text: The Swaffham Museum is a small, independent social history museum for Swaffham and the surrounding villages in Norfolk from the Stone Age to the modern. It has five galleries exhibiting local history and local geology as well as an Egyptology room about Howard Carter and the Ancient Egyptians, celebrating the centenary year of Howard Carter discovering the Tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.
  Swaffham was struck by a tornado measuring F1 on the Fujita scale and T2 on the TORRO scale on 23 November 1981 during the 1981 United Kingdom tornado outbreak.
  Folklore
  Swaffham is one of the many locations for The Man Who Became Rich through a Dream folk tale (Aarne-Thompson type 1645). The tale tells of a pedlar from Swaffham who dreamed for several consecutive nights that if he waited on London Bridge he would eventually hear good news. He travelled to London, and waited for several days on the bridge. Eventually a shopkeeper asked him why he was waiting, and the man told of his dream. The shopkeeper laughed, and replied that he often dreamed that if he went to a certain orchard in Swaffham and started digging, he would find buried treasure. The pedlar returned to Swaffham, and found the treasure.
  In medieval folklore, a black, hairy dog called the Black Shuck was rumoured to have wandered the three settlements of Swaffham, Castle Acre, and Great Cressingham, ambushing merchants who were on their way to large towns to sell their goods. There are still rumours of a puma-like black cat wandering around Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.