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Annouchka Bayley’s Elizabeth Bathory – Zoom

Elizabeth Bathory

“They called me the hand of the Devil. Scourge. Straight out of the thin fold that keeps Hell and Earth apart. Part woman, part monster. They told stories of my depravity. How I lured young women to me. In my time they stripped me of my lands, my influence, my power. In your time they brought out books and moving images about me describing the horrors I inflicted on these innocents, these unprotected girls. Elizabeth Bathory: torturer. Killer. Psychopath. The Blood Countess. But this isn’t their story. It’s mine.” (from: The Blood Countess. p. xii)

This talk looks the infamous figure of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory – said to be Europe’s first female serial killer. Said to have tortured and murdered 650 young women for her own dark pleasure. Said to have inspired myths and stories like Snow White and countless other monstrous women.

But did she do it? How do you exorcise the ghost of a whole forgotten history and get it to speak in the present day? Part true-crime investigation, part esoteric exorcism of a violence that haunts the history books, the author of The Blood Countess will discuss how she wrote the novel using a freaky combination of quantum ontologies and the scholarly practice of fictioning to perform a literary exorcism.

Based on 100s of hours of original research and tapping into scholarly practices of new materialism this novel takes an uncompromising look at what history is and what it does to women.

Praise for the book:

Imagine one of Virginia Woolf’s speculative biographies told through quantum physics. Truly a novel for our time whose beautiful narration continues to. Haunt my thoughts like the Countess herself. Prof Thomas Nail (Philosophy, University of Denver)

Quantum physics made very sexy. Prof Johnny Golding (Fine Art & Philosophy, Royal College of Art)

There’s plenty to think about here, especially where the compelling historical events get reflected in the modern day, through a mysterious quantum entanglement. This novel is like a cross between Hilary Mantel’s retelling of court history in Wolf Hall, the bibliographic thrills in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Prof Alan Blackwell (Computer Science, University of Cambridge)

Congratulations doesn’t seem plaudit enough for this book. Such an original idea. Prof Sir Harry Bhadeshia (Metallurgy, Tata Steel/ Cambridge University)

Speaker Bio:

Dr Annouchka Bayley is an Associate Professor of Arts at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Darwin College. She is Chair of the Cambridge Posthuman Network, Co-Chair of the Cambridge CRASSH lab LEAPLab, and former designer and director of the Cambridge Arts, Creativity & Education MPhil programme (2021-2024).

She is one-quarter of the live-coding, doom-metal band Chainsaw Trousers. She has previously worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and held lectureships at the Royal College of Art and Kings College London. She has published extensively on new materialisms and posthumanisms for art practice. Her 2026 articles include Mycelial Madness with the Royal Society, the Reverse Engineering of an Exorcism with Performance Research, and a new book Fieldnotes from the Edges of Arts with Routledge.

UK Press for the novel:

BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-69057709?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR03UlomdZ-e_0UN0Y0X0GGbkc3W5-RsY95IoVqCxGbKsAT6ZRCU2BzneQ0_aem_ARXx18zgjS4j5CPcMC6HUfNgSJUj-bSvdelcPleaB8c-1ErReTpWO7gdekD8IhxhT1bApHDXdLEg_73u2mkhvnJJ

Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/elizabeth-bathory-slovakia-castle-cachtice-b2638092.html

Intl Press: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/30/accounts-hungarian-blood-countess-remain-shrouded-/

(other include Seattle Times, CBS news) Radio: abc Australia

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

The Power in the Panel: An Exploration of Tarot and Comic Books – B.Earl – Zoom

The Power in the Panel: An Exploration of Tarot and Comic Books

There is a unique relationship between comic books and Tarot, as they both embody sequential storytelling using symbolic art and natural language.

Referencing several comic book series, including sequences from instructor B. Earl’s Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Daredevil and Echo, and Werewolf by Night, we will explore how the two seemingly disconnected art forms actually flow from the same fountain.

Superhero comics in particular entered the mainstream in the mid-1900s and really found their stride in the 1960s with series such as The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and of course Spider-Man. This was also around the same time that Tarot began to enter into the popular mainstream with counter-culture communities engaging “new age” ideas. Humans have always needed stories,but as science began to more deeply explore the psyche with luminaries such as Carl Jung, science and stories began to emerge with archetypes that helped people better understand themselves. Comic books, especially superhero comics, have always explored these archetypes that are ever-present in Tarot’s Major Arcana.

The obvious difference between the two is that a comic book is a curated series of panels telling a specific story through the lens of the author and artist, while a Tarot spread is a seemingly random series of panels that becomes a mirror for the querent. This modular storytelling system allows for the Self to more deeply intuit meaning through the cards’ random articulation. Unlike comic books, it is up to the reader to interpret the story through the spread of the panels. In this workshop we will take sequences from specific comic books and peel back the layers to better understand the intention of the creative team. By understanding this form of sequential storytelling, we will then apply this same technique to different configurations of Tarot spreads. This unique method of storytelling will allow us to use the symbols and keys provided by Tarot to unlock stories not only in comic books, but also in our everyday lives.

Speaker Bio:

Ben Earl is a comic book writer and editor known for his contributions to Marvel Comics. He has worked on stories that expand the publisher’s superhero mythos, blending action-driven narratives with grounded character development. His work is recognised within the industry for its attention to continuity and its collaboration with major artists across several series.

Key facts

  • Profession: Comic book writer and editor
  • Publisher affiliation: Marvel Comics
  • Primary medium: Superhero comics
  • Notable roles: Writer, editor, and story consultant

Career and contributions

Earl began contributing to Marvel Comics during a period of renewed focus on both legacy characters and diverse storytelling voices. He has been involved in the writing and editorial process for various titles that bridge classic and contemporary Marvel eras. His storytelling often emphasises moral conflict, legacy, and the human cost of heroism, themes that resonate with modern audiences while remaining faithful to the company’s traditional tone.

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

The Visual History of Magic: How Grimoires Depicted Angels and Demons – Sergei Zotov – Zoom

The Visual History of Magic: How Grimoires Depicted Angels and Demons

How did magical manuscripts make the invisible visible? This lecture explores how ancient grimoires depicted angels, demons, and spirits through images, diagrams, seals, and schematic figures. Far from being simple illustrations, these visual forms functioned as tools for knowledge, protection, invocation, and control, shaping how practitioners imagined and interacted with supernatural beings. By examining manuscripts from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the lecture shows how images structured magical practice and mediated between Christian theology, ritual magic, and scientific experiment.

The talk places grimoires within the broader visual culture of premodern science and religion, tracing how angelic hierarchies, demonic figures, and planetary spirits were standardised, abstracted, or deliberately obscured. It also asks why visual strategies mattered so deeply in magical texts, and how they relate to secrecy, authority, and the transmission of secret knowledge. By focusing on images rather than texts alone, the lecture offers a new perspective on how magic was learned, practised, and imagined in European history.

Speaker Bio:

Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.

Curated & Hosted by:

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

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

Relationship with the Unseen — On the Nature of Rituals and Repetition – Inna Didenko – Zoom

Relationship with the Unseen — On the Nature of Rituals and Repetition

Every relationship has its quiet rituals. The same message sent before sleep. A cup placed on the same side of the table. A gesture repeated so often it starts to feel dangerous to stop. We don’t call these rituals — we call them love. So why does it become suspicious the moment we talk about a relationship with the unseen?

This talk approaches ritual not only in a spiritual context, but as human behaviour — an anthropological and psychological inquiry into why we repeat, discipline, and devote ourselves at all. Moving through rituals as something intimate and strangely practical, we’ll explore how repetition creates attachment, how discipline trains desire, and how practice often shapes relationships long before belief or meaning. Rooted in Hindu bhakti traditions yet drifting across psychology, philosophy, and spiritual practices from other cultures, the talk asks why ritual is not ornament but infrastructure: it organises time, marks thresholds, and quietly holds meaning in place. We’ll also touch on the risk inherent in ritual — how the same mechanisms that deepen intimacy can harden into rigidity or fanaticism.

We’ll listen to sound as a path to devotion — mantra and chanting — and look at seeing as an act that shapes reality and focuses attention in an age of distraction. This is not a lecture about faith, nor a defence of tradition. It is an exploration of how humans are wired to ritualise — to use repetition to regulate attention and build relationships with the unseen. At its heart, this is a talk about transcendental love not as belief, but as practice, sustained through repetition, even when we don’t fully understand what we’re loving, or why.

Speaker Bio:

Inna has a background in arts and cultural studies and over a decade of experience in cultural and educational programming. Her work focuses on exploring the shared threads that connect diverse traditions, cultural practices, and creative expressions. Through lectures and discussions, she has used art and culture as a common language to bridge differing perspectives, foster dialogue, and cultivate appreciation for diversity alongside a sense of unity. Inna is also an intercultural mediator, committed to navigating cultural differences and resolving disagreement through thoughtful, dialogue-based approaches.

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

The Caribbean Goodbye: Britain’s Black Hauntings and The Future(s) That Never Came – Tré Ventour-Griffiths – Zoom

The Caribbean Goodbye: Britain’s Black Hauntings and The Future(s) That Never Came

In Britain and the wider diaspora, ‘The Caribbean Goodbye’ is when Caribbean people leave Caribbean cultural events without directly saying goodbye – sometimes taking hours, caught in the feel-good energy of being amongst one’s culture (totally opposite to spaces like the workplace and schools). The Caribbean Goodbye often comes attached to stereotypes and multigenerational jokes of perpetual lateness to appointments, family events, and Caribbean funerals. Based on Tré’s article of the same name, this lecture engages family anecdote and memory to consider Caribbean ‘lateness’ not as cultural quirk, but a horrific response shaped by histories of racism as histories of the present. When elders reminisce of ‘Back in the Day’ it is an idyl haunted by a future always out of reach. In this lecture, Tré suggests that racism, loss, and longing, do not stay historical, but linger in the present through extended farewells in sacred family-community spaces offering a commentary on how we remember, struggle, and imagine.

Speaker Bio:

Tré Ventour-Griffiths is a disabled freelance historian-sociologist, creative writer and Black history consultant with interests in place history, real and imagined hauntings, pop culture, and violence: from the overt to the institutional. He just submitted his PhD: a creative writing project that combines UK Black regional history with nonfiction to tell a Black Caribbean folk history of Northants. Beyond his PhD, Tré examines the ways Black Britain is haunted by afterlives of the British Empire, including the slave-based wealth etched into many heritage sites romanticised in period dramas, like Jane Austen screen adaptations. Much of his other work looks into the history, questions of identity, and social commentaries, in UK-US film and television. He has written and presented on texts like Marvel, Star Trek, horror, and period dramas, from Call the Midwife to Bridgerton. As a travelling scholar-creative, Tré writes on Substack as The Avid Pedestrian.
Website: https://treventour.com/
Writing + More: https://linktr.ee/treventoured

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

Mermaid Spells: Sea Alchemy, Seiðr & the Goddess Mysteries of the Deep – Helena B. Scott – Zoom

Mermaid Spells: Sea Alchemy, Seiðr & the Goddess Mysteries of the Deep

Mermaids are archetypal initiators of transformation; liminal beings of sea and soul who embody Lady Alchemy, guiding us to unite opposites within and awaken the full, integrated self. As symbols of deep change, they help us reconcile shadow and light, matter and spirit, conscious and unconscious, opening the way to expanded awareness and spiritual renewal.

This rare and original talk invites you into the depths of ancient sea magic through the lens of archetypal and depth psychology. You will explore how the living energies of the ocean awaken intuition, inner magic and the divine feminine, while engaging with historic rituals and practical approaches to working with oceanic currents, ancestral memory, creation and rebirth.

The journey moves through ancient goddess traditions and living practices of sea magic, beginning with Isis—inventor of all things marine, Light bringer as Isis Pharia and known as Our Lady of the Seas,a title she later shares with Mary. From her waters, we descend into Norse oceanic sorcery and the legacy of Freyja, golden-haired goddess of love, war and witchcraft, and the first völva to initiate Odin into seiðr, the art of foresight and fate-weaving. The talk also weaves in sacred knotwork with Mesopotamian, Sámi and Norse roots, alongside the modern Blue Mind concept, revealing water as both a mirror of the soul and a powerful force for inner renewal and transformation.

Are you ready to answer the call of the deep? Book your place on this unique ocean-themed talk now and step into the tide of transformation.

Speaker Bio:

Helena B. Scott is a Jungian writer, linguist, historian, and cultural heritage specialist whose work in historical revisionism bridges medieval history, esoteric symbolism, and depth/archetypal psychology through a multidisciplinary lens. She specialises in the Knights Templar, the Grail tradition, and the sacred feminine, with research exploring spiritual alchemy, symbolism, and ancestral archetypes—particularly mermaids, Mary Magdalene, and sacred feminine mysteries preserved within Gnostic andesoteric medieval European traditions.

She was recently awarded an MA (Hons) in Public History & Cultural Heritage (2025) by the University of Limerick, following an MA internship with Waterford Medieval Museum, and in 2009 her work played a pivotal role in a UNESCO campaign that successfully declared falconry as intangible cultural heritage. Helena has also undertaken extensive training in Depth and Archetypal Psychology, including with Laurence Hillman, son of US psychiatrist James Hillman, the founder of Archetypal Psychology, and holds several diplomas from the Jung Centre (Dublin), including a Diploma in Jungian Psychology.

In October 2025, Helena founded Ireland’s first public Templar history festival, Waterford Templar Historical Day, developed as part of her MA research and framed under the UNESCO Historic Urban

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

Into the Faerie Rings: Psychedelic Plant Medicines and Faerie Realms – Zina Brown – Zoom

Into the Faerie Rings: Psychedelic Plant Medicines and Faerie Realms

Are you… curious?

Many a traveller in folklore and fable have come across the Faerie Rings – magical circles of mushrooms that can transport the curious (willing or not) to the faerie realms. They may find themselves lost in bizarre lands of pure imagination, colorful as they are confusing, populated by unusual beings both benevolent and malevolent, time stretching impossibly around them.

Catch a bit of faerie sight? To those that have journeyed with psychedelics – it may sound familiar!

In this lively lecture, we’ll explore the wild and wondrous connections between the unseen realms of faerie, nymphs, and hidden folk with the strange and powerful experiences from visionary plant and fungi medicines – such as Ayahuasca and Psychedelic Mushrooms.

Told from a shamanic storyteller’s perspective, we’ll dive into the unseen worlds waiting all around us. We’ll remember the old ways of connecting with nature spirits are as needed today as they ever were. And we’ll learn that curiosity goes both ways – they are as curious about us as we are about them.

Will you step inside… and see what awaits?

Speaker Bio:

Zina Brown is the writer and director of “The Faerie Rings”, an upcoming narrative feature film about the promise of visionary plant medicines, and the cruelty of those who would outlaw them. Zina’s unique visual and narrative style has been awarded in film festivals across the world, including the Barcelona International Environmental Film Festival, Kyiv Film Festival in Ukraine, Mexico City International Film Festival, Amsterdam International Film Festival, San Antonio Film Festival, and the Woods Hole Film Festival. He has over 25 years of writing and directing experience, including numerous music videos and festival favorite short films. His short film, Dreams of the Last Butterflies, was screened at 50 Film Festivals in 13 countries, as well as winning many awards. www.thefaerierings.com

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

Chilling Encounters with the Islamic Jinn – Mahdi Jannatdoost – Zoom

Chilling Encounters with the Islamic Jinn – Mahdi Jannatdoost

Invisible, ancient, and deeply unsettling, the jinn occupy a shadowy realm alongside humanity—watching, whispering, intervening. Neither angels nor demons, they are beings of smokeless fire: capable of belief or disbelief, kindness or cruelty, love or vengeance.

In this eerie lecture, we descend into the Islamic world of jinn as described in the Qur’an, Hadith, and centuries of folklore, theology, and lived experience. We explore chilling encounters recorded by scholars and storytellers alike: possession and obsession, jinn marriages, desert hauntings, whispers at night, and the dangerous consequences of crossing unseen boundaries.

What happens when humans accidentally insult a jinn? Why are ruins, crossroads, bathrooms, and wilderness places of fear? Can jinn fall in love with humans—or seek revenge? And how do exorcism, protection rituals, and Qur’anic recitation function in real Islamic practice today?

Blending theology, anthropology, folklore, and spine-tingling case stories, this talk reveals a spirit world that is not metaphorical—but real, moral, and terrifyingly close.

This is not a fantasy of demons and monsters.

This is a belief system lived by millions—where the unseen may already be listening.

Enter respectfully. Leave cautiously.

Speaker Bio:

Mahdi Jannatdoost is an Iranian-born engineer with a Master Degree in civil engineering currently based in Norway, where he works within the field of sustainable construction and engineering. With an academic background in civil engineering and green energy technologies, his professional training is rooted in material science, structural systems, and applied research- a background that should surely make him a true sceptic of anything paranormal.

However- Alongside his formal career, Mahdi has maintained a long-standing and deeply personal interest in Islamic folklore, occult sciences, and the study of non-human intelligences as understood within Islamic cosmology. In particular, he has spent years researching the nature of jinn—beings described in the Qur’an and classical Islamic literature as intelligent entities formed from smokeless fire, existing alongside humanity in an unseen realm. Drawing on traditional sources, folklore, and lived belief, Mahdi approaches the subject not as fantasy but as a meaningful and culturally embedded worldview held by millions across the Islamic world. His interest is further informed by personal experiences which he understands as encounters with jinn—experiences that have shaped his research questions and his desire to engage openly with the topic.

Through lectures and discussions, Mahdi seeks to present both scholarly perspectives and first-hand reflections, offering audiences a rare insight into how belief, experience, and tradition intersect in contemporary understandings of the jinn.

Curated & Hosted By:

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

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

Undertakers and Death with Dr Dan O’Brien LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture. Tickets include a complimentary glass of Devil’s Botany Chocolate Absinthe. Doors open at 6:30pm and talk starts at 7pm

Undertakers and Death: A Merry Dance with Dr Dan O’Brien

Join us at The Last Tuesday Society for an illustrated talk with Dr Dan O’Brien exploring the imagined world of the early undertaker and some of the most striking depictions of the undertakers’ relationship with death. Death historian Dr Dan O’Brien describes how the fortunes and misfortunes of the undertaker were window on popular ideas about death and the new trade that benefited from it.

An eighteenth-century cartoon imagined a dainty dance between Death and undertaker; the sable-clad death worker was amusingly uncomfortable with his scowling partner. In this busy century, the relationship between undertakers and death was imagined as an uneasy alliance. The early trade’s dependence on death was often caricatured with the gloomy undertaker joined by the familiar skeleton of the memento mori. Death brought joy to the undertaker but this mortal fellow was not invulnerable to its approach and nor could rely upon inevitability of death.

Dr Dan O’Brien

Death historian Dr Dan O’Brien is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. Dan’s research primarily focuses on the development of the undertaking trade and its products in the eighteenth century. He seeks to understand how the undertakers and their goods were perceived by society, by analysing how funerals were presented in the popular culture of the period. Drawing upon an eclectic range of source materials has enabled him to consider simple, but often overlooked, questions about how people’s knowledge about the early trade was formed. His research has produced four chapters, two of which are now published with Routledge and University of Bristol Press. Dan also talks publicly to a wide range of audiences on different themes in mortality history such as funerary gifts, sea burial and mourning jewellery. He has recently appeared on History Hit’s After Dark podcast talking about the funeral of Queen Victoria and describing a funerary crime on Killing Time with Rebecca Rideal.

Dr Dan O’Brien Social Media Links:
TikTok : tiktok.com/@dr.dan.o
Instagram: Instagram.com/dr.dan.o
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/drdan.bsky.social

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The Absinthe Parlour at The Last Tuesday Society is London’s best award-winning alternative cocktail bar hidden within The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities. A drinker’s cabinet of wonder filled curious cocktails & extraordinary elixirs —The Last Tuesday Society’s Absinthe Parlour is truly a hidden treasure of East London. Opened by collectors, drinks historians & absinthe experts — Allison Crawbuck (Brooklyn) & Rhys Everett (London) in 2016, the duo bring with them a shared passion for the mysterious world of spirits & the macabre.

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Devil’s Botany is the UK’s first absinthe distillery, founded by Directors of The Last Tuesday Society’s Absinthe Parlour. Celebrating spirit’s connection to art, literature, magic & mixology, Devil’s Botany is unleashing the future of absinthe with bold expressions for the adventurous drinkers of today.

The venue opens at 18:30. Doors will close at 19:00 to avoid disrupting the speaker. We kindly ask that all guests arrive before 19:00. Refunds are not possible for in person events with less than seven days notice in any circumstances.

Death and Undertaker

Nocturnes, Symphonies & Seances: Whistler’s Life & Art—Antony Clayton (Zoom)

Painter, printmaker, teacher, critic, polemicist, flamboyant dandy, acerbic wit, ebullient self-publicist, irascible litigant and a serious artist of considerable refinement, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was one of the most controversial figures in the London art world of the late-Victorian period. This talk coincides with the first major European retrospective of Whistler’s work in 30 years, which is on at Tate Britain from 21 May to 27 September.

Educated in the Parisian studio of Charles Gleyre and influenced by Japanese art and design, Whistler spent many of his most productive years in Chelsea, capturing crepuscular atmospheric effects on the Thames and producing some of his most memorable portraits. His distinctive Nocturnes, Arrangements, Symphonies and Harmonies verged on abstraction and challenged the orthodox Victorian belief in the primacy of subject matter, so much so, that John Ruskin famously accused him of, “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Many writers of the time, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, were fascinated by his work, although he often fell out with friends and admirers.

This talk will outline Whistler’s life and work and also address his interest in Spiritualism and similar phenomena such as séances, spirit rapping, table turning and mesmerism. Having once ‘talked’ to a dead American cousin, Whistler wished to communicate with long-dead painters in the hope of learning their secrets, using his muse and lover Joanna Hiffernan as a medium.

About the Speaker

Antony Clayton is the author of Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London (2000), London’s Coffee Houses, a Stimulating Story (2003), Decadent London (2005), The Folklore of London (2008) and Secret Tunnels of England, Folklore & Fact (2015). He also co-edited (with Phil Baker) and contributed to Lord of Strange Deaths: the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (2015) and wrote Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (2012), which also featured contributions from David Tibet, Gary Lachman and Andy Sharp. His latest book is Mansion of Gloom: the Unsettling Legacy of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Accumulator Press, 2024). This is the third talk Antony has given for the Viktor Wynd Museum.

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 All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) the second antholoigy he’s edited 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: Nocturne: Blue and Gold by James McNeill Whistler. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.]