London Fortean Society

We are sorry but we have had to cancel this event and we hope to reschedule it for spring 2018. Sorry for the disappointment and please check back with us for this and other events. We do have a British Bigfoot talk in September for some of your bigfoot needs. Monday 27 November 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page Cryptozoology, or “ the study of hidden animals, ” focuses both on creatures generally considered extinct but believed by some to still exist, as well as creatures of mythology, legend, and folklore that are purported to be based on a biological reality. It is this latter emphasis with which Dr. Floyd’s presentation is concerned in relation to what he terms “Bigfoot types.” Observing some of the ancillary genres of cryptozoology, citing Bigfoot-types in various literary, artistic, architectural, and popular areas, and with particular interest in the European Wild Man and Green Man, the Nativ...

£20 / £16 concessions plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Saturday 18 November 2017 10am - 5pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page Book stall by Newham Bookshop and Strange Attractor . Stalls by Hare and Tabor and Circle of Spears Productions . As the year darken the London Fortean Society once again explores the folklore, ghosts and curses of the British Isles with the one-day symposium The Haunted Landscape 2017. Authors, experts and researchers discuss ghosts, strange beasts and magic. From haunted folk songs to 3000 year old chalk giants, phantom black dogs, Albion’s Goat God and the Queen of the Fairies. Join us at Conway Hall to learn that this green and pleasant land we abide in has dark, strange and uncanny other side.                           9.30am Doors 10am-10.10 Film screenings from Video Strolls 10.10-10.55 Phantom ...

£5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Thursday 9 November 2017  7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page One of the greatest and strangest phenomena of recent times is the rise of Uri Geller and the belief that minds can bend metal. This special presentation, with live demonstrations, tells the whole story from a unique perspective. Ian Rowland , who performs professionally as ‘The Mind Man’, is friends with (and has been hired by) both Uri Geller and arch skeptic James Randi. He is also a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and has given ‘test conditions’ demonstrations of psychic phenomena without claiming any psychic powers at all. So is it fact, fiction or fakery? All will be revealed! £5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Thursday 9 November 2017  7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page

7.45pm Wednesday 25 October 2017 £4 / £2 concessions - pay on door The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page The Cage in St Osyth, Essex is a haunted medieval prison that has recently hit the headlines. “ Essex's most haunted house: Could you last a night? ” asked Essex Live. “ A retired policeman claims to have captured a picture of a ghost carrying the body of a witch on a stretcher ” spluttered the Mail Online. The Cage was the local holding cell whose prisoners included the ‘Witch’ Ursula Kemp who was held captive there prior to her trial and hanging in Chelmsford. But Ursula may haunt the cage still. This modern-day case particularly involved one woman, Vanessa Mitchell, who felt after several years of phenomena she could neither live there or responsibly let it for residential purposes. She rented it to paranormal groups for investigations. John Fraser has completed a detailed repo...

7.45pm Thursday 28 September 2017 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advance tickets ) The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page For the past two years Harry Rose has been working on a project exploring evidence the of Bigfoot in the UK; working with experts in the field and hearing of first hand encounters. He will be sharing some of the stories he has come into contact with and the images he has taken in recorded sighting locations. Harry Rose is a photographer and researcher working at the British Journal of Photography. He has a keen interest in folk lore and mythology. "I create work base on what is physical and tangible." 7.45pm Thursday 28 September 2017 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advance tickets ) The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page

£5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Monday 4 September 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page My Life with the Alpine Time Travellers – or – Sun Ra, Damanhur and the search for new myths In 2006 David Bramwell went to visit a community called Damanhur, living in the Italian Alps. It was to be the first of many visits and the start of a lifelong fascination with the place. Damanhur, a 600-strong community, had built the world’s most extraordinary piece of outsider art: an underground temple the size of St Paul’s Cathedral, one of the great architectural wonders of the modern world. The Damanhurians also named themselves after plants and animals, claimed to have taught a rubber plant how to sing and even built a fully-functioning ‘time machine’. Another case of a deluded cult? David didn’t think so. After many visits (and a Radio 3 documentary), David finally thinks he’s figured Damanhur out. He beli...

The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile. Charles Fort - The Book of the Damned A gathering to celebrate the 143rd birthday of Charles Fort, the American writer who inspired the idea of being fortean.  I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. Charles Fort - Lo! Meet us at 7.30pm on Sunday 6 August outside 39A Marchmont Street London WC1N 1AP, Fort’s home in London, with a reading and toast. We'll then have a drink in his honour at the nearby Marquis Cornwallis on Marchmont Street, a "Bloomsbury pub of grandiose proportions". All forteans and friends welcome.   I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity—such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen—stationary meteor-radiants, and a re...

7.45pm Thursday 27 July 2017 This event is sold out. Sorry. We shall try and book Andrew the next time he is in the UK. The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page Viva La Muerte ! Santa Muerte, Folk Saint and Holy Personification of Death, Healer and Protector. The leading expert on the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas, Dr. Andrew Chesnut will explain how Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte (Saint Death), has gone from only a few thousand devotees in 2001 to some 12 million today. Andrew is Professor of Religious Studies and holds the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He authored the first and only academic book in English on the Bony Lady, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (OUP, 2012).  7.45pm Thursday 27 July 2017 This event is sold out. Sorry. We shall try and book Andrew the next time he i...

£5 This event has sold out. We are sorry, please contact Conway Hall to join the waiting list. Thursday 20 July 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page Americans have believed in conspiracy theories since before the United States united. A ceaseless array of conspiracy accusations have demonized witches, Freemasons, foreigners, red coats, black helicopters, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, fifth columns, the government, and more recently, Vladimir Putin. The common assumption is that conspiracy theories are nothing more than the delusions of paranoid minds trying to make sense of an ever more complicated world. However, the evidence tells a different story. In this talk, Professor Joesph Uscinski will show that conspiracy theories follow a strategic logic: they are tools used by the powerless to attack and defend against the powerful. Conspiracy theories must conform to this logic, or they will not be successful. In th...

£8 This event has sold out. We are sorry, please contact Conway Hall to join the waiting list. Tuesday 18 July 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page London Fortean Society, in partnership with Conway Hall, present a night marking the centenary of the Cottingley Fairies case. In July 1917 Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, 16 and 9 years old, took a photograph. It showed Frances in their garden with four fairies dancing in front of her. In 1920 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about them in the Strand Magazine: The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life. The Cottingley Fairy photographs were not revealed as a hoax until Elsie and Frances confessed in 1983. But they still claimed that they did find fairies at the bottom of the garden. Michael Terwey of the National Scien...

7.45pm Thursday 29 June 2017 This event has now sold out. We are sorry. Please let us know if you missed out and we will rebook Madeleine. The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page This evening Madeleine Ledespencer will present the notorious heretical priest and accused satanist, Abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan (1824- 1893), who came to be known as a bogeyman of the 19th century Paris magicians who misrepresented his occult Catholicism. In his lifetime, Boullan went from a rising star within the church of Rome to a defrocked priest running his own ministry of mystical Catholicism in which women were consecrated bishops and preparations were made for a coming new age of Luciferian feminine power. He was hugely famed in his day, and served as an inspiration for artists and occultists as varied as JK Huysmans, Michael Bertiaux, and Maria de Naglowaska. Tonight we will look at the life, work, and impact o...

£5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Tuesday 6 June 2017 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page On the eve of his 165th birthday (“I was born June 7th 1852, near Delhi, India…”), the London Fortean Society present for your delectation the strange story of Gef the Talking Mongoose. In the early 1930s and for several years thereafter, an isolated farm in the rural south west of the Isle of Man became the focus of international media attention. Psychic investigators, spiritualists, psychoanalysts and reporters were all drawn to the lonely farm of Doarlish Cashen, whose inhabitants, the Irving family, steadfastly maintained that they were being ‘haunted’ by a super-intelligent weasel or mongoose by the name of Gef. This mysterious entity was allegedly able to speak English and other languages, sing popular songs and hymns of the period, and would engage the family in nightly conversations about religion, the superna...

7.45pm Thursday 25 May 2017 £4 / £2 concessions ( Advance tickets ) The Bell , 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook page Our short talks on fortean London returns with speakers discussing the ghosts and legends of Camlet Moat and the Crouch End Spriggan. Camlet Moat: Ghosts, Legends and Witchcraft  Camlet Moat Enfield (Wikicommons) Nobody knows much about Camlet Moat in Trent Park, Enfield. Little wonder then that it should have become the focus of legends, ghost stories and modern-day witchcraft. My talk will take us on a journey from fact to fiction and folklore. Jason Hollis is the author of Haunted Enfield (History Press 2013) and is currently writing a follow-up book concerning ghosts and haunted places within the London Borough of Barnet. The Crouch End Spriggan A trip down an abandoned rail line brings us face to face with a strange creature emerging from the brickwork of an old statio...

£5 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Tuesday 16 May 2017 (Please note the new date!) 7.30pm Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page Image by John Clark One summer in the 12th century harvesters in the fields of the Suffolk village of Woolpit were amazed when two children suddenly appeared, as if out of the ground. Their skin was green, and they spoke an unintelligible language. Later, when they had learnt enough English to communicate, they said they came from a land called St Martin’s Land, where the sun never shone. The ‘Green Children of Woolpit’ have inspired short stories, novels, plays, poems, pop songs, a teaching resource in drama on the theme of ‘Community cohesion and the prevention of violent extremism’, and an opera. They have been identified as fairy-folk, as extraterrestrials, as strays from a family of Flemish weavers, or as descendants of humans once abducted by aliens, returned to earth via a matt...

£20 plus booking fee ( Advance tickets ) Saturday 1 April 2017 10am – 5.30pm (Registration from 9.30am) Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions  Orion: The Man Who Would be King From hoax hip-hop stars and haunted houses to military deception, fake news, cancer myths and a joke that may have started World War III join the London Fortean Society and Conway Hall Ethical Society for an April Fools Day of hoaxing, deceit and unreal things. Some may be charming, others are terrifying. 1st April is the traditional day for hoaxing and japes but deception and deceit riddle everyday news and communication.   Fake News discussion with Padraig Reidy, James Ball and Peter Pomerantsev Ghostwatch: The scariest TV show ever made? Stephen Volk and Lesley Manning Orion: The Man Who Would Be King & The Great Hip Hop Hoax. Jeanie Finlay The Hoaxes of Crass. Penny Rimbaud Fake Cancer Cures and Anti-Vaccination Myths . Dr David Rober...