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Folklore meets True Crime: The Folklore of Poisonous Plants Used in Murder – Icy Sedgwick – Zoom

Folklore meets True Crime: The Folklore of Poisonous Plants Used in Murder

Banish the notion that anything natural must be good for you – 2/3 of plants are dangerous to humans. Thankfully, it’s often parts of the plants we rarely encounter, like the bulbs, or their berries are too unpleasant for us to eat in vast quantities. Yet aconite, belladonna, and hellebore show up in fiction, myth, and unfortunately fact as plants often employed as murder weapons. Look at hellebore, used to poison enemy water supplies in the ancient world, or poison hemlock, used in the execution of Socrates.

This talk will explore the folklore of those poisonous plants employed in murder, both fictional and real, with the emphasis on the plant lore rather than the gory details.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Icy Sedgwick is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating the fascinating world of European folklore with a focus on the British Isles, and the author of Rebel Folklore, Ghostlore, Bring Me Love, and Fate or Fortune. She is fascinated by plant lore, ghost stories, lost gods, and divination. Former ghost hunter Icy also holds a PhD in Film Studies after examining the representation of haunted houses in contemporary Hollywood cinema. https://www.icysedgwick.com

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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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

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The Knucker from Beowulf to Jet-Boot Jack – Paul Holman – Zoom

The Knucker from Beowulf to Jet-Boot Jack

The tale of the Lyminster Knucker has settled into a narrative of a threatening but not too bright monster vanquished by a plucky lad possessed of a ready wit and a poisoned pie. Etymology, which was once used to indicate the Knucker’s hellish origins, is now routinely called upon to prove that the tradition is an Anglo-Saxon survival. Yet the story as we know it is far from ancient and definitive, being first set down less than a century ago. Environmentalists and pagans have adopted the creature as a symbol and a guardian of the landscape, and a couple of neighbouring villages have duly laid claim to a Knucker of their own. Its defeat has been interpreted as a metaphor for the taming of the riverine landscape in which it is said to dwell, and re-enacted with a seventy-foot long carnival figure of papier-mâché and cloth on Brighton beach. Novelists and storytellers have teamed the Knucker up with other local figures, such as the elusive Saint Lewinna and Horsham’s real life Persian Princess, while one local coder incorporated the monster and its habitat into the 8-bit cosmography of a video game. Yet, for all this, the sense of some fluid and ominous survival still persists, hidden beneath the waters of a fenced-off pool.

Speaker Bio:

Paul Holman is the author of Sussex Coils and Loops (Scarlet Imprint, 2026), a book structured around a series of ritual art actions performed at sites in South-East England which have serpent and dragon legends associated with them. His other publications include Tara Morgana (also from Scarlet Imprint) and The Memory of the Drift (Shearsman).

Sussex Coils and Loops: https://scarletimprint.com/publications/p/sussex-coils-and-loops

Paul Holman: http://taramorgana.com/

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The History of Witchcraft – Gretchen Ivey – Zoom

The History of Witchcraft

This lecture will explore the history of witchcraft, witch beliefs, and the witch craze across the United Kingdom during the early modern period. Students will examine how fear, religion, superstition, and social tension contributed to the persecution of thousands of individuals accused of witchcraft throughout England and Scotland. Particular attention will be given to the social and political conditions that fuelled witch hunts and the ways in which accusations were often linked to gender, poverty, and local conflict.

A significant part of the course will focus on Wales and the strikingly different attitude many Welsh communities held towards witches and folk healers. Unlike other parts of Britain, many areas in Wales valued individuals accused of witchcraft for their knowledge of herbal medicine, healing practices, and traditional remedies. The lecture will investigate why some accused witches escaped persecution by moving into Welsh communities and how local customs, folklore, and practical reliance on medicinal knowledge shaped these attitudes.

Students will consider why Wales often treated alleged witches with greater tolerance and what communities gained from respecting and protecting these individuals rather than persecuting them during periods of widespread fear and hysteria.

Speaker Bio:

Gretchen Ivey is originally from the United States. She has lived and worked extensively abroad, including in Mexico, Bolivia, Switzerland, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, before making her home in England in 2002. She holds bachelor’s degrees in History and Spanish, as well as a master’s degree in Creative Writing.

Her academic and personal interests centre on the supernatural and the ways in which supernatural beliefs have shaped history, culture, folklore, and literature across different societies and historical periods. Through her research and lectures, she explores how ideas surrounding ghosts, witchcraft, hauntings, and the unexplained continue to influence cultural identity, storytelling, and collective memory.

Speaker Bio:

Sarah Winchester – Gretchen Ivey – Zoom

Sarah Winchester Blub Description

Few locations in American history have inspired as much mystery, speculation, and supernatural folklore as the Winchester Mystery House. Built by Sarah Winchester, widow of the Winchester rifle fortune, the sprawling mansion became famous for its endless construction, bizarre architecture, hidden passages, and stories of restless spirits said to haunt its halls.

This lecture explores the fascinating life of Sarah Winchester and the historical events that shaped both the woman and the legend. Students will examine the rise of spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, the tragedies that affected Sarah personally, and the myths surrounding her belief that she was pursued by the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles.

The session will also investigate the architecture of the Winchester Mystery House itself, separating documented history from supernatural folklore. Finally, the lecture will analyse the 2018 horror film Winchester, exploring what the film-makers portrayed accurately and where dramatic licence transformed history into Gothic horror.

Combining history, culture, architecture, literature, and the supernatural, this lecture examines why the Winchester Mystery House continues to occupy such a powerful place in popular imagination.

Speaker Bio:

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Poe and Spiritualism – Chris Semtner – Zoom

Poe and Spiritualism

During Spiritualism’s Victorian Era heyday, millions of devotees crowded around séance tables to contact their dearly departed loved ones. While Spiritualism’s levitating tables and trance mediums are familiar to most, much less known is poet Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on the movement. Join Chris Semtner, the Poe Museum’s curator and the author of Haunting Poe, as he reveals Poe’s associations with Spiritualism’s early practitioners and how his stories inspired and popularized their beliefs.

Speaker Bio

The curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Chris Semtner is an award-winning, internationally exhibited visual artist whose work can be found in numerous private and public collections. The Webster Award-winning author has written several articles and chapters in addition to eight books about Poe, visual art, horror, pop culture, and cryptography. Semtner has written for Biography.com, Crime Writers’ Chronicle, Resources for American Literary Study, and other publications. He has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, SyFy Wire, and Rue Morgue Magazine, in addition to appearing in documentaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, and Japan. He regularly speaks about strange and macabre subjects at various venues from the Steampunk World’s Fair and GalaxyCon to the U.S. Library of Congress and as far away as Paris, Madrid, and Kyoto.

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In the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution – Jason Wiggin – Zoom

In the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution

In the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution, the boundary between the physical and digital world is becoming increasingly blurred, changing the way we experience memory, presence and death. This talk explores the growing relationship between extended reality (XR), digital immortality and the architecture of remembrance, asking: What happens when the body no longer needs a physical place to be remembered?

From South African cemeteries and QR-coded gravestones to AI avatars, virtual memorials and holographic resurrections, we will explore how mourning is moving into the Metaverse. As technology reshapes the rituals of grief, what does it mean to visit the dead in virtual reality, speak to an AI version of a loved one, or preserve a life in digital form? At a time when our online selves may outlive our physical bodies, this talk considers whether these new technologies bring us closer to those we have lost, or simply create new ghosts for the living.

Speaker Bio:

Jason Wiggin spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about death, ruins, memory and forgotten places. A Senior Lecturer in Interior Design at Norwich University of the Arts, his research wanders through cemeteries, adaptive reuse, digital afterlives and the curious ways people choose to be remembered. He believes interiors don’t end at the walls of a building, they extend into stories, rituals, landscapes and, perhaps, the Metaverse.

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A Ghost in Every Grid Square: Building a Haunted Map of Milton Keynes – Steph Lay – Zoom

A Ghost in Every Grid Square: Building a Haunted Map of Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes might be the last place anyone would expect to find a rich haunted history.

Built from the ground up around sixty years ago, it is a city of grid roads, roundabouts, underpasses, concrete cows and carefully planned estates. It has no ancient city walls, no labyrinth of medieval streets and few of the crumbling buildings traditionally associated with ghosts. To many outsiders, it appears rational, modern, and perhaps even a little soulless.

But what happens when someone takes the time to ask whether the city is haunted?

Since April 2025, psychologist, writer and photographer Dr Steph Lay has been attempting to find a first-hand account of something uncanny in every one of Milton Keynes’s grid squares.

What began as an apparently impossible challenge soon uncovered a hidden city of apparitions, phantom footsteps, haunted homes, poltergeist activity and strange encounters in the most ordinary of places.

In this talk, Steph will explain how she created the Revenants on the Redway project, how its stories are collected and mapped, and what she has learned from the people who trust her with experiences they may have carried silently for decades.

Along the way, she will share a selection of the project’s most compelling accounts, taking the audience through new-build estates, shops, footbridges, roadsides and older corners of the city. Together, these stories reveal an uncanny landscape that few people had thought to look for.

Milton Keynes may have been planned as a new city, but its haunted history is only just beginning to emerge.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Steph Lay is a writer, researcher and cognitive psychologist based in Milton Keynes. Her doctoral research explored the uncanny valley and why certain near-human faces can feel so unsettling.

She is the creator of City of Secrets and its ongoing Revenants on the Redway project, gathering local stories of the unexplained and exploring the hidden histories, folklore and uncanny possibilities of Milton Keynes.

Behind the scenes, Steph also works with Peter Laws on the YouTube channel Into the Fog. She curates first-hand paranormal accounts submitted by viewers and creates atmospheric artwork and visual storytelling to help bring those stories to life.

Across her work, she brings together psychology, place, folklore and the paranormal, exploring not only why strange experiences unsettle us, but why they matter to the people who live through them.

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Sanctum: At Home with the Uncanny by Mark C. O’Flaherty – Zoom

Sanctum: At Home with the Uncanny

Sanctum is an anti-interiors book, a compilation of 10 years of the kind of work created in tandem with commercial editorial projects. These focus on the aspects of stories that editors think would unnerve their readers. What does the uncanny mean to you? It is about people who see themselves as custodians rather than owners of houses; ghosts, love stories, and art and design created and collected in these unique spaces. Every home has a singular energy. Most importantly Sanctum is about the people in these places, now and in the past. It’s also an homage to In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, which explores the beauty of imperfection.

Speaker Bio:

Mark C. O’Flaherty is a design writer and photographer for a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, World of Interiors and House & Garden. He grew up in London and spent the last decade splitting his time between Europe and New York. In the 1990s he worked in fashion show production and was a music photographer and DJ. He is the author and photographer of Narrative Thread: Conversations on Fashion Collections (2023, Bloomsbury). markcoflaherty.com

Image: Portrait by Ruth Hogben.

Cover image by Mark, Sanctum: At Home with the Uncanny is published by Thames & Hudson.

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A Satanic Camelot – Rosemary Thorpe – Zoom

A Satanic Camelot

This talk proposes Rosemary’s Baby as the guiding thread through a sequence of cultural and political events, beginning with the ascent of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and leading to the publication of a novel in which Ira Levin engages in sustained acts of religious and moral blasphemy—acts that were rapidly translated into a film script following the book’s release. In 1968, the project was subsequently entrusted to a young Polish director, Roman Polanski, who at the time professed no belief in the supernatural. Even though the United States had already witnessed several political assassinations, municipal authorities across the country chose to ban the film upon its release. Public unease would deepen further in 1969, when followers of Charles Manson carried out the murders at Cielo Drive.

Speaker Bio:

Rosemary Thorne (she/her) is a bilingual Spanish writer, translator, and researcher specializing in horror and the occult, based in Madrid, Spain. Born in 1968, she became a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) in 2019 and soon thereafter began serving as Co-Chair of the HWA International Chapter, a role she continues to hold. She also served as a juror for the prestigious 2023 HWA Lifetime Achievement Award.

She writes her horror fiction primarily in English, which she regards as the most welcoming language for the genre. Her first novel, El pacto de las 12 uvas, was published in December 2021. She has also translated Edward Lee’s The Bighead into Spanish for Dimensiones Ocultas Press.

An active essayist, her recent work focuses on the analysis of literature, cinema, and visual art through an occult and esoteric lens.

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Deck the Halls (Carefully): Poisonous Plants of Christmas – Icy Sedgwick – Zoom

Deck the Halls (Carefully): Poisonous Plants of Christmas

Thanks to Batman Returns, most people probably know mistletoe is poisonous if you eat it, yet the plant has become intrinsically linked with Christmas. Are any of our other beloved Christmas plants poisonous? Well, yes, as it turns out – especially the so-called Christmas rose, which is not a rose, but a hellebore! Holly berries are toxic too, and while not poisonous, poinsettia sap is certainly irritating. Yet they, and other plants, have become Christmas staples.

This talk will explore the folklore of those plants both associated with Christmas and those that flower in the festive period that are poisonous.

Speaker Bio:

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