Tracey has written fiction for as long as she can remember, covering a variety of genres and subjects. Her first stage play WITCH, a historical drama based on original English witch trial transcripts, premiered in 2016 and has been performed more than 80 times to date. Tracey’s most recent publications were Dark Folklore (2021), co-written with her husband Mark, and Who Is Anna Stenberg? (2023), her first full-length novel. Her next book, also co-written with Mark, is Devon’s Forgotten Witches 1...
Jun 28, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Dave Silk is a storyteller and historian from Newcastle upon Tyne and co-author of Tyne and Wear Folktales for Children . He collects and retells traditional tales and ancient stories from around these isles and further afield and enjoys rearing pet leeches and practicing the Dark Arts. In the daytime, he is usually found doing his ‘normal job’ of lurking in the dark towers of Newcastle Castle, where he is the Learning Manager. In this chat, we talk about the Newcastle Witch Trials, other witch ...
Jun 24, 2025•53 min
In this third episode of our Witches, Cunning Folk & Magic theme, I'm talking to Deborah Hyde, an author, presenter and producer who has written for periodicals such as The Guardian and The Fortean Times, and who specialises in the subject of weird belief. For ten years, Deborah was Editor-in-Chief of The Skeptic and is a fellow of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She makes frequent TV appearances, being a regular contributor to 'Strange Evidence' and 'Mysteries at the Museum', and has p...
Jun 21, 2025•44 min
In this second episode of our Witches, Cunning Folk & Magic theme, I'm talking to Willow Winsham, an author and historian specialising in folklore, and the history of the English witch trials. Her books include the highly popular Treasury of Folklore series from Batsford Books, and Accused: British Witches Throughout History from Pen and Sword Books. Her passion for uncovering fascinating topics and dedication to impeccable research guarantees an accessible and engaging read, whatever the su...
Jun 14, 2025•49 min
In this first episode of our Witches, Cunning Folk & Magic theme, I'm talking to Dr Tabitha Stanmore! She's a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Exeter on the Leverhulme-funded Seven County Witch Hunt Project, investigating the people affected by the 1640s witch trials in eastern England. Her doctoral research was funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (part of the AHRC), and published as Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service magic in England from the l...
Jun 07, 2025•53 min
Much is often made of London's lost rivers, like the Tyburn, Fleet, and Walbrook. Yet Newcastle upon Tyne also has rivers we cannot see. Ours are not lost, rather they're simply buried. The Skinnerburn, Erick Burn, Pandon Burn, Lam Burn, and Lort Burn all continue to flow beneath the city, down to the mighty Tyne. The Lort Burn is perhaps the most well-known of the buried rivers. Originally called the Dene Burn, it gained its new name of Lort Burn in the later 14th century. Some sources say 'Lor...
May 31, 2025•28 min
The Broads National Park, often known as the Norfolk Broads, is one of the UK's 15 National Parks. Seven rivers and over sixty waterways called Broads comprise the park. In the medieval era, locals dug peat from the land for fuel. By the 14th century, these channels flooded and created the Broads. They'd become a popular boating destination by the 19th century. Here in the 21st century, the park is Britain's largest protected wetland. Unsurprisingly, the Park is also home to spectres, Otherworld...
May 24, 2025•18 min
Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic. His magical specialities are the dead (folk necromancy), divination (geomancy), the cunning-crafts of traditional British service magic, and the grimoires. His published works include The Black Raven with Brian Johnson, Nazarth: Pillars of Gladness , The Art of Cyprian’s Mirror of Four Kings , An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke with Phil Legard, A Book of the Magi , The Starry Rubric , and a host of essays in colle...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Canals occupy a strange place in the cultural imagination. They're manmade, yet offer a connection to nature, and they offer a means of transport, but one that's only accessible by boat. Some cities depend on canals, like Amsterdam or Venice, while in the UK, canals are often overlooked or forgotten spaces that have long outlived their original purpose. There is also surprisingly less folklore about canals than you might imagine, given the amount you can find about rivers or lakes. It's not that...
May 17, 2025•20 min
We've no doubt seen plenty of content online about water's power to be a great healer. We need to drink it (this is your reminder for today), while people swear by cold water baths for their wellbeing. Then we think about how much water appears in nature, somewhere we're often counselled to go to improve our mental health. I think of how often I find myself heading towards water on my days off, whether that's the local burn, the mighty Tyne, or the unforgiving North Sea. But how often do we thin...
May 10, 2025•20 min
A sense of mystery gathers around London's lost rivers, with their names whispered like forgotten deities from an ancient cult. Fleet, Tyburn, Walbrook, Effra, Westbourne, Neckinger. In some cases, they aren't so much lost, as buried. Sometimes, they break ground, appearing where you least expect them. Take the grey duct that carries the Westbourne above the District and Circle line at Sloane Square as an example. Yet the Walbrook seems truly lost. As Tom Bolton says, it "is the most mysterious,...
May 03, 2025•24 min
Visiting churches might not sound like everyone's idea of a great time. Yet the buildings are stuffed with strange carvings, peculiar graffiti, interesting artwork, and even sassy memorials. These church curiosities tell us a lot about what mattered to people in centuries past. They also preserve folklore, legends, and the beliefs of the congregation. From apotropaic marks scratched onto fonts, to stone guardians on the outer walls, churches are a fascinating repository of folk practices...if yo...
Apr 26, 2025•23 min
W.J. Gilbert is a writer, storyteller, and creator of the YouTube channel Eerie Edinburgh. Based in Edinburgh, he’s the author of the best-selling Hidden Haunts: Scotland , Hidden Haunts: England , and Ghostly Tales of the NC500 — a haunted journey through Scotland’s most legendary road trip route. His next book, Hidden Haunts: Ireland, is currently in development. His writing explores the eerie overlap between folklore, history, and the paranormal — with a particular focus on the overlooked, un...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Churches can be sites of divination, haunted locations, and important community hubs. Yet in Wallsend, Holy Cross Church is notorious for a tale of witches and heroic derring-do. The ruin might not look like it now, but appearances can be deceptive. It's not just a chapel. Throw in a midnight ritual, grotesque women, a desecrated corpse and an infamous lord for good measure. Is it fact, folklore, or total fiction? Let's explore the legend of the Witches of Wallsend in this week's episode of Fabu...
Apr 19, 2025•16 min
Here in the 21st century, death and burial often occur as part of a sanitised process. Death happens away from home, often in hospitals, and funerals are usually tidy, respectful affairs. We can forget that this wasn't always the case, and that our quaint, inner city gardens were sometimes putrescent burial grounds, crammed with rotting remains. Even worse, history contains legends like that of Enon Chapel. This awful story is far from being folklore, but rather a dark chapter in the history of ...
Apr 12, 2025•20 min
You would absolutely know a lychgate if you saw one. They make popular backdrops for wedding photos, and provide a quaint air of rustic charm to country churchyards. They're the wooden or stone gateway, complete with tiled roof, that marks the entry into the churchyard. Not all churches have them, and they're far more common outside churches in the countryside than in suburban or city-centre churches. Yet they do have some folklore attached to them. Let's take a look at what they were for and wh...
Apr 05, 2025•23 min
I started out with the intention of looking at unusual church names. The problem was, this offered the potential to accidentally poke fun at their congregations. It also didn't help that most churches in the UK have pretty similar names. They're named for individual saints, like St Nicholas' Cathedral in Newcastle, or even all saints like, funnily enough, All Saints. Otherwise, they're named for their location. Yet many churches have such names and preserve a touch of their history, or that of t...
Mar 29, 2025•21 min
Looking at the origins of sports team names might seem antithetical to folklore. Yet sport forms part of the ritual calendar for many people, whether on a personal or a mass scale. Look at the good luck rituals people follow before they watch their team play. Or how about the sporting events that become part of the folk tradition of a place through their regularity? Some team names refer to the history of the area. Others refer to the specific history of the team. Some are generic, designed to s...
Mar 22, 2025•23 min
Victoria Male is an internationally recognized screenwriter, earning accolades from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, film festivals, and major industry lists. Her prose has been published worldwide in fifteen literary magazines and she’s written op-eds for major publications. She worked in creative development for The Montecito Picture Company and media startup Graphic India, in addition to producing a podcast for three years. In this chat, we talk about her screenplay for the ...
Mar 18, 2025•1 hr
There is no shortage of bizarre pub names in the UK. Some of them appear to be a combination of random objects, like the Frog and Nightgown. Others have a local story behind their odd name. I've covered unusual pub names before, so consider this Part 2. Yet when I started researching these examples, it became apparent that pub names didn't have to be unusual to be interesting. Rather, pub names can capture a slice of history, whether they commemorate a local person, notorious or otherwise, or ev...
Mar 15, 2025•20 min
Unlike place names, which often give us information who once lived somewhere, street names can be a different case entirely. Sometimes they bear the names of notable (and often now infamous) people. Other times they refer to long-gone industries performed in the area - you can guess what happened on Cock Lane in London, site of the Cock Lane Poltergeist in 1762. Or street names might be the last remains of a now-dead language. Yet the continual building of new streets also sees the creation of n...
Mar 08, 2025•20 min
Place names are important and pass on a lot of valuable information, even if we no longer understand how to interpret it. Within them, they tell us who used to live in an area, or what natural features were important. Some of them even end up with a range of legends to explain names that might otherwise seem random or bizarre. Folklore attempts to explain their origins. I've talked about unusual place names before, but this time, we're going to look at more of a range of names to see where they ...
Mar 01, 2025•21 min
When I decided to write about goats in folklore, I thought I would find plenty of content. After all, they appear in mythology. Look at Amalthea, the goat reputed to have raised Zeus in Greek myth. Or the goats associated with the goatherd in the Auriga constellation. That's before we get anywhere near the sign of Capricorn. Yet in terms of actual folklore, there's less than you would expect. Unlike pigs, there are few specific tales about goats. Instead, they pop up almost as a side character i...
Feb 22, 2025•22 min
Kimberly J. Lau is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" (Wayne State University Press), Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics , and New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden , as well as articles in a number of interdisciplinary journals. Her research interests include fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy; femi...
Feb 20, 2025•51 min
Pigs appear in folklore in somewhat unusual ways. Sometimes, they choose the location where a church should be built. Or they appear as phantoms, haunting misty moorland. Sailors or fishermen considered pigs unlucky, and wouldn't even say 'pig' at sea. If they met a pig on their way to the boat, they would postpone sailing. Some of them went so far as to ban pork products on board. While this superstition seems inexplicable on the surface, Jacqueline Simpson suggests it comes from the biblical a...
Feb 15, 2025•19 min
Certain animals might spring to mind when it comes to folklore. Hares, horses, deer, cats - they all have an otherworldly quality to them. Would you consider the same of cows? There's a surprising amount of folklore about cows. They can be death omens, fairy cattle, consumption cures, or even the guardians of treasure. That's not even considering the deities associated with cows, or their appearance in mythology. Just look at the various versions of the Taurus origin myth. But let's take a look ...
Feb 08, 2025•23 min
Following on from 2024's theme of the Folklore of Animals, this month we'll examine the Folklore of Agricultural Animals. This week, we'll explore the folklore, legends, and even folk medicine associated with sheep. Sheep are not native to the UK. Neolithic settlers brought them to Britain from southwest Asia in around 3000 BCE. Sheepskin and other wool textiles appear in the archaeological record from the Bronze Age in northern Europe. Following the Norman Conquest, sheep became the dominant fo...
Feb 01, 2025•19 min
Niina Niskanen is a Finnish artist, writer and a folklorist who specialises in Finnish, Baltic and Sámi Mythology. She is an online educator and hosted “Heart of Mielikki,” one of the first online courses about Finnish mythology for non-Finnish speaking audiences. Niina is also an artist with a BA in illustration. Her work has been displayed in numerous art exhibitions in Finland and abroad. Niina is the author of the book " Mythology of The Sámi, Stories from the North " and she has Sámi ancest...
Jan 29, 2025•44 min
If you think of the phrase "to be in mourning", you'll probably imagine a Victorian scene. Perhaps a black-clad widow ushers similarly black-clad children to a desolate graveyard in the depths of autumn. Or maybe you picture a grand house, shuttered up against the world that continues outside, while life is paused for those inside as they grieve their loss. Clearly, humans have had mourning rituals and customs throughout history. Yet it is the 19th century that captures attention, perhaps throug...
Jan 25, 2025•27 min
According to legend, two green children wandered into a village in 12th-century Suffolk. No one knew who they were or where they came from. Their refusal to eat and unfamiliar language made locals wary. Over time, they gradually assimilated and told a fantastic story of their origins. Were they fairies? Lost children with big imaginations? Extraterrestrials? The fever dream of medieval chroniclers? Let's take a look in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore! Find the images and references on t...
Jan 18, 2025•19 min
