The Haunted Landscape: Magic, Fairies and Old Gods

Location: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4R

Organiser: London Fortean Society

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The Haunted Landscape, an annual dive into magic, ghosts and folklore, entertains the Great God Pan with Professor Ronald Hutton and Sara Hannant, meets fairies new and old with Francis Young and Jo Hickey-Hall, witnesses witch trials with Marion Gibson, and walks Britain's haunted lands with Jeremy Harte and The Stone Lands Fiona Robertson. Ronald Hutton - The Return of the Horned God Professor Hutton traces the emergence of the ancient Greek god of the wild, Pan, as the favourite male divinity of the Victorians and the animating spirit of the English landscape. Sara Hannant - Panic: Visions of the Horned God Sara Hannant will describe highlights from her magical journey which resulted in ‘Panic: Visions of the Horned God in the English Country Garden’. Francis Young - A History of European Fairy Traditions Francis explores some of the less well-known fairies of Europe, from Greece and the Balkans to the Baltic and Slavic worlds, as well as France and Iberia, to show that belief in nature spirits, godlings and social supernatural beings. Jeremy Harte - Mad, Bad or Sad? Ghost Monks and their Hidden Treasures The Dissolution of the Monasteries filled England with ghosts and ruins. Saintly, fiendish, and sometimes both at the same time, ghost monks were remembered for the treasures they had concealed. Fiona Robertson - Stone Lands: A Journey Through Britain’s Ancient Places Fiona Robertson shares megalith-related tales of demons, ghosts, witches, and antiquarians driven to madness by their obsession with the stones. Marion Gibson - Welcome to Witchland: Recovering the Stories of Britain's Civil War Witches In the 1640s, Britain was swept up in a brutal witch hunt. In the resulting hysteria – which would, just a few decades later, provide a handbook for the Salem trials – hundreds of innocent people were killed. Jo Hickey-Hall - Modern Fairy Sightings: Personal Encounters in Extraordinary Times. A surprising amount of credible modern reports of fairy encounters are causing an increasing number of us to reconsider. The Modern Fairy Sightings Project provides a space for us to listen to people’s eyewitness accounts.