was sentenced to death by the sword. The famous detail we remember from St. Lucy statues, her holding a platter with her eyes on it, is a much later invention. Medieval folklore says she plucked her eyes out when her suitor admired them, and then sent them to him on a plate. The first written records of her life don’t include it.

St. Christopher, martyred by Roman Emperor Diocletian in the early 4th century, is well known in Western art history as a giant who carries baby Jesus across a river, but a much older Eastern Orthodox tradition depicted St. Christopher entirely differently. He was portrayed as a cynocephalus, a man with the head of a dog, and the story went that he was originally named Reprobus and came from a tribe of people with dogs’ heads. Russian, Greek, and Coptic icons continued to feature this image up until 1722, when the Russian church authorities outlawed it.

Bartholomew was one of the 12 apostles chosen by Jesus, but the Bible says nothing about how he met his end. Other early Christian texts say that he was sent to Armenia, converted the king, and was then flayed alive by order of the king’s angry brother. In Milan Cathedral, there is a statue of Bartholomew made in 1562 by Marco d’Agrate, which shows him calmly wearing his flayed skin as a cloak, hence his status as patron saint of tanners.

St. Wilgefortis didn’t actually exist, but that doesn’t mean the people who created her myth were disingenuous. Medieval Christians believed that she was a princess betrothed to a pagan king. Because she had sworn off marriage, she prayed to God to make her ugly enough that the king would reject her. She awoke one morning with a full beard and the king, horrified, left. Her enraged father then ordered her crucified. Art historians trace the whole legend to a 14th-century misinterpretation of an older crucifix in Lucca, Italy, showing a robed, bearded Christ, later misread as a bearded woman on a cross.

St. Lawrence was a deacon in Rome during the 3rd century who was entrusted with the Church’s charity funds. In 258, when a Roman official ordered him to turn over all the riches of the Church, he gathered up all the city’s poor and sick people and told the official that “these are the true treasure of the Church.” Enraged, the official sentenced him to be roasted alive on an iron grate placed over hot coals. More than a century after his death, the bishop Ambrose recorded Lawrence’s final words as he lay roasting, “Turn me over; I’m done on this side.”

St. Guinefort was actually a greyhound, born in 13th-century Lyon, France. A knight left his infant son with the dog as a babysitter. Returning home, the knight found his baby’s cradle overturned and Guinefort’s mouth covered in blood. Enraged, the knight killed his pet. But then, the knight discovered that the baby was unharmed and lying next to the corpse of a venomous snake, which Guinefort had killed to defend the baby. Guilt-ridden villagers built a shrine and worshipped the greyhound as a protector of infants, though the Church never recognized him as a saint.

St. Olga assumed regency of Kievan Rus in 945, when a neighboring tribe killed her husband, Prince Igor. Before she converted to Christianity, she avenged his murder by besieging the tribe’s capital and forcing its citizens to pay tribute: according to legend, Olga ordered every house to provide three sparrows and three pigeons; she then had burning rags tied to their feet and let them loose. The birds flew home and burned down the city. About a decade later, Olga converted to Christianity and is venerated as a saint for her conversion.

St. Joseph of Cupertino was a 17th-century Italian friar best known for being incredibly clumsy and a terrible student. Witnesses in church said he frequently fell into trance-like states, during which he would seemingly rise into the air and float towards the altar. More than 70 of these levitation events were attested in depositions from fellow churchgoers, cardinals, and even the pope. This spectacle prompted the Roman Inquisition to investigate him for witchcraft. They then kept shuttling him from one remote monastery to another until his death.

In the 10th century, St. Dunstan was Archbishop of Canterbury and one of England’s most important political and church reformers, after having begun life as a monk and blacksmith in Glastonbury. His enduring folk reputation, however, derives from a tale recorded later by a monk called Osbern: that the Devil came to Dunstan’s forge in the form of a gorgeous woman to entice him, but Dunstan noticed cloven hoofs beneath her gown and seized the Devil’s nose with his red-hot smithing tongs until Satan ran away.

Edmund was king of East Anglia until the Vikings conquered the kingdom in 869. When he refused to renounce Christianity, he was tied to a tree, shot full of arrows, and beheaded. His head was tossed into a thicket. A monk named Abbo of Fleury, writing about a hundred years after Edmund’s death, reports that when the king’s men went out searching for him, calling his name, they heard a voice saying “Here, here.” They found the head between the paws of a wolf, which simply walked off as they picked it up.

A 12th-century Flemish nobleman, St. Drogo abandoned his worldly possessions to become a shepherd in the French village of Sebourg. Suffering from a terrible illness that ravaged his face and body in his twenties, he constructed a small stone cell next to the exterior wall of the parish church in 1186 so that his neighbors would never have to look upon him again. He lived within it for about 40 years, receiving his communion and rations through a small window, before finally passing away. The idea that St. Drogo is a patron saint of coffee is only a recent online phenomenon.

Ancient martyrologies have St. Expeditus as a Roman soldier who was martyred in Armenia about 303. In most of his statues, he appears as a Roman centurion carrying a cross with the Latin word for “Today” and stepping on a raven that is croaking “Tomorrow,” a reminder to not put off your business until tomorrow. According to another story from the 19th century, his fame today started when a convent received a shipment of unidentified relics labeled in French with the word “expedite” and the nuns assumed “expedite” was the name of a saint.

According to one version of the story, a man called St. Genesius was a pagan actor and playwright in Rome, and around 303 he put on a satirical play for the emperor Diocletian and his court. During the play, which mocked the Christian ritual of baptism, he stopped in the middle of a scene imitating one, broke from character, and said he had actually converted to Christianity. Even when tortured, he would not retract the statement and was subsequently beheaded, which is why actors claim him as their patron.

For years, St. Simeon of Emesa lived as a hermit on the shore of the Dead Sea until he made the long walk to the Syrian city of Emesa with a dead dog trailing behind him on his belt. Then, he began acting insane in public, throwing nuts at women in church and tripping merchants. Meanwhile, he secretly healed the sick and fed the poor, never accepting credit. His life was recorded in the 7th century by the biographer Leontios of Neapolis as an example of “Foolishness for Christ,” an Eastern Orthodox practice intended to eradicate the ego.

In 1150, Christina was born in the Belgian town of Sint-Truiden. In her twenties, she went into convulsions that looked like death but then came back to life at her own funeral mass, sitting up in her coffin and flying to the rafters. She told people she had been to Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven, and she’d volunteered to return to earth to suffer in place of other souls in Purgatory. The story was recorded by a Dominican priest, Thomas of Cantimpré, around 1232. Her veneration comes from local tradition rather than any papal decision.

In 4th-century Egypt, St. Moses the Black was a slave who formed a gang of criminals who terrorized the region around the Nile. When his criminal activities were discovered, he fled to a monastery and was so inspired by the peaceful nature of the monks that he became one of them. Years later, when the monastery was attacked by raiders, he chose not to participate in the defense of the monastery and attempted to persuade the attackers to abandon their violence. He was killed in the attack.

St. Simeon Stylites was getting tired of having huge crowds of pilgrims following him around the Syrian desert, so in 423 he built a stone column near the town of Telanissos and kept building it higher and higher until it stood about 50 feet tall. Then he climbed to a small platform at the top and stayed there, in the heat and rain and winter frost, for 37 years, eating bread and drinking goat’s milk that his followers hauled up to him. A contemporary writer, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, saw it himself. And unlike most of the stories on this list, this one just happened.

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