London Fortean Society

10 am - 5 pm Saturday 20 November 2021 £20 / £15 concessions ( Advance tickets ) £10 Live stream ticket. Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page The Haunted Landscape awaits you. Join the London Fortean Society and friends for a day of British folklore, corpse ways, giants, witches and more. Speakers include Author Syd Moore, Alixe Bovey, Jeremy Harte and Mark Norman of The Folklore Podcast . This event is live and will be live streamed. Dr Alixe Bovey - Albion’s giants: Gogmagog, Brutus and the conquest of Britain Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, completed in the 1130s, opens c. 1200 BC with the tale of the conquest of Britain by a band of Trojan refugees. Led by Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, the Trojans made their way to an uninhabited island known as Albion, but on arrival they discovered that it’s overrun by ferocious giants. Renaming the island Britain after Brutus, they exterminated the gi...

7.15pm Tuesday 16 November 2021 £8 Live / £5 live concessions & Live Stream ( Advance tickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Facebook event page This event will be held with an in-person audience at Conway Hall *AND* online, via Zoom. Everyone wishing to join this event must register for a ticket in advance, using the “Book Now” link ** In 1749, a newspaper advertisement appeared declaring that a man would climb inside a bottle on the stage of a London theatre. Although the crowds turned up in their hundreds to witness the trick, the performer didn’t. Over the following decades, elaborate jokes and fanciful tales would continue to bamboozle people across England. In The Century of Deception , magician and historian Ian Keable tells the engrossing stories of these eighteenth-century hoaxes and those who were duped by them. The English public swallowed tales of rapping ghosts, a woman who gave birth to rabbits, a levitating Fren...

In partnership with Conway Hall. Thursday 23 June 2021 7.30pm (BST) Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.   At present this event is online only.  Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering.  Facebook event page .  Human twins have many meanings and different histories. They have been seen as gods and monsters, signs of danger, death and sexual deviance. They are taken as objects of wonder and violent repression, the subjects of scientific experiment. Now millions are born through fertility technologies. Their history is often buried in philosophies and medical theories, religious and scientific practices, and countless stories of devotion and tragedy. In this history of superstitions and marvels, fantasies and experiments William Viney – himself a twin – shows how the use and abuse of twins has helped to shape the world in which we live. His book Twins (Reaktion 2021) has been...

 In conjunction with the Edinburgh Fortean Society , Scott Wood will be talking on Urban Legends. 7.30 pm Tuesday 9 March 2021 Free Join on Zoom .  Meeting ID: 845 8600 5454 Passcode: 1z6ripG1 Facebook event page. People share urban legends a lot, be they tiny rumours or full blown horror stories, but where do these stories come from and what do they represent? Using three examples of urban legends Scott Wood considers ways of how urban legends are formed and their meaning with stories of the helpful terrorist, the dead body on public transport and the hidden insult. There may be swearing. Urban legends are pieces of cultural ephemera that are also narrative demonstrations of society’s concerns, prejudices and rational blind spots. Urban legends are our contemporary folklore - coarsely humorous, cruel, bigoted and endlessly fascinating. Scott is the author of London Urban Legends: The Corpse on the Tube and the co-founder of the London Fortean Society. This talk will be prese...