London Fortean Society

  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 reveals

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 Facebook

  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/