Fortean London Halloween: Ghost, Witches and Demons

Event information

Lurking on the night before Halloween, our October meeting has gathered a coven of the finest speakers on London ghosts, witches and demons as well as our own Scott Wood. Each talk will be 20-30 minutes.

Roger Clarke: Queen Victoria and the Child Medium
The Tale of Vicky’s Ticker: Did a publican’s daughter from Shoreditch really channel spirits for Queen Victoria as a child?
Raised in a haunted house, Roger Clarke is best known as a film-writer for the Independent newspaper and Sight & Sound. He is the author of 'A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof'.

Jessie Childs: Beware the Foul Fiend: An Elizabethan Exorcism in Hackney
Award-winning historian Jessie Childs tells the true story of a horrific exorcism performed on a young chambermaid by a group of fugitive priests in a house in Hackney in 1586.
Jessie Childs won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography with her first book 'Henry VIII's Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey'. She has written and reviewed for the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Literary Review. Her new book is 'God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith In Elizabethan England'.

Deborah Hyde: The Witch of Eye
Nearly six hundred years ago in Smithfield, London, a commoner was burned alive as punishment for practising the dark arts. But the case of Margery Jourdemayne is interesting for so many more reasons than the obvious ones. We'll look at this fifteenth century upstart to find out what Margery's case said about society, the power of the Church and our own preconceptions of what witches should look like.
Deborah Hyde is editor of The Skeptic magazine and writes about belief in the malign macabre at Jourdemayne.

Scott Wood: Ghosts and Demons of the City
The City of London, Borough and Spitalfields have a dark history of walking corpses, demonic images and ghostly visitations. Scott Wood marks the local ghosts and ghoul on to the map.

Scott is the host and co-organisor of the London Fortean Society, the Fortean writer for Londonist and the author of 'London Urban Legends: The Corpse on the Tube'.