The Haunted Landscape VII : Folklore, Ghosts, Magic, and Monsters
Schedule
Sat Nov 22 2025 at 10:00 am to 05:00 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Conway Hall Sunday Concerts | London, EN
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Whose claws are scratching at the church door? What’s that ghost tumbling over the moor? Who’s that figure cut into the earth? What can I do to lift this curse? Join us for a legendary trip through the Haunted Landscape at London Fortean Society’s day of expert talks on British ghosts, magic and folklore.All speaker books will be available to buy, and have signed, from The Word Bookshop’s stall.
E. Jay Gilbert – Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives
E. Jay Gilbert has been collecting tales of the supernatural from her local area, a small village outside of Newcastle, for years, and what surprised her most is how universal those are: not only in terms of recurring spectres that haunt us the world over, but also how similar our experience of ghost-telling is, wherever we grew up.
Mark Norman – The Folklore of Churches and Churchyards
Expect vestiges of possible pagan symbols hidden in the fabric of the church building, learn the ways in which you can use the church and its grounds to divine who might die in the next twelve months, where you might find love, and how you might cure illnesses.
Jeremy Harte – The Devil in Church
At the height of a storm, parishioners would huddle in the most sacred and least safe building in the parish – the parish church, with its demon-dispelling bells jangled by a team of ringers who would be first to be destroyed when the lightning made contact. As the discharge ripped through the building, people saw what chronicle and sermon had primed them to see – a dragon, a fiend, a black pig or dog desecrating the sanctuary.
Rachel Poulton – Unseen: In Search of the Sublime and Spirit of Place in the Haunted Landscape
Rachel Poulton will share her quest for the sublime and spirit of place through intuitive walks in our eternal landscape. Tapping into the ancient atmospheres and recalling the folklore attached to legendary sites like The Wilmington Giant and Chanctonbury Ring, Rachel invites you to wander with her and explore the unseen landscape.
Roger Luckhurst – The Lost Landscape of London’s Inner-City Dead
London is still a patchwork landscape of forgotten or lost grounds, and Roger Luckhurst will illustrate this by exploring zones around the edges of the City of London for their vanished or marginalised places of rest for the dead.
Icy Sedgwick – Northern Ghosts: The Bargest and Gytrash
The barguest occupies a strange position in the folklore of northern England because no one can agree on whether the barghest is a ghost, sprite, bogey-beast, fairy, death omen, or something else entirely. The gytrash, appears in Yorkshire, loitering on lonely roads often as a dog or a horse. While some stories see the gytrash leading lone travellers astray, other stories see the gytrash take on a much more helpful role in putting lost travellers in the right direction.
Tabitha Stanmore – Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might well have been cunning folk: practitioners of magic who were a common, even essential part of daily life, at a time when the supernatural was surprisingly mundane.
Owen Davies & Ceri Houlbrook – Legend-Tripping in the British Landscape
Legend-tripping is the act of visiting a particular place within the landscape because it is associated with a legend, often in the hope of witnessing a phenomenon as if the visitor were in the legend. Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook will explore the nature, history, and landscapes of legend-tripping in Britain, from cryptids and ghosts to Robin Hood.
Book sales via The Word Bookshop.
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Where is it happening?
Conway Hall Sunday Concerts, Red Lion Cement Limited, London, WC1R 4RL, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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