London Fortean Society

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...

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...