London Fortean Society

7.45pm Tuesday 21 June 2022 We are really sorry but, due to the tube strike, we are postponing this talk. We hope to bring Roger and his talk back from the beyond in the autumn. All ticket holders will be refunded.  Join our Mailing List 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. 7.45pm Tuesday 21 Jun...

Presented with Rewierding: Statler and Waldorf from  The Muppets  meet the Ancient of Days. 7pm doors Tuesday 7 June 2022 £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 Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of William Blake's most extraordinary works - at times outrageous, radical, heretical, profound, bewildering and very funny. Come and join John Higgs - the author of William Blake Vs The World - for a reading of this magnificent little book, as he attempts to understand both the text and what it reveals about William Blake himself. John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. In the words of MOJO magazine, “Reading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything beco...

 7.45pm Tuesday 31 May 2022 £5 / £3 Concessions  Advance tickets The Bell, 50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverpool Street. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East Facebook Page Join our Mailing List In the 18th and 19th centuries artists like William Hogarth, James Gillray and George Cruikshank created political and social satire, often with blatant rudeness, to ridicule the high and mighty and to highlight social issues. In a highly-illustrated talk award-winning political cartoonist Martin Rowson (the Guardian etc) discusses their work and shows how they have inspired his own scathing and often extremely graphic work. In a full-page editorial in 2017, in response to one of his Guardian cartoons, the Daily Mail denounced him and his work as “disgusting, deranged … sick and offensive”. Not for the faint-hearted!   7.45pm Tuesday 31 May 2022 £5 / £3 Concessions  Advance tickets The Bell,  50 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EX. Train and Tube: Liverp...

7.15pm Wednesday 25 May 2022  £8 / £5  concessions ( Advance tickets ) £5 Live Stream (T ickets ) Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn Directions Mailing List Facebook event page The brain can misfire in extraordinary ways… Where do delusions come from and what do they mean? For centuries, delusions have been dismissed as something for doctors to sort out behind closed doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks: they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas. The King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter…and he wasn’t alone. After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France’s asylums. Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead. For centuries we’ve dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – th...

For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witche s. 7.45 Tuesday 3 May 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 Covid precautions: Please take a lateral flow before attending. This event may be cancelled and moved to online. We shall keep you posted. On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the ha...

Can we see the future in our dreams? Image: Dreaming by Hartwig HKD on Flickr 7.45 Tuesday 5 April 2022 £5 / £3.50 Concessions Tickets available on the door The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube and Rail: London Bridge Facebook Page  London Fortean Email List Renowned esoteric writer Gary Lachma n has been recording his own precognitive dreams for forty years. In this unique and intriguing talk Lachman recounts the discovery that he dreams 'ahead of time', and argues convincingly that this extraordinary ability is, in fact, shared by all of us. His latest book Dreaming Ahead of Time is a personal exploration of precognition, synchronicity and coincidence drawing on the work of thinkers including J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestly and C.G. Jung. Lachman's description and analysis of his own experience introduces readers to the uncanny power of our dreaming minds, and reveals the illusion of our careful distinctions between past, present and future. Gary Lac...

Tuesday 1 March 2022 7.30pm (doors 7ish) £5 / £3.50 concessions ( Advanced tickets ) The Miller , 96 Snowsfields, London Bridge, London SE1 3SS Tube & Rail: London Bridge Tube: Borough Event Facebook page We are returned. Join the London Fortean Society for further talks on the strangeness of our home city. Sarah Sparkes covers her researches into the ghosts of a London landmark while Robert Stephenson (London Earth Mysteries) discusses the curious case of London, ley lines and Alfred Watkins.  Writer and fortean host Scott Wood shares a top five of fortean fings in south east London . Dancing ghosts, mouldering fairies, helicopters chasing UFOS. That sort of thing.  The Ghosts of Senate House – Sarah Sparkes Sarah Sparkes will talk about The Ghosts of Senate House , a creative research project, which collects and archives tales of hauntings and other unexplained happenings, centered at Senate House, University of London and its immediate surrounds. Sarah was a Resear...