Joining me for this episode is intuitive artist, writer, researcher and podcaster Claire Casely. Claire’s creative projects are inspired by the presence of faeries which she experiences through nature connection, faerie sight and during journeying in meditation and dreams. Together these practices have helped her to form a multi-sensory method of connecting with the otherworld, which she calls ‘Faery Whispering’. In the interview I begin by talking with Claire about how her interest in faeries s...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 107
My guest for this episode is researcher and author Fred Andersson, who joined me to talk about his new book, ‘Northern Lights – High Strangeness in Sweden’. This is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in that country. Sweden has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to U...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 106
My guest for this episode is author Simon Miles, who joined me to talk about his recent book 'The Map and the Manuscript'. This debut work documents an investigation of over more than twenty years into the "Affair of Rennes", a tangle of puzzles that has fascinated readers and researchers alike for half a century. A minor riddle of local history centered on a tiny village in the south of France became a global phenomenon, yet its greater secrets have remained tightly sealed. Amongst a sequence o...
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 105
Joining me for this episode of the podcast is previous guest and good friend of the show Matt Hopewell, AKA AP Strange. AP is a paranormal researcher, writer and self-described Discordian Flying Saucer Enthusiast, Certified Kook, Donut Wizard and Master of Mystical Flapdoodle. He has a distinctly fun and light-hearted method of exploring Forteana on his blog 'AP Strange's Weird Writings', with articles on an impressively varied array of unusual subjects. In the interview I talk with him about hi...
Aug 09, 2023•58 min•Ep. 104
My guest for this episode is legendary paranormal investigator and author Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel has had a prolific writing career dating back to 1952 which has seen him pen hundreds of books. Not only has he written science fiction stories, but together with his wife Patricia, also non-fiction books on an array of subjects, most notably the paranormal, unexplained mysteries of the world, poetry and religion. He has travelled the world in search of the unexplained, endeavouring to unravel such...
Jul 19, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 103
For this episode my guest is art historian Emily Leon. Emily’s research focuses on modernism and the esoteric interests of late-19th and early-20th century western artists, with a particular concentration on abstraction and the links between art, science, and religion. Since 2017, much of her scholarship has focused on the social, spiritual, and theoretical implications of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work. Most recently, in 2023 she presented “Past-Future, Present-Future, Future-Future: Hilm...
Jul 05, 2023•48 min•Ep. 102
My guest for this episode is photojournalist Shannon Taggart, who joined me to talk about her 2019 photobook - 'Séance'. This project was the culmination of two decades of research into the history, rituals, practices and exponents of Spiritualism, a religious movement which emerged in the mid 19th Century in update New York in the USA and is now established across the globe. Shannon's interest in the subject stems from an experience as a child attending a service at a spiritualist church in Lil...
Jun 21, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 101
My guest for this episode is witch and author Emma Kathryn. Emma has had an interest in witchcraft from an early age and her practise has developed to include a combination of british magical traditions with the afro-caribbean ones of Myal and Obeah. She has written books such as Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming Food, Wild Witchcraft and Witch Life and champions the positive relationships that can exist between people and nature through an interest in the supernatural. I begin the interview by a...
May 31, 2023•57 min•Ep. 100
Joining me as my guest for this episode is Emma Heard, creator of the Weird Wiltshire blog. Emma has had a lifelong interest in the paranormal and experienced many unusual occurrences that are hard to explain. During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 she had a chance to write a blog for fun and so Weird Wiltshire was born, offering a place to explore the history, folklore and spooky tales which overflow the county. I begin the interview by talking with Emma about how her interest in these subjects b...
May 10, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 99
My guest for this episode is Gregory Forth, who joined me to discuss his book Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid. Gregory received his doctorate at Oxford and was a professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is the author more than one hundred scholarly papers and several academic books. Between Ape and Human is his first book for a general audience. While doing fiel...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 98
Joining me as my guest for this episode is author Patrick Harpur. Patrick has written extensively on a range of fortean subjects but is perhaps best known for his 1994 book Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. This applied the ideas of people such as William Blake, W.B Yeats and Carl Jung to examine the connections across a wide range of paranormal phenomena and explore the history of the realm many believe exists between the states of body and spirit. The book is regarded as class...
Mar 29, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 97
My guest for this episode is folklorist and author Jeremy Harte, who joined me to talk about his new book Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape. Jeremy has written extensively on local history, folklore and the supernatural and is the curator of the Bourne Hall Museum at Epson and Ewell as well as secretary of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society. In Cloven Country, he explores the background of those stories where the Devil played a part both in creating the English land...
Mar 08, 2023•58 min•Ep. 96
Joining me for this episode is filmmaker George Popov. George is half of the creative partnership behind Rubicon Films, who since 2022 have released a series of paranormal themed documentaries under the title of ‘Sideworld’. To quote George, a sideworld exists “where the line between fact and fiction is enshrouded in mist and shadow, and beyond that threshold is a place that can change our perspective on everything we think we know.” The three Sideworld documentaries made so far have explored th...
Feb 22, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 95
My guest for this episode is Vuk, host of the Tracing Owls podcast. A quirky but nuanced exploration into Fortean philosophy, Tracing Owls focuses on the roles of Mother Nature, the Trickster and the experiencer in shaping paranormal phenomena, with a healthy amount of humour and humility along the way. Could Cryptids, UFOs, High strangeness and paraweird anomalies all originate from the same source? Vuk seeks to catalogue the overlooked, spotlight the disregarded, and show that the cosmic expan...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 94
Joining me for this episode is author and dream researcher, Sarah Janes. Sarah has been an enthusiastic lucid dreamer since childhood and has written about dreams, dream culture and the anthropology of dreaming for a number of academic journals, the Idler magazine and more. Sarah’s first book Initiation into Dream Mysteries, Drinking from the Pool of Mnemosyne was published recently and explores the ancient history and philosophy of dream therapy and sleep medicine, beginning in deepest antiquit...
Jan 18, 2023•58 min•Ep. 93
My guest for this episode is Dr Liz Savage, who joined me to talk about the concept of Dickensian Cryptozoology. Liz earned her PhD from Durham University on nineteenth-century literature, focusing on Charles Dickens and the uncanny. Her current research continues to focus on the strange and unusual in literature, film, and other media. Dickensian Cryptozoology is the subject of a paper she has written which proposes a new approach to the writers texts that examines the character and places he c...
Dec 28, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 92
My guest for this episode is author David Booher, who joined me to talk about his 2017 book, No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story – UFO Abduction or Covert Operation. The book explores the interesting case of Gerry Irwin, a young soldier in the US Army who whilst driving back to his base on a cold February evening in 1959, witnessed an unusual light in the sky. Stopping to investigate, he left a message on his car to make other motorists aware and walked through the undergrowth towards the spot wher...
Dec 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 91
Joining me as my guest for this episode is Duncan Barford. Duncan is the creative force behind Occult Experiments in the Home, a project which began as a blog but has expanded beyond that into a number of books and a podcast. These have all explored magick, occulture and the paranormal and focus in particular on how those areas intersect with personal experience, psychology, and spiritual practice. Duncan is also a qualified counsellor and suspended the blog when beginning the training for this,...
Nov 16, 2022•59 min•Ep. 90
In this episode my guest is paranormal investigator Michele Eve. Michele, who is based in the English county of Gloucestershire in the UK is the creator of the Mystical Times blog, where she writes about a wide range of paranormal phenomena, from time slips, to ghostly monks, past lives, strange deaths, local folklore and much more. Michele grew up in a Spiritualist household and we talk about that early in the interview, before moving on to her time working as a psychic medium, and what that fa...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 89
Joining me for this episode are paranormal researchers Ailsa Clarke and Bethan Briggs-Miller, who are the hosts of the Eerie Essex podcast. In their podcast, they explore the folklore, macabre history and supernatural happenings of Essex, an ancient county in the east of England. There have been episodes on witches, cryptids, ghosts, exorcisms, gnomes, and much more. In the interview I begin by talking with Ailsa and Bethan about how Eerie Essex got started, after which we discuss some of the un...
Oct 05, 2022•57 min•Ep. 88
My guest for this episode is Emma Woods, author of Glimpses of Magonia, a memoir of the disconcerting yet transformative anomalous events that she has experienced all through her life. The book provides a unique insight into what motivates people like her to seek answers in areas of paranormal research, to help better understand the meaning of those experiences. In the interview, I start by talking with Emma about the title of the book and what that means to her. From there we talk more about th...
Sep 14, 2022•59 min•Ep. 87
Joining me for this episode is Jo Hickey-Hall. Jo is a folklorist, researcher and social historian with a long-held interest in the relationship between supernatural experience, local landscape and oral tradition. In 2015 she gained a Masters in History from the University of Bristol, supervised by Professor Ronald Hutton, with her research focused on the portrayal in Medieval Irish literature of a mythic race of beings known as the Sidhe. Later, Jo began the Modern Fairy Sightings Project, whic...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 86
My guest for this episode is the Reverend Peter Laws. Peter is not only a church minister but also an author, journalist, public speaker and podcaster. He has written articles for the Fortean Times and has a regular film review column there. In 2018 he wrote his acclaimed non-fiction book The Frighteners , which sought to understand and defend why humans have a morbid streak and saw him investigate the human fascination with death, murder and the supernatural. Our conversation is a wide ranging ...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 85
Joining me for this episode is paranormal researcher and investigator Morgan Knudsen. Morgan is the founder of the award-winning Entity Seeker Paranormal Research and teachings, which developed a number of educational programs to help people better understand and appreciate supernatural phenomena, the best known being Teaching the Living, which was also developed into a book based on the program. Morgan’s latest book is The Gift of Instinct: Paranormal Lessons for an Extraordinary World, in whic...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 84
My guest for this episode is author and magical practitioner Melissa Seims, who joined me talk about her new book Here be Magick: The People and Practices of the Coven of Atho, which tells an unusual story set in the early post-war years of the UK, a period that was an interesting time in the history of witchcraft in the country as changes in legislation had allowed people to explore their interest in the occult more freely. Some began searching for evidence of pagan traditions that had survived...
Jul 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 83
Joining me for this episode is paranormal psychologist and writer, Evelyn Hollow. Evelyn is a former psychology lecturer and holds a Master of Research degree in Paranormal Psychology. She was a resident author at Esoterica Zine for more than four years, the occult columnist for the Corvid Culture website and gives guest talks on paranormal history and the quantum physics of anomalous phenomena. She now also consults as an expert for a variety of TV shows and podcasts — most recently the smash-h...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 82
My guest for this episode is Bex Atwood. Bex, who lives on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State, is a witch, horticulturalist and paranormal investigator, who in 2021 joined the Liminal Earth project alongside Jeremy Puma and Garrett Kelly, who I spoke to in episode nineteen, way back in 2019. In the interview we talk about the origins of Bex’s interest in the supernatural, her investigations of haunted spaces and how that lead to becoming part of the Liminal Earth setup. Our discussion incl...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 81
For this episode I’m joined by a returning guest, author Travis Watson to discuss his latest book ‘Mysteries in the Mist : Mist. Fog and Clouds in the Paranormal’. This is a follow up work to his book on Phantom Black Dogs and explores the evidence of an association between a host of different paranormal phenomena and their appearance amidst or being presaged by unusually localised mist, which in some cases seems to be an intentional act. In the interview we discuss this in more detail, explorin...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 80
My guest for this episode is paranormal researcher and author Michelle Souliere. Michelle is a resident of Portland in the US state of Maine and since 2005 has been chronicling the weirdness of that part of the world in her ‘Strange Maine’ blog, which explores unusual local history, mysteries, legends, cryptids and a whole lot more. In 2021 she released the book Bigfoot in Maine, which is the subject of our conversation for this episode. In the interview we talk about the history of Bigfoot sigh...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 79
Joining me for this episode is returning guest Matt Frederick, who first appeared on Some Other Sphere back in 2019, in the early days of the podcast. This time around we’re discussing his new book, A Meeting at The Crossroads: Robert Johnson and The Devil, which explores one of Blues musics best known legends, that the musician Robert Johnson made a pact with the Devil for talent and fortune, and not long after met his demise in 1939, at the age of just twenty-seven. In the interview we talk ab...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 78
