The Corpse on the Tube and Other Urban Legends

 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 presented live via Zoom and then archived on the Edinburgh Fortean Society YouTube channel.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/84586005454

Meeting ID: 845 8600 5454

Passcode: 1z6ripG1

Join by Skype for Business

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/skype/84586005454

Paleo-fantasy and Ancient Alien Contact

 In partnership with Conway Hall.

Tuesday 10 November 2020

7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering.

Facebook event page. 

Do you believe that aliens built the pyramids? Do you imagine cavemen going out to club a bear while cavewomen stayed home with the kids? Did you learn in school that the Greeks invented civilisation? When you see the image of apes evolving into man, do you stop to question the idea that it represents a progression to the ultimate goal of contemporary Western civilisation? 

These are all myths about the ancient world perpetuated by the media, uninformed pseudo-scientists, and sometimes outright racists. The way we teach history tends to focus a model of humanity that’s reinforcing 1950’s white gender roles and reproducing capitalist patriarchy. Stacy Hackner will discuss a few ways in which a common conception of the past doesn’t add up, why we’ve come to think of history in this biased way, and how we can continue to question and correct these misunderstandings.

Stacy Hackner is a human fact generator and archaeologist specialising in human bones, focusing on a reassessment of gender-based social roles in the ancient world, drawing attention to ideas we hold that are based in 1960s ideals of family life (“man hunt, woman cook!” is a hard belief to kill). She has worked in a number of dusty holes across the globe, most recently in a 19th-century cemetery in Cyprus, and has lectured at UCL and Birkbeck in archaeology, epidemiology, and museum studies. Stacy also believes that science needs to be more public-facing and decolonialised, and hosts science communication activities at museums and festivals to this end, while also managing a public engagement team at UCL Museums. 

Students describe her as “a good reason to wake up before 9” and her lectures as “kinda like falling into a Wikipedia hole”. She enjoys camping, queer cinema, and giving internet trolls a smackdown. She will always pop up on your feed to share a terrible archaeology pun.

 In partnership with Conway Hall.

Tuesday 10 November 2020

7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering.

Facebook event page. 

Calling the Spirits – A History of Seances

In partnership with Conway Hall.

Monday 19 October 2020

7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering. 

Facebook event page. 

Lisa Morton investigates the eerie history of our conversations with the dead, from necromancy in Homer’s Odyssey to the emergence of Spiritualism – when Victorians were entranced by mediums and the seance was born.

Among our cast are the Fox sisters, teenagers surrounded by ‘spirit rappings’; Daniel Dunglas Home, the ‘greatest medium of all time’; Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose unlikely friendship was forged, then riven, by the afterlife; and Helen Duncan, the medium whose trial in 1944 for witchcraft proved more popular to the public than news about the war. Her book, Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, also considers Ouija boards, modern psychics and paranormal investigations, and is illustrated with engravings, fine art (from beyond) and photographs. Morton begs the question: is anybody there . . .?

In partnership with Conway Hall.

Monday 19 October 2020

7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering. 

Facebook event page.

Online: Merpeople: A Human History

In partnership with Conway Hall.
Vaughn Scribner: Merpeople: A Human History
Tuesday 6 October 2020
7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering. 
Facebook event page. 

People have been fascinated by merpeople since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash (1984), myths, stories and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times ‘mermaiding’ has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world.

In his book Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are – and always have been – everywhere.

In partnership with Conway Hall.
Vaughn Scribner: Merpeople: A Human History 
Tuesday 6 October 2020
7.30pm (BST)

Please register for this event at the following booking link: Book Now.  

Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation of at least £5 when registering. 
Facebook event page. 

The Real Vampires

This event is cancelled and we shall be running it again, live, at a later date in 2021. Please keep a look out for forthcoming online events. We'll get there friends... we'll get there. 

Tuesday 13 October 2020
8pm (doors 7.45pm)
£5 / £2 concessions 
The Miller, 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS
Tube & Rail: London Bridge
Tube: Borough
Event Facebook page


The real vampires were not suave, polished, cultivated or rich. They looked like ordinary dead peasants. Yet for those who believed in them, they were terrifying. So terrifying that they prompted live burials, nervous breakdown, hysterical paralysis and speechlessness. During a real vampire panic, an overworked, underfed community was so terrified that it found the energy to dig up eleven graves, and the wood to burn eleven corpses.

Richard Sugg discusses real vampires were so terrifying that the energy of fear they produced actually caused poltergeist attacks. In several cases, they were so terrifying that they quite literally scared people to death.

From Russia to New England, from the Scottish borders to Crete, and from the Bronze Age to the days of Twilight, Richard's book The Real Vampires takes the reader on an unforgettable tour of wonder, horror and strangeness. It will be available on the night.

Richard specialises in marginal, forgotten or tabooed histories, as showcased in his previous writing on a variety of supernatural and unusual themes.

Tuesday 13 October 2020
8pm (doors 7.45pm)
£5 / £2 concessions 
The Miller, 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS
Tube & Rail: London Bridge
Tube: Borough
Event Facebook page

Online: UFO Culture and Why We See Flying Saucers

Tuesday 23 June 2020
7.30 pm BST (GMT+1) 
This event will be held ONLINE. Please register online at the following link: Book now. 
Join this event on Facebook. 

Conway Hall is a charity who have lost almost all of their income. We politely ask for a donation when registering for this event.

More than seventy years since Kenneth Arnold saw erratic objects “like a saucer if you skip it across the water”, UFOs have been making headlines once again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about an approximately five-year Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent television interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn’t be linked to any country. The implication, of course, was that they might be linked to other solar systems.


The UFO community—those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analysing supposed flying saucers (or triangles or chevrons) for years—was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation. Their incredulity and doubt rippled across the internet. Many of the people most invested in UFO reality weren’t really buying it. And as Sarah Scoles did her own digging, she ventured to dark, conspiracy-filled corners of the internet, to a former paranormal research center in Utah, and to the hallways of the Pentagon.

In They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers Scoles met the bigwigs, the scrappy upstarts, the field investigators, the rational and the unhinged of this sprawling community. How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with “anomalous phenomena”? And how do they (as any group must) reflect the politics and culture of the larger world around them?

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Sarah Scoles is a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, New Scientist, Aeon, and Wired. A former editor at Astronomy magazine, Scoles worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the location of the first-ever SETI project. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

This talk will be held online using the Zoom application (available for PC, Mac, iOS and Android). A link to join the talk will be sent to ticketholders on the day of the event.

Tuesday 23 June 2020
7.30 pm BST (GMT+1) 
This event will be held ONLINE. Please register online at the following link: Book now. 
Join this event on Facebook. 
Conway Hall is a charity who have lost almost all of their income. We politely ask for a donation when registering for this event.

Monumental Memories – Indigenous Memory and Stonehenge

Saturday 20 June 2020
1 pm BST (GMT+1) 
This event will be held ONLINE. Please register online at the following link: Book now. 

This event is in partnership with Conway Hall. Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation when registering.

This talk will be held online using the Zoom application (available for PC, Mac, iOS and Android). A link to join the talk will be sent to ticket holders on the day of the event.
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Without writing, indigenous elders memorised a vast amount of factual information on which survival depended both physically and culturally: knowledge of thousands of animals and plants, astronomical charts, vast navigation networks, genealogies, geography and geology… the list goes on and on. How did they remember so much? And why does this explain the purpose of ancient monuments including Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Nasca Lines? Can we use these memory methods in contemporary life?

After discovering that the true purpose of monuments like Easter Island and Stonehenge were to act as memory palaces, Dr Lynne Kelly takes this knowledge and introduces us to the best memory techniques humans have ever devised, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to methods used by today’s memory athletes. A memory champion herself, Kelly tests all these methods and demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of our brains at any age.

Dr Lynne Kelly, author of The Memory Code and Memory Craft, will explain the exact mechanisms used and why this explains the purpose of many enigmatic monuments around the world – and that we have a great deal to learn from the extraordinary mnemonic skills of indigenous cultures.
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This talk will be held online using the Zoom application (available for PC, Mac, iOS and Android). A link to join the talk will be sent to ticket holders on the day of the event.

Saturday 20 June 2020
1 pm BST (GMT+1)
This event will be held ONLINE. Please register online at the following link: Book now. 

This event is in partnership with Conway Hall. Conway Hall is a charity and we politely ask you to add a donation when registering.