Event Category: Lecture Series

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).]

Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction – Timmy Davis – Zoom

Psychedelics and Memories of Birth, Abuse and Alien Abduction 

Psychoanalysing the psychedelic phenomena of recovered memories of abuse, birth and alien abduction

From earliest life every one of us is immersed in a world of pure novelty, preoccupied with weaving the fluctuations of experience into a stable and coherent tapestry. We theorise and construct understandings and expectations of space, time, the social world and ourselves within it from the threads of culture we happen upon in our maturation. Yet novelty insists upon us, disrupting all attempts to complete the picture. Protected by only this thinnest of veils, every so often we experience something so apparently novel it creates a hole in the very fabric of our reality. These rips, tears and ruptures can undermine faith in our habitual ways of knowing, our own memories and even our sensory perceptions themselves, demanding suture. In this talk we will draw on contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of trauma, revelation, gaslighting and eye witness testimony to think about some of the more far-out experiences that can be engendered by psychedelics, and one of their unfortunate results, epistemic injury.

Speaker Bio

Timmy Davis is the founder of The Psychedelic Experience Clinic, director of Psychedelic Policy and Regulation at the Centre for Evidence Based Drug Policy (CEBDP), policy director at the Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR) campaign and a trainee at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

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.

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

Maya
maya

Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture Two – Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages

From the physicians of ancient Greece to the virologists of the 21st century, herpes has fascinated, frustrated, and stigmatised in equal measure. In this second lecture, we unravel the complex story of the herpes simplex viruses—agents of an infection so old that it is woven into the DNA of human civilisation itself. We will examine its earliest written descriptions by Hippocrates, its curious role in Renaissance court scandals, the myths and moral panics it sparked in the 20th century, and the scientific breakthroughs that reshaped both treatment and public perception.

Through an interdisciplinary lens—combining medical history, epidemiology, and cultural analysis—we will explore how herpes has been portrayed in art, law, literature, and the media, and why its social stigma endures despite its ubiquity. This is the story of a virus that is both commonplace and culturally charged, told with the precision of history and the intrigue of human drama.

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

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine – Giorgia Gaia – Zoom

Paranormal Ethnographies of Ketamine

Over the past six years, this ongoing investigation into the paranormal dimensions of psychoactive experiences has continued to identify Ketamine journeys as uniquely significant. Ketamine remains a profoundly paradoxical substance at once celestial and infernal. Its remarkable psychedelic capacities intertwined with its well-documented potential for dependence. Nonetheless, accounts of deep Ketamine “breakthroughs” stand out as particularly compelling for the study of anomalous and paranormal phenomena. The substance seems to grant access to liminal territories where conventional understandings of reality and unreality, as well as time and space, can be dismantled and reconfigured in unexpected ways.

This lecture revisits and expands upon the “magical” qualities attributed to Ketamine, emphasizing its capacity to open hyperdimensional experiential spaces that, although sharing affinities with other psychedelics, remain strikingly distinct. Over the years, Ketamine has gained increasing prominence within an underground psychonautic occulture, a community drawn to the esoteric and metaphysical potentials of altered states, as well as within the broader field of contemporary psychedelia.

The ethnographic material presented reflects an evolving archive: a continually expanding collection of interviews, uncanny experiences, and reports of alternate or “alter(n)ate” realities shared by adventurous psychonauts across diverse sets and settings. Together, these accounts trace a living, open-ended inquiry into the ways Ketamine continues to shape, distort, and illuminate the boundaries of human perception.

Speaker Bio

Giorgia Gaia is an independent researcher, with MA degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology and in History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. Since her early twenties she has been involved in the underground scene of rave culture, as a DJ and cultural producer. Her academic research has focused on countercultures, esoteric communities, occultism and psychonautic. Being herself continuously involved in the creation of alter(n)ate realities and magickal experimentations, since 2013 she is co-curator of Ozora Festival’s cultural area. In 2018 she founded Occulture Conference, a Berlin based festival exploring occultism and esoteric arts.

https://occultureconference.com

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.

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

Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence – Dr Pascal Michael – Zoom

Extraterrestrials, Evolution and AI: The Future of Intelligence

“From Non-human Intelligence (NHI) to Transhuman Intelligence (THI): The Extratempestrial Hypothesis, Evolutionary Psychology, and AI Development

This talk explores the idea that the so-called “aliens” people encounter—especially the classic Greys—might not be extraterrestrial at all, but humans from the future. Anthropologist Michael Masters suggests that if we evolved far enough—larger heads and eyes, smaller bodies—we might look just like them. He argues they could be time-traveling scientists, studying us like we would study ancient human ancestors.

But evolution today isn’t just biological. As we merge with technology—AI, brain-computer interfaces, and more—our future selves may become something entirely new: transhuman. These beings might be part-human, part-machine, and their advanced technologies could even blur the lines between life and death, time and timelessness.

This possibility raises deep questions about consciousness, identity, and why so many of these encounters feel emotionally overwhelming or reality-shattering—what’s sometimes called “ontological shock.” If these entities are us, just much further along, what are they trying to tell us—and are we ready to listen?”

Speaker Bio

Dr. Pascal Michael BSc, MSc (UCL), PhD completed his doctorate in Psychology at the University of Greenwich in 2023 on a comparative analysis of the neurophenomenology of both DMT (& analogous) experiences and the near-death experience (NDE). He has been a lecturer (PT) there since, teaching and researching the phenomenology, psychology & neuroscience of psychedelics, NDEs, alien abduction/UFOlogy, related ‘exceptional human experiences’, and the intersections therein. He was program lead of the professional certificate in Psychedelics, ASCs and Transpersonal Psychology, and is currently a PhD & MSc supervisor, at the Alef Trust.Pascal has presented at many conferences, including the largest European conference on psychedelics, Breaking Conventions, and been invited to give several talks, such as for the privately held Tyringham Initiative, or give keynotes such as for the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy. His invited public talks and interviews number in the 30s. He has published many articles and chapters, including some of the most read articles in Frontiers in Psychology, which have been featured in several major news outlets including The Conversation. He is on the board of advisors for Noonautics and The Tyringham Initiative. He was PA to the chair of the Parapsychological Association, and was the 2020 recipient of the Schmeidler Outstanding Student award. Most lately, he was named one of the top 25 thinkers in psychedelic research.

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 indigenous 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.

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

Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Syphilis Through the Ages – Lena Heide Brennand & Cat Irving – Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

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

The Dark Side of Psychedelics – Reporting on the dark side of the psychedelic renaissance – Mattha Busby – Zoom

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
maya

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

My Dad Made a Monster: Family, Film & Fandom—a Zoom talk with Richard Hand

‘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.]

Drugs and Intelligence – Dr Maria Balaet – Zoom

Drugs and Intelligence: Associations between recreational drug use and cognitive ability in the general population

The Great British Intelligence Test recruited over 500,000 individuals between late 2019 and 2020, then longitudinally monitored 135,000 participants. The study involved comprehensive cognitive assessments alongside detailed surveys of lifestyle choices, including recreational drug use. Previous population studies indicated associations between prolonged or heavy use of certain illicit drugs, such as stimulants and cannabis, and impaired cognitive performance. In contrast, emerging evidence suggests that specific substances, like psychedelics, may be associated with enhanced performance in particular cognitive domains, including creativity, cognitive flexibility, and emotional processing. The current presentation focuses on the results from the large-scale analysis from the Great British Intelligence Test designed to address a decades-long debate about the associations between recreational drug use and cognitive function. It describes a distinctive cognitive profile—or “fingerprint”—that characterise recreational drug users, remaining consistent despite potential influences from alcohol or tobacco consumption, psychiatric, or neurological conditions. Particular attention is given to discussing nuanced associations between distinct drug classes, notably psychedelics, and specific cognitive abilities.

Speaker Bio

Dr Maria Balaet holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine and Computational Neuroscience from Imperial College London, which was funded by a prestigious award she received from the UK Medical Research Council. She is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. With over a decade of research experience, her work focuses on human intelligence and altered states of consciousness. Most notably, she has developed precision cognitive testing technology as part of the Cognitron Team and has led one of the largest longitudinal study arms in the world studying how naturalistic drug use including use of psychedelics associates with cognitive ability and mental health as part of the Great British Intelligence Test (which recruited over 500,000 participants). Outside of academic work, Maria has a passion for science communication and is a regular public speaker, podcast guest and panelist at a wide range of events. https://mariabalaet.com/

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.

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

Maya

 

Terror in the Dark: The Chilling Story of Live Horror Radio – Zoom talk with Richard Hand

Everyone has heard of The War of the Worlds, the (in)famous 1938 broadcast that supposedly sent America into a panic. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This talk will lure you into the weird, wild world of horror radio from the 1920s to the 1950s, the golden age of live broadcasting. Long before podcasts and streaming, radio ruled the airwaves, bringing thrilling, terrifying stories directly into the intimacy of people’s homes. Live, unfiltered, and often shockingly and gruesomely extreme (even to our modern ears), horror radio shows like The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave, Lights Out, Suspense, and Quiet, Please pushed the boundaries of storytelling with superb scriptwriting, ingenious sound effects, spine-chilling performances, and unforgettable hosts. These weren’t just spooky tales, they were immersive experiences that haunted the imaginations of millions.

This vivid talk will explore how horror found a perfect home in the invisible world of sound, how brilliant personalities were drawn to the genre, how stations competed to outdo each other in shock value and artistry, and how this era shaped modern audio storytelling. Expect moments of gore, ghostly sounds, and grisly secrets behind the microphone – plus a few surprises that may still give you goosebumps.

This talk is a love letter to a lost era of live horror radio – and a celebration of its enduring power to scare us senseless.

Are you brave enough to listen?

 

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. 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: Boris Karloff performing in a radio play.]