Event Category: Folklore

The Ghosts of Christmas Past – Sarah Clegg- Zoom

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Christmas might seem like a time of jollity and cheer, but underneath all the tinsel and fairy lights there’s a far darker mood – one we see expressed in our modern custom of telling ghost stories at Christmas, in monsters like the Krampus, which roam the streets of European towns and cities across the Christmas season, and the horrible horse-skulled monster the Mari Lwyd who appears across Wales in the darkest nights of the year.

This talk will examine both the origins of these dark Christmas customs, and how they’ve changed and shifted down through the centuries – following everything from the hierarchy shredding Roman festival of Saturnalia to the custom of dressing as a monster and going house-to-house demanding drinks, food and money (the origins of modern Halloween trick-or-treating), and even the Christmas witches, who were said to riot through the skies with bands of the dead over the midwinter.

Speaker Bio

Sarah Clegg has a PhD in ancient history from Cambridge University and was part of the 2020/21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her most recent book – The Dead of Winter: the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas– was published in 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 on the Greek island of Lesvos.

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Spirits of Dark and Lonely Water – a Zoom talk with John Clark

In 1973 Britain’s Central Office of Information commissioned a film, directed at children, to warn them of the dangers of playing near ponds and rivers. Presiding over it was a sinister Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, voiced by the actor Donald Pleasance. In this presentation we shall look at how a similar approach was adopted by parents in the 19th century, and how they used ‘imaginary monsters’ to scare children away from dangerous waters. Our starting point is a recent Royal Mail stamp depicting just such a monster, named Grindylow. By way of the world of Harry Potter and the writings of 20th- and 19th-century folklorists we shall track Grindylow and her sisters Jenny Greenteeth and Nellie Longarmsto their lairs in the ponds and flooded marl pits of north-west England in the early 1800s.

 

Your speaker is John Clark, who was for many years Curator of the medieval collections of the Museum of London (now London Museum). Since his retirement in 2009 he has continued to research and publish on a range of subjects, including medieval horses and their equipment, London legends, and folklore and fairylore. His book on the medieval story of the Green Children of Woolpit, The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, bringing together the results of some 25 years of research, was published in 2024 by University of Exeter Press in their series New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Belief.

Your curator and host for this online event will be the writer 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. He has edited two anthologies of classic ghost stories for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series – Eerie East Anglia (2024) and his latest, All the Fear of the Fair: Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow (pub. Oct 2025). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording valid for two weeks.

 

[Image: montage of a still from Lonely Water (Central Office for Information, 1973) and a depiction of Grindylow by Adam Simpson for the Royal Mail’s 2025 ‘Myths and Legends’ stamp series (© Stamp Design Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2025).]

Greek Myth and Religion – Philip Matyszak – Zoom

Greek Myth and Religion

What did the Ancient Greeks actually believe – and how did it shape the way they lived their lives?

Philip Matyszak, a noted scholar of Greek myth and religion and author of numerous books such as A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece (Michael O’Mara, 2021), will guide us through the Ancient Greeks’ belief system, bringing their world to life. He’ll give us an overview of how their religion worked, explaining how their gods embodied concepts and forces – from wisdom to the weather – that were part of their daily reality.

We’ll also learn how their myths, with their complex and flawed heroes, differ from the moralism of popular stories today, exploring and explain the human condition rather than trying to improve it. Matyszak views the Greeks’ many myths as part of one large, rambling story that runs across four generations with a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The same characters interact and pop up in each other’s stories: Theseus kidnaps Helen of Troy, is rescued from Hades by Hercules, who meets Medea and buries Icarus. And its span is immense: from cosmogony, where humans do not yet exist, to Seven Against Thebes, where the gods barely feature, it is a tale that goes from one end of the known world to the other.

Speaker Bio

Philip Matyszak has a doctorate in Roman history from St John’s College, Oxford. He is the author of many books on classical civilization, including Chronicle of the Roman Republic, The Enemies of Rome, The Sons of Caesar, Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day, Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day, Lives of the Romans (with Joanne Berry) and Legionary.

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Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child – Dr Jen Baker – Zoom

Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child

This talk examines the transformation of the ghost-child figure from oral folklore and legends to their literary incarnations in Anglophone cultures of the long nineteenth century. They are mostly found as a small but concerted sub-genre of the emerging literary Ghost Story of this period, but also appear sporadically in elegies and in images from spectral photography to illustration. We will see how the ghost child of this period occupied a liminal space not only between life and afterlife, but between puritanical and liberal forms of Christianity, between images of innocence and sin, between pity and terror, between oral tradition and textual manifestation, and between the ethereal and the corporeal. (Please note that there may be a few images of real (historical) child death shown).

Bio

Dr Jen Baker is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests are childhood, death studies, the Gothic, short form and illustration from the late c18th to the present on which she has published a range of articles and chapters and is currently working on her monograph Spectral Embodiments: Anxious Manifestations of Child Death in the long c19th. She is compiler and editor of Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (2021) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series.

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 on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Caption: Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “The Lost Ghost”, Everybody’s Magazine, May 1903.

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Daisy Wheel, Hexfoil, Six-Petal Rosette & Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Daisy Wheel, Hexafoil, Flower of Life: One Symbol’s Journey

The six-petal rosette is well known to graffiti hunters, sometimes referred to as a daisy wheel. To geometers it is known as a hexfoil (or hexafoil) and to the adherents of the New Age as the ‘Flower of Life.’

It is first recorded as a solar symbol in Near East in the 8th century BC, flanking a Syrian solar deity – although there are claims that it can be seen in the symbolic art of earlier cultures.

It appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron; an object melding Celtic, Thracian and Near Eastern mythical symbolism. Two rosettes flank a Goddess, surrounded by exotic creatures which seem to be elephants, winged griffins, and a large feline.

The symbol was carried west by the Roman Legionnaires where it often appears on their headstones. The Merovingians of the 5th century deployed the symbol alongside pagan imagery on their grave slabs. By the 8th century, it was adopted by the Carolingians and embedded within their sacred architecture.

In early Medieval Europe it was used to invoke the protection of the Virgin, sometimes placed as a ‘crown’ in holy sculptures from the Mediterranean. By the time it arrived in England, it was considered to be the motif most appropriate for the pilgrim ampullae of Our Lady of Walsingham, the second most important shrine in England after Thomas Beckets shrine Canterbury.

Following the Black Death, the symbol was appropriated by the new elite class to adorn and protect their high-status buildings in the Tudor age. To show its durability, it even went on to have a further life as a motif used on headstones in the New World.

This talk will follow the symbol’s journey of appropriation by ancient cultures, up to the point when it becomes part of the  repertoire  of symbols sacred to Christianity. The talk  will focus upon the corpora of medieval graffiti, where it was often associated with fonts and follow it through to the Early Modern Period, where it was adopted by the elites to protect their grand residences and fortifications.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence – Wayne Perkins – Zoom

Witchcraft In Kent: The Archaeological Evidence

History has shown us that the Witch – as conceived of as the broom-riding hag stereotype –   was essentially the delusional construct of the misogynist cleric Heinrich Kramer.

His insidious ideas were perpetuated via the publication of  ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ (Hammer of the Witches) in 1486, a propagandist tract which came complete with fake approbations from his Faculty in Cologne. Condemned on release, numerous reprints over the years continued to disseminate his ideas, contrary to intellectual thought elsewhere.

As Kramer’s assertions were fantasy, it would be therefore safe to assume that no one had ever been harmed by so-called ‘maleficium.’

And yet, Kent’s Assize Court Records are full of indictments of those accused of practising malignant witchcraft and the subsequent judgements which led to their execution. Following the Witchcraft Act of 1562, indictments for murder by witchcraft had begun to appear in the historical record.

This illustrated talk uses a combination of survey, local case studies and the examination of the key witchcraft trials in the county to paint a picture of 17th century Kent. It was second only to Essex to have the highest number of witchcraft indictments in England

Speaker Bio

Wayne Perkins is an archaeologist of 23 years with a special interest in apotropaic graffiti, folklore and concealed objects recovered from ancient buildings.

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

 

The Mermaids of Staithes – a Zoom talk with Professor Sarah Peverley

The Mermaids of Staithes: Sea, Superstition, Egg-Broth and Loss in a Yorkshire Legend

Join mermaid expert Sarah Peverley for an illustrated talk about the vengeful tale of the mermaids of Staithes. Well-known locally along the north-east coast of Yorkshire, England, the legend concerns the capture and escape of two mermaids, who speak enigmatically about egg-broth and curse the community that hurts them. The tale has notable parallels with other mermaid stories from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, all of which were recorded in print from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, except the Staithes story.

Through deductive source analysis, this talk identifies the oldest verbal and published versions of the legend on record and explores analogues to the egg-broth superstition, which attest to the story’s emergence much earlier in the eighteenth century and connect it to popular superstitions about the sea. By situating the tale’s publication in context, it is also possible to connect its first occurrence in print to recurrent losses from inundations, coastal erosion and the economic decline of Staithes’s fishing industry in the early twentieth century. Featuring the sea, superstitions, mermaids, witches and folklore, there is something for everyone in the history of this charming tale.

 

Professor Sarah Peverley is an academic, writer and broadcaster who divides her time between being immersed in the depths of mermaid history and lost in the medieval world. As professor of medieval literature and culture at the University of Liverpool she teaches across English and History and regularly speaks at festivals and heritage events. She has consulted for organisations like Guinness World Records, and has written, presented or appeared in over eighty TV, radio and press features. She is currently writing a cultural history of the mermaid. For more information see www.sarahpeverley.com.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. 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. He recently edited Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen (2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weirdseries. 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 Worlds of J.R. R. Tolkien – Professor Ronald Hutton – Zoom

The Worlds Of J.R. R. Tolkien

It was the quiet, pious and conventional Oxford professor, J. R. R. Tolkien, who turned fantasy literature into the most popular literary genre in the modern world, especially with his great trilogy of the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings. This talk is intended to explain what sort of man he was, and what formed his life and beliefs and inspired his work. It also poses the question of how far he can be regarded as essentially a Christian author, as many devoutly Christian commentators have claimed, and how much his fantasy world was a much more complex creation, including both pagan and folkloric themes. In doing so this talk seeks to account for the remarkable public success of his stories and their huge influence among such a varied readership

Speaker: Professor Ronald Hutton is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs.

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Mythical Mothers, Monsters, and Mesopotamia – Dr Louise Pryke – Zoom

Mythical Mothers, Monsters, and Mesopotamia
Despite the antiquity of the topic, motherhood in Mesopotamia has received little attention in modern scholarship. Yet mothers are extremely important cultural figures throughout many periods, with numerous heroes of Mesopotamian epic depicted having close connections to their mothers. Maternal figures often play a pivotal role in myths, and historical kings as well as legendary ones are shown to value their mother’s guiding wisdom. In this talk, we consider the connection of motherhood, wisdom, and protection in Mesopotamia, and discover that even quasi-divine heroes who cut pathways through mountains and battle giant monsters cannot succeed without the support and wisdom of their mothers.
Bio
Dr Louise M. Pryke is a research associate at the University of Sydney. She is the author of several books including Ishtar (2017), Gilgamesh (2019), and Wind (2023).
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.
Image: Plaque with face of the demon Humbaba, Babylon, c. 2000-1600 BCE. The Met. Public Domain.
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Cholera in Victorian England: Medicine, Myths, and Modernity – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

 

Cholera in Victorian England: Medicine, Myths, and Modernity

Step into the 19th century and explore the devastating impact of cholera on Victorian England. Learn how this deadly disease swept through crowded cities, challenging public health systems and sparking fear across all classes of society. Discover the evolving understanding of disease transmission, from miasma theory to the groundbreaking work of pioneers like John Snow, whose mapping of outbreaks paved the way for modern epidemiology.

Through vivid historical accounts, we will delve into the era’s social and medical responses, including sanitation reform, quarantine measures, and curious remedies like “cholera belts” and aromatic pouches. This lecture examines how cholera shaped public health policies and attitudes toward urban living, leaving a legacy that resonates to this day. Join us to uncover the interplay between science, society, and the human will to overcome epidemic crises in a rapidly industrializing world.

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

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