Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Tales from the Time Between Times – Owen Staton – Zoom

Tales from the Time Between Times

When the veil thins and the night presses close, when the wind moves like a whisper through the trees and the firelight dances with a life of its own… that is when the old stories wake.

Come, draw nearer to the firepit at the heart of the forest, where shadows stretch long and the past is never truly past. Here, storyteller Owen Staton invites you into that liminal hour — the time between times — where myth and memory walk hand in hand.

Hear the hollow laughter of the Mari Lwyd as she rattles her skull at the threshold. Catch a fleeting glimpse of the Tylwyth Teg, fair and terrible, watching from just beyond the circle of light. And listen… closely… for even the Devil himself is said to wander these woods when the darkness is at its deepest.

These are not just stories. They are echoes. Warnings. Invitations.

An evening of Welsh ghost lore, rich with atmosphere, humour, and a creeping sense of something older than the land itself — told as only Owen Staton can tell it.

The fire is waiting.
The night is listening.
All that remains… is for you to step into the dark.

Speaker Bio:

Owen Staton is a Welsh storyteller and performer with over thirty years’ experience bringing the myths and legends of Wales to life for audiences across the world. As host of the acclaimed Time Between Times podcast, he has built a reputation for weaving atmosphere, humour, and a touch of the uncanny into every tale. Now in his fifty-third year, Owen continues to travel the old paths of story… though his hair, by his own admission, remains entirely beyond his control.

Curated & Hosted by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland

In Iceland, Christmas does not arrive quietly.

It comes creeping down from the mountains—one figure at a time.

The thirteen Yule Lads, now often softened into mischievous gift-bringers, were once something far less comforting: a band of strange, intrusive beings who descended upon farms in the darkest nights of winter. Each with their own unsettling habits—slamming doors, licking spoons, stealing food—they moved through the household not as welcome guests, but as presences to be endured.

Behind them loomed their mother, Grýla, a monstrous figure said to hunt disobedient children and boil them alive. And beyond her, the vast, silent threat of the Yule Cat, who stalked the snowy landscape in search of those without new clothes to wear.

This lecture explores the darker origins of the Yule Lads within Icelandic folklore: their connection to older troll traditions, their role in seasonal discipline and social control, and the gradual transformation of these figures under the influence of modern Christmas traditions. Through folklore, literature, and cultural history, we will trace how fear, humour, and survival intertwine in one of the most unique festive traditions in the world.

Why thirteen? Why do they arrive one by one? And what do their strange behaviours reveal about life in a harsh and isolated landscape?

This is not the story of Christmas cheer.It is the story of what comes down from the mountains when the nights are longest—and the world feels most fragile.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead

Long before Dracula gave the vampire a cloak, a castle, and a seductive gaze, the undead were something far more troubling: a practical problem.

In the villages of Eastern and Central Europe, the dead did not always stay buried. Bodies were said to rise, to feed, to return to their families—not as spirits, but as flesh that would not decay properly. Livestock sickened. Children wasted away. Entire households fell ill. And in response, communities acted—not with superstition, but with a grim, methodical logic.

This talk explores the historical phenomenon of the so-called “vampire panics” of the 17th and 18th centuries, when officials, clergy, and physicians were drawn into investigations of the undead. Corpses were exhumed and examined. Reports were written. Remedies were prescribed. The boundary between folklore, medicine, and early science began to blur in unsettling ways.

Why did certain bodies become vampires? What did people actually see when they opened the grave? And how did disease—particularly those that distort the body in death—shape the belief that the dead were feeding on the living?

From stakes driven through the heart to sickles laid across the throat, from garlic and fire to the careful repositioning of the corpse, this lecture reveals the ritual technologies developed to contain the restless dead. These were not random acts of fear, but structured responses to a world in which death itself seemed unstable.

Drawing on historical case studies, medical misunderstandings, and the anthropology of death, this talk repositions the vampire not as a figure of gothic romance, but as something far older and more disturbing: a body that refuses to behave.

Because before the vampire became seductive, it was unmanageable.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Opium Dreams: Desire, Decay, and the Victorian Imagination – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Opium Dreams: Desire, Decay, and the Victorian Imagination

What does it mean for a society to fall in love with oblivion?

From ancient ritual intoxication to the smoky parlours of 19th-century London, opium has long occupied a strange and seductive place in human history—at once medicine, muse, and menace.

This lecture traces the cultural, social, and psychological impact of opium across the ages, culminating in its profound entanglement with Victorian society.

In the 1800s, opium was everywhere: prescribed by doctors, sold freely in chemists, and consumed across all classes—from exhausted factory workers to poets, painters, and aristocrats seeking transcendence. It soothed pain, inspired visions, and quietly tightened its grip on a nation in the throes of industrialisation and empire.

Through the writings of figures such as Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we explore how opium shaped literature and the creative imagination—fueling dreamlike beauty, but also paranoia, fragmentation, and despair. We will step inside the opium dens of London’s East End, examine the moral panic they provoked, and uncover how addiction, colonial trade, and class anxieties became deeply intertwined.

This lecture moves between the intimate and the imperial: from private visions to public crises, from the quiet laudanum bottle in the bedside drawer to the vast machinery of the Opium Wars.

Rich in atmosphere and grounded in cultural history, Opium Dreams invites you into a world of velvet shadows and chemical longing—where pleasure and ruin walk hand in hand, and where the boundaries between medicine, vice, and art begin to dissolve.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Radio Sorcery: a resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal practices – Dr Matteo Polato – Zoom

Radio Sorcery: a resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal practices

The talk introduces a sound and resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal experiences, focusing on the relational, affective, and performative processes that have shaped occultural practices in recent decades. Radio technology is central to this exploration, considered both materially and discursively. On one side, it traces the use of radio devices among practitioners from the early 1950s – beginning with Friedrich Jürgenson’s experiments on Electronic Voice Phenomena – to the present, including the so-called ‘Estes method’ popularised by the documentary webseries Hellier (2019). On the other, the talk examines radio as a metaphor often used to interpret unexplained experiences, engaging with ideas such as Stone Tape Theory, T.C. Lethbridge’s residual haunting, and John Keel’s superspectrum. These and other frameworks conceptualise the paranormal experience itself as a process akin to radio transmission, made of the tuning-in, decoding, and amplification of otherworldly agencies.

However, the talk does not merely offer a history of paranormal uses of radio. Instead, it proposes an alternative epistemological framework grounded in sound and resonance, capable of foregrounding aspects often overlooked by ocular-centric models. Thinking through sound and resonance – as fundamentally interactive and embodied media – in fact, enables to challenge the often reductionist academic position to the field, redefining the paranormal not as a fixed object of investigation – to be analysed either as an ontological impossibility or as a subjective product of irrationality – but instead as a process emerging from relationalities in-between the embodied and the representational, the experiential and the fictional, the everyday and the exceptional.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Matteo Polato is a researcher, musician and experimental game developer. He is currently Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at the School of English, Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2025 he completed a PhD on the roles of sound and resonance-based processes in contemporary occulture and paranormal practices. He co-founded D∀RK – Dark Arts Research Kollective at MMU, a research group which explores the creative, communal and boundary-breaking potential of occulture. In the last 20 years he released albums on multiple labels, presented sound art pieces and performed in Europe, UK, USA and Japan. With the collaborative project Yami Kurae he develops experimental videogames inspired by psychogeography and occultural practices.

Hosted & Curated By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World

In the deep forests and under the shadow of Norway’s mountains, something watches.

Long before trolls became lumbering figures of children’s stories, they were understood as dangerous, intelligent, and deeply other—beings who lived just beyond the edge of human settlement, in caves, cliffs, and hollow hills. They stole livestock, lured travellers off their paths, hoarded ancient treasures, and, in some tales, hunted human flesh. To meet a troll was not whimsical. It was a risk.

This lecture explores the older, darker layers of Norwegian troll traditions, where the boundary between nature and the supernatural begins to dissolve. Trolls are not merely creatures of myth, but expressions of a landscape that is vast, unpredictable, and not entirely human. They are tied to mountains and weather, to darkness and stone, to the slow passage of time itself.

Drawing on folklore, art, and historical belief, we will examine how trolls were understood across Norway: as solitary giants, shape-shifters, multi-headed beings, or even deceptive figures capable of blending into human society. Particular attention will be given to the work of Theodor Kittelsen, whose haunting visual interpretations captured the uneasy presence of these beings at the edge of sight.

Why do trolls turn to stone in sunlight? What do their stories reveal about fear, isolation, and the limits of human control over nature? And why do they continue to haunt the cultural imagination of the North?

This is not a lecture about fairy tales.

It is about what lives in the mountain—and what happens when it notices you.

Speaker Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Freaks – Johnny Mains – Zoom

Freaks

Fresh off the massive success of Dracula (1931), director Tod Browning was tasked by MGM’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, to create a movie that would out-terrify Universal Studios’ booming monster franchise. He chose to adapt ‘Spurs’, a short story by Tod Robbins that was first published in the February 1923 issue of Munsey’s Magazine. It was a property Browning had convinced MGM to buy the rights for in 1925, but the project stalled. Browning temporarily left MGM to film Dracula for Universal Pictures, and watching Universal print money with their horror output, MGM’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, called upon Browning to make a film that would “out horror Frankenstein”. Browning dusted off the script for ‘Spurs.’ and when Thalberg read the treatment, he lamented: “Well, I asked for something horrible, and I guess I got it.” Despite his reservations, Thalberg greenlit the project, and Browning used real life sideshow performers, sending talent scouts across the US to hire human oddities. The result was Freaks (1932) and the resulting controversy was immediate. Test screenings were a disaster with people reportedly running from the theater. In a state of panic, MGM drastically slashed the film’s runtime from 90 minutes down to a disjointed 64 minutes, permanently destroying the excised footage to appease the censors.

Speaker Bio:

Johnny Mains has been writing a book on Freaks for the past decade, collecting as much information as he can about every aspect of the making of the film. For his talk, he opens up his archive to reveal three different versions of the script, talks through everything that was cut, dives deep into the shady world of Hollywood finances, revealing the film actually made more money than anyone expected, and the lengths he has gone to in trying to track down the ‘missing’ footage.

Johnny Mains is an editor, author and genre researcher. He currently works with the British Library, editing books for their Gilded Nightmare series.

You can find him at @johnnymains.co.uk over on Bluesky.

Hosted & Curated By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Dreams of Death: Navigating States of Dazzling Darkness – Dr. Nida Chenagtsang – Zoom

Dreams of Death: Navigating States of Dazzling Darkness

Are you ready to face your death? Or does this question alone bring shivers down your spine? If you dare to study the ultimate unknown, join us for this third instalment of Fey’s Shadow Salon, where we move beyond the unconscious, the supernatural and the psychedelic in order to understand how the psyche unravels when suspended in the emptiness of a liminal state.

We’ll investigate the similarities between the state of dreaming, death and darkness retreats. What connects these and can you utilize one to prepare for the other? These mysteries will be illuminated for us with the torch of Tibetan wisdom, as carried by our speaker of the night and a renowned expert on Tibetan Buddhism and traditional medicine: Dr. Nida Chenagtsang.

Come and find out what it takes to face the darkness beyond.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Nida Chenagtsang is a renowned Tibetan physician, scholar, and lineage master of the Yuthok Nyingthig, the unique spiritual healing tradition within Sowa Rigpa (Traditional Tibetan Medicine). Born in Amdo, northeastern Tibet, he began his medical training at the local Tibetan Medicine hospital before earning his degree from Lhasa Tibetan Medical University in 1996. Alongside his medical studies, Dr. Nida immersed himself in Vajrayana Buddhism, receiving transmissions and training from esteemed masters across all Tibetan Buddhist schools, with a particular focus on the Longchen Nyingthig, Dudjom Tersar, and Yuthok Nyingthig traditions.

A well-known poet in his youth, he has published numerous books and articles on Sowa Rigpa and the Yuthok Nyingthig, as well as groundbreaking research on ancient Tibetan healing practices, earning international recognition in both the East and West.

As the Founder and Academic Director of the Sowa Rigpa Institute, Dr. Nida has been teaching internationally for over 25 years, and continues to share the wisdom of Tibetan Medicine worldwide, preserving and advancing its profound healing traditions for future generations.

Hosted and Curated by:

Fey, a mediator between the otherworldly and the mundane. Outside of the salon (Ada Kałużna), a researcher with interest in philosophy of mind, psychedelic experience and the extraordinary Past scientific officer at the Beckley Foundation. Community-builder and traveler.

LINK: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ada_Kaluzna2

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Fey’s Shadow Salon – a lecture series where we explore the elusive, chart the intangible, and investigate the invisible. Come around as we initiate the first season of the Salon, the Study of the Unseen, on the eclipse of 3rd March and stay for the ride through labyrinths of the human psyche, from the seven circles of the Jungian unconscious, to the psychedelic fountains of creativity, to the tall peaks of imagination where the ancient Spirits dwell.

1. “Books of Visions”: Jung, Dante, and the Making of the Red Book – 3 Mar 2026

2. Psychedelics as Catalysts of Creativity – 30 April 2026

3. Dreams of Death: Navigating States of Dazzling Darkness – 14 May 2026

4. The I Ching Oracle – 28 May 2026

5. Spirit of Creativity – 28 July 2026

Amidst the Demons – Ed Simon – Zoom

Amidst the Demons

Fallen angels, devils, demons – the greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing us that he and his compatriots didn’t exist. Well, regardless of whether or not demons are “real” or not, from Asmodeus to Ziminiar they’ve had an effect on human imagination (and nightmares). In this presentation Ed Simon talks about the influence that “demonological poetics” has had on culture and the ways in which the Devil has often been a measure of all that we can know (or don’t know).

Speaker Bio:

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, and a staff writer for Literary Hub. A widely published writer, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.

Hosted & Curated By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Rags, Bones, and Other Sacred Objects – Ed Simon – Zoom

Rags, Bones, and Other Sacred Objects

Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren’t just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance.

Speaker Bio:

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, and a staff writer for Literary Hub. A widely published writer, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.

Hosted & Curated By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day