London Fortean Society

This is t he story of one of England’s “folk saints” to whom many miracles were attributed. In the 14th century his shrine became the third most popular after Canterbury and Walsingham yet, mysteriously, he remained uncanonised. “ Master”, “Maister” or “Sir” John Schorn(e), Rector of North Marston, Buck s , was reputed to have miraculous powers of healing sickness. He is said to have struck the ground with his staff and a spring gushed forth; t he water was excellent for curing the “ague” (malaria) and gout. Medieval drawings and wall paintings show him carrying a boot containing a small devil which he made appear and disappear as symbol of his power – supposedly the origin of Jack-in-the-Box. Following his death, the little church of North Marston became a place of pilgrimage. A number of wayside Inns held the name The Boot as pilgrims made their way to and from North Marston on their way to Canterbury. Archae o logist Wayne Perkins delve s deep into the psychogeography of the ...

  A cursory search on eBay will turn up any number of Dybbuk Boxes, allegedly cursed items that it is unwise to open lest you release the entity within. Are these real? Where do they come from? And what is a Dybbuk anyway? A tortured tale of demons, holocaust survivors, TV stars, unlucky rappers and online bargains.   Fortean Times news editor Ian Simmons explores the bizarre origin and legends behind these strangely popular haunted items. Venue: The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street E1 7EX (Tubes: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, Aldgate East) Date: 31st January 2023 Time: 7.30 for 8pm Tickets: £5/£3, https://www.wegottickets.com/event/564582/  

The first major survey of the occult collection of artworks, letters, objects and ephemera in the Tate Archive. 7.15pm Thursday 1 December 2022  £8 / £5  concessions ( Advance tickets ) £5 Live Stream ( Tickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page Archivist Victoria Jenkins presents her major survey of the occult collection of artworks, letters, objects and ephemera in the Tate Archive. This talk offers in-depth exploration of the occult and its relationship to art and culture including witchcraft, alchemy, secret societies, folklore and pagan rituals, demonology, spells and magic, para-sciences, astrology and tarot. She reveals some of the 150+ unseen esoteric and mystical pieces, never-before-seen by the public and  brings a new understanding to the artists in the Tate collection and the history and practice of the occult. The first major survey of the occult collection of artworks, letters, objec...

The Haunted Landscape calls again with demons in the landscape, kings sleeping beneath the ground, and the ghosts that have followed us through all of human history. Join the London Fortean Society at Conway Hall  (or on the live stream) for a day of talks and short films on the folklore of Britain and beyond.  Saturday 19 November 2022  Doors, books stall, and coffee from 9.30am. Talks 10am - 5 pm. Lunch 1pm-2pm (ish) £25 / £18 concessions. £15 live stream. Advance tickets Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions A link to all live streams will be sent out to all online participants after booking.  Mailing List Facebook event page (London) Facebook event page (Livestream) Talks  9am Registration starts.  9.30am Doors 10am Jasper Goodall - Into the Wild Night 10.30am Roy Vickery - Folklore and Dangerous Plants 11am Break 11.20am Dr Victoria Flood - Alderley Edge and the Dead Man 11.50pm Break 12.10pm Dani...

      The Science of Weird Shit: Twenty Years of Weird Science at Goldsmiths Following his retirement in October 2020, Emeritus Professor Chris French reflects on the work of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, founded in the year 2000.  Ever since records began, in every known society, a substantial proportion of the population has reported unusual experiences many of which we would today label as “paranormal”. Opinion polls show that the majority of the general public accepts that paranormal phenomena do occur. Such widespread experience of and belief in the paranormal can only mean one of two things. Either the paranormal is real, in which case this should be accepted by the wider scientific community which currently rejects such claims; or else belief in and experience of ostensibly paranormal phenomena can be fully explained in terms of psychological factors.  Chris tells us about anomalistic psychology, the study of extraordinary phenomena of beh...

 A visual journey from the minute to the infinite, exploring the relationships and harmonies between all parts of the universe and inspiring personal contemplation regarding our own place within it. Tuesday 8 November 2022  Doors, books, drinks from 7pm. 7.30pm start.  £10 / £7  concessions ( Advance tickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page A visual journey from the minute to the infinite, exploring the relationships and harmonies between all parts of the universe and inspiring personal contemplation regarding our own place within it. Join renowned image alchemist Stephen Ellcock , in conversation with artist and art writer Matthew Collings , as he presents a pan-global collection of remarkable and arresting images drawn from the history of art to explore the ancient belief that the cosmos is reflected in all living things. An eloquent introduction to his new collection The Cosmic Dance , th...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgFCnrfF3epj5w-eMrujdrRsR5vOKGjOj Tuesday 1 November 2022 7pm - 7.30pm start Ticket sales now closed - please come and pay at the door The Amersham Arms , 388 New Cross Road, London SE14 6TY Tube and Rail: New Cross / New Cross Gate / Deptford Bridge DLR Facebook Page   London Fortean Email List Join the London Fortean Society with three writers on London and British horror as we look at the city's dark cinematic street and how film transformed familiar British landscapes into spaces of terror. Lauren Jane Barnett - Death Lines: London’s Horror Film History   Lauren Jane Barnett unearths the literature, legends, and history behind horror classics including Peeping Tom and An American Werewolf in London , and lesser-known works such as mind-control melodrama The Sorcerers ; Gorgo , Britain’s answer to Godzilla; tube terror Death Line ; and Bela Lugosi’s mesmeric vehicle The Dark Eyes of London .  Tinged with humor, social critique, and ...

  Tuesday 25 October 2022 – 7.30 for 8pm – £5/£3 Venue: The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street E1 7EX (Tubes: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, Aldgate East)   ‘ I was Satan’s roadie’ – Tracking the Devil in English local lore According to legend, the English landscape – so calm and welcoming on the surface – is really the Devil’s work. Throughout the country, local lore describes the infernal labour with which great rocks were hurled into place, hills heaped up and valleys carved out. That hideous strength laid down great roads in one night, spanned impossible gorges with slender bridges and left scars everywhere as the hard stone melted like wax under the tread of those burning feet. It sounds terrifying, and yet popular tradition always countered the hellish threat with a happy ending. Folklorist Jeremy Harte has travelled to the Devil’s Chimney and his Cheeseknife, his Parlour and his Punch Bowl, to find out where these subversive stories really come from. His new book Cloven Country...

Tuesday 4 October 2022 7pm - 7.30pm start £5 / £3 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page  London Fortean Email List Saint Francis is the first recorded stigmatic: someone who miraculously bears the bloody marks of the Crucifixion on their bodies. There are five Holy Wounds in total. Stigmatics through the centuries have borne one or all of these wounds as a mark of a deeply personal relationship with Jesus.  Join Eric Huang, the host of Saint Podcast – for a history and culture podcast that explores legends of the saints – in a talk that traces the history of this mystical and painful phenomenon, one that manifests among the faithful to this day and remains a controversial marvel both within and without the Catholic Church. Tuesday 4 October 2022 7pm - 7.30pm start £5 / £3 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge ...

  27th September 2022 7.30 for 8pm The Founding of the Ghost Club The Ghost Club is one of the oldest organisations in the world associated with psychical research. It was founded by William Stainton Moses and AA Watts in 1882 and ran as a private gentlemen’s club until 1936, dedicated to telling “true” ghost stories. Members and visitors included Sir Laurence Oliphant, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, Egyptologist Ernest Wallis Budge and colonial administrator Sir Harry Johnston. Its members, alive or dead, were counted as members. Gothic specialist Prof Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck, University of London, has been exploring the Ghost Club’s archives and minute books, and reveals what they got up to in their early meetings as a club, and their overlap with the Society for Psychical Research . ** This meeting was postponed from June The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX   Tickets £5/£3 from https://www.wegottickets.com/event/554053/    

Tuesday 6 September 2022 7pm - 7.30pm start £5 / £3 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page   London Fortean Email List The autumn brings darker nights and an encroaching chill. Join us for two talks on haunted moments and macabre encounters. Sandra Lawrence - Miss Willmott and the Mystery of the Screaming Skulls In November 1899, famous horticulturalist Miss Ellen Willmott - best known for (allegedly) sprinkling the seeds of a ghostly sea holly in other people's gardens - was intrigued to learn of a strange sickness that had recently befallen three young men after touching two curious human skulls kept at Warbleton Priory in Sussex. A longtime member of the Society for Psychical Research, Miss Willmott asked her acquaintance to send her details... Sandra Lawrence is the author of 14 non-fiction books for adults and children, on a variety of subjects, ranging from history (including Murder an...

  Tuesday 30 August 2022 – 7.30 for 8pm – £5/£3 The stupendous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and their surrounding geological illustrations and landscapes combine historical gravitas and spectacle. In 1854 the public encountered 37 life-like sculptures of extinct animals unlike anything seen before, populating a “walk through geological time” in vistas of lost, ancient worlds. These were the works and vision of the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, geologist David Ansted, with questionable input from the Victorian celebrity anatomist and palaeontologist Richard Owen. Dr Ellinor Michel of the Natural History Museum and Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs will bring highlights from the first book on these beauties in over a quarter century, co-authored with Mark Witton, renowned palaeoartist and palaeontologist from University of Portsmouth . Their new work has uncovered surprises about this Grade 1-listed, Heritage-At-Risk site and underscores the risks to its future.  Ticket...

  Tuesday 26 July 2022, 7.30 for 8pm. £5/£3 -  Advance Booking    There are many reasons why people entertain conspiracy beliefs and an increasing body of research exploring the underlying factors: social influences, common fears, social disconnection and dissatisfaction, generalised mistrust of government and individual traits. In the age of Covid it is especially relevant to understand vaccine hesitancy and vaccine denialism – people have died, friendships have broken down; clearly this is a topic where a great deal of passion is expressed. Psychologist Dr Anna Stone of the University of East London recalls watching the first moon landing on TV, so it came as a shock to her to read that a large proportion of the population of the US believ...

7.45 Tuesday 5 July 2022 £5 / £2 Concessions Advance Booking The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page  London Fortean Email List I dreamed I was paying a visit to London. It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume. Aleister Crowley Philip Baker combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London. Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn. Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blit...

7.15pm Tuesday 28 June 2022  £12 / £7  concessions ( Advance tickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page '.... magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities.  ' Mat Osman (founding member of Suede, author of The Ruin s) and world-renowned image hunter Stephen Ellcock discuss with Cathi Unsworth (and some special guests) the anarchic magic of their collaboration England on Fire. Here you will find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. Forget the tired gallery of lords and ladies, forget the tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England’s psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is hitched. On these fabled shores we are all castaways. Ma...