Latin American Mythology and Legends – Gods, Ghosts, and Forbidden Forests
From the whispering jungles of the Amazon to the haunted streets of colonial cities, Latin America is steeped in stories that blur the line between myth and reality. Join us for a captivating journey through a continent rich in ancient deities, shape-shifting spirits, bloodthirsty creatures, and heroic tricksters.
This lecture dives into the mythologies of the Aztec, Maya, Inca, and lesser-known Indigenous cultures—alongside folk legends like La Llorona, El Silbón, and the Chupacabra. Discover how colonialism, Catholicism, and native beliefs intertwined to create some of the most potent and haunting lore on Earth.
Whether you’re drawn to the gods of the sun and maize, or the weeping woman who wanders by moonlight, this is a night of stories that will enchant, terrify, and inspire.
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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next da
Lecture One – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Syphilis Through the Ages
From the whispered shame of ancient courtesans to the bio-political battlegrounds of the 20th century, this gripping lecture series traces the strange and scandalous journeys of five of history’s most infamous sexually transmitted infections: Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis, and HIV.
Uncover how these infections shaped empires, influenced religion and morality, inspired grotesque treatments and cruel laws — and gave rise to some of the most ground-breaking medical breakthroughs of the modern age. With each session focusing on one disease, we’ll dive into its origin myths, sociocultural impact, evolving medical responses, and the enduring human stories behind the statistics.
Expect mummified syphilitics, Cold War paranoia, ancient Egyptian condoms, tabloid fearmongering, wartime brothels, queer resistance, blood politics, and the science of stigma.
History has never been this intimate.
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, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Speaker Bio:
Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
Did you know that the story of “Cinderella” can be traced back to ancient Greece of 2,500 years ago? How about “Beauty and the Beast,” based on the 2,000-year-old Roman story of “Cupid and Psyche”? These are just two examples of the many fairy tales that have their origins in the ancient world. This talk explores the nature of fairy tales in antiquity and their influence on later tales. We will explore ancient Egyptian stories, a medieval “Little Red Riding Hood,” and variants in the collections of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and others.
Image:William-Adolphe Bouguereau, ‘The Abduction of Psyche’ (1895).
Bio
Debbie Felton is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches ancient Greek and Latin as well as various courses in translation, such as “Fairy Tales in the Ancient World,” “Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean,” and “Monsters of Classical Myths—and Their Meanings.” She specializes in folklore in classical literature and has published on various folklore-related topics including ghosts and witches. She is the author of Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021). She has also edited several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024).
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
In her role as a seemingly destructive female from classical mythology, Medusa continues to fascinate and disturb modern audiences. She has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the centuries: Is she a dangerous, man-destroying monster? An innocent maiden unjustly punished by the gods? A supernatural entity who just wanted to be left alone? A feminist icon?This talk presents various perspective on Medusa ranging over the last three thousand years, including representations from both literature and art, from early Greek texts such as Hesiod’s Origins of the Gods to recent artistic reconceptions such as Luciano Garbati’s Medusa with the Head of Perseus (2008) and beyond.
Bio
Debbie Felton is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches ancient Greek and Latin as well as various courses in translation, such as “Fairy Tales in the Ancient World,” “Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean,” and “Monsters of Classical Myths—and Their Meanings.” She specializes in folklore in classical literature and has published on various folklore-related topics including ghosts and witches. She is the author of Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021). She has also edited several volumes, including A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024).
Image: Gorgoneion featuring the head of Medusa, Greece, 4th Century BCE. Pushkin Museum.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
High on Kinder Scout in the Peak District sits a small, unassuming tarn known as the Mermaid’s Pool. Victorian locals would trek there at Easter midnight, hoping for a glimpse of its mysterious inhabitant, a benevolent spirit who offered immortality rather than death. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, the Kinder Mermaid belongs to a largely overlooked category in English folklore: the “lake ladies.” This talk recalls the folklore of these rare female water spirits—from Yorkshire to Herefordshire—arguing they form a distinct supernatural cohort separate from murderous “drowners” like Jenny Greenteeth.
Bio
Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, WW2 in Italy and Italian Renaissance History. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) came out in 2022.
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
The English author Angela Carter (1940–1992) was known for her richly imaginative and subversive writing, which blended elements of feminism, magic realism, and Gothic. She is particularly celebrated for her postmodern reworkings of traditional folk and fairy tales, most notably in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of dark, sensual stories that reimagine classic stories through a feminist lens. Her later novel Nights at the Circus (1984) gives us the story of Fevvers, a winged aerialist whose ambiguous nature blurs the line between myth and reality.
Carter’s work frequently explores the uncanny by revealing the latent violence and sexuality beneath familiar narratives. Her stories challenge conventional notions of gender and power, transforming archetypal characters into complex, often ambiguous figures. Through her vivid prose and radical reinterpretations, Carter reshaped the boundaries of fantasy and folklore in modern literature. This illustrated Zoom talk will explore these darker aspects of her writing.
Your speaker for this event will be Dr Jacob Huntley, a Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His research interests include the Gothic tradition, horror fiction, and the evolution of the ghost story. Jacob’s Zoom lecture will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Your curator and host is the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
The Dark Side of Psychedelics – Reporting on the dark side of the psychedelic renaissance
As a journalist reporting on the psychedelic world at the same time as having his own experiences, for both research and as part of a personal quest for growth, Mattha Busby has seen it all. Ceremonies bathed in love and light, and rituals steeped in darkness. Through all of this, he has witnessed and experienced both the benefits of psychedelics and their serious potential for harm. To tell this story, Mattha embarks on a rip-roaring journey through a brave—and profoundly weird—new world in which psychedelics are more available than ever before in human history. Retreat organizers are paying for targeted ads on Instagram, and giving celebrities free trips in exchange for positive testimonials. Illegal psychedelic dispensaries have popped up on high streets, and vendors are selling psychedelic toad venom on tropical beaches and in hotels, often without adequate safety measures.
For many, these psychedelic experiences have provided welcome relief from a near-constant sense of anxiety, but others have been left dazed and confused, or worse, and with few avenues for support. In rare cases, people have even died at psychedelic retreat centers, and at clinics, though we often do not hear about this until someone investigates. Some of these incidents have highlighted the folly of erasing the reality of the darker aspects of shamanism in popular representations and denying the sometimes radical cultural differences between those who serve psychedelics and those who receive. There has been scant discussion of how many of the traditional uses of ayahuasca were for sorcery and other nefarious purposes.
Ultimately, it can be difficult to deduce good psychedelic facilitators between the less well-intentioned until you’ve spent time with them. But increasing numbers of people around dinner tables now tell of destabilising journeys and touchy shamans. There are no easy answers to all of this — but the first step would be leaders in the psychedelic industry accepting this fact and not dismissing critiques as ill intentioned tellings of isolated incidents.
Speaker Bio
Mattha Busby is a journalist specialising in health policy, drugs/psychedelics and (sub)culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Rolling Stone, WIRED, and elsewhere. In 2024, he was a Ferris-UC Berkeley fellow in psychedelic journalism. He has published two slim book volumes, on drug policy for Thames & Hudson in 2022 and on psychedelics for Hoxton Mini Press in 2025.
Curated and hosted by
Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.
Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.
She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.
Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.
maya
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
‘My father, Peter Hand, who passed away in 2024, was Head of Modelling at MGM in Borehamwood during the 1950s and ’60s,’ says Richard Hand. ‘He worked on a number of movies and built the various scale models – and the “man-in-suit” versions – for Gorgo (1961), Britain’s B-movie answer to Godzilla, after which he left the film industry. Before he died, he published his memoirs, A Spear Carrier in Search of a Role (2021), and they offer a fascinating, first-hand glimpse into a neglected corner of film history: the model studio.
‘Remarkably, I didn’t even know about my father’s work on Gorgo until years later. He was never interested in horror or pop culture, so while my older brother and I were obsessively building glow-in-the-dark Aurora monster kits, collecting issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and making our own scare attractions and Super-8 horror epics, I had no idea about my father’s dark cinematic secret… One day, my brother turned to me and said, “Did you know our dad actually made a monster?” I didn’t believe him, but it was completely true – and it changed the way I thought about our family and about the culture we grew up loving.
‘This talk reflects on my father’s story and the unexpected intersections of family memory, horror fandom, and lost film craftsmanship.Drawing on his memoirs and my own memories, I’ll explore how model work like his has been largely written out of official film histories, even as the monster he helped design and build – and others like it – have gone on to become cult icons. I’ll also consider how this story connects to wider patterns of horror fandom and culture: from model kit mania and magazines to the music of Frank Zappa, who in songs such as ‘Cheepnis’ famously celebrated low-budget monster movies.’
Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Head of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has a particular interest in historical forms of popular culture, especially horror, and is the author of two books on horror radio drama; the co-author (with Michael Wilson) of four books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre; the co-editor (with Jay McRoy) of two volumes on gothic/horror cinema; and the co-editor (with Mark O’Thomas) of a collection of essays on American Horror Story. As well as an academic, he is a theatre director and award-winning radio writer, including as lead dramatist for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air podcast drama which, in 2020, was archived by the Library of Congress for its ‘historical and cultural significance’.
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: an adapted film promo poster for the 1961 British sci-fi movie Gorgo.]
William Blake, much misunderstood in his own time, has been the inspiration for generations of artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians drawn to his radical vision of absolute freedom. Blake’s work spans the worldly and the spiritual, merging humanity, nature, and the divine in fantastical ways.
Award-winning author Philip Hoare’s powerful new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (pub. April 2025), shines the spotlight back onto Blake, reminding us that art still possesses the power to inspire and transform. Philip finds echoes of Blake’s visionary genius in artists including Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, in the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood, and in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.
So, throw off your “mind-forg’d manacles” and join us to learn about one of England’s most remarkable and revolutionary 18th-/19th-century artists, in this illustrated online Zoom lecture (which will be followed by an audience Q&A session) from one of our finest contemporary writers.
Philip Hoare is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including biographies of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, and England’s Lost Eden (2005), about religious mania in the late-Victorian New Forest. Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and was followed by: The Sea Inside (2013); RisingTideFallingStar (2017), a literary love letter to David Bowie; and Albert and the Whale (2021), about the artist Albrecht Dürer. An experienced broadcaster and curator, Philip wrote and presented the BBC Arena programme The Hunt for Moby-Dick, directed three films for the BBC’s Whale Night, and organised The Moby-Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Big Reads.
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: a fragment of Behemoth and Leviathan from Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, 1826.]
Join us to hear the true story of a devilish, nineteenth-century arsonist and national cause célèbre.
1833. After four years, twelve fires and the best efforts of London’s finest detectives, still no one had discovered the identity of the ‘devil’ with the gift of fire who was terrorizing the English countryside. With land reform sweeping through South Cambridgeshire, the unsolved scandal choked the columns of the nation’s newspapers, wrecking the reputation of the ‘ill-fated village’ of Shelford. Something had to give…
Come along – appropriately on the night before Bonfire Night – to find out how tensions were finally extinguished, and to discover the fiery fate of the notorious John Stallon…
‘It will always be like this, John thinks, this new power of mine. Like having a firework in your head.’
Your speaker this evening is the award-winning playwright Fraser Grace. During Covid he found himself without a theatre to write for, so turned to a long-held passion project – a local story from the village of Great Shelford in South Cambridgeshire, where he has lived for the past 28 years. Published by Galileo in May 2025, Firestarter is a form-busting piece of creative non-fiction based on the true story of John Stallon.
Previously, Fraser’s debut play Perpetua, won the Verity Bathgate Award and his Breakfast with Mugabe was the recipient of the Arts Council’s John Whiting Award for Best Play; it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Antony Sher, and later broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and The World Service. Fraser is the author of a further eight plays, and currently also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.
Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: detail taken from the cover of Firestarter.]
Category
Category
Join Our Mailing List
Become a Patron on Patreon
Become a Patron for Free Museum Entry, Delightful Zoom Discounts & Other Goodies
