Boggart and Banshee: A Supernatural Podcast

Apr 01 2025 45 ep. 47 mins 120

Boggart and Banshee: A Supernatural Podcast artwork

So a Brit and a Yank walk into a supernatural podcast… Nattering on fairies, folklore, ghosts and the impossible ensues. Cross your fingers, turn your pockets inside out and join Simon and Chris as they talk weird history, Fortean mysteries, and things that go bump in the night.

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Supernatural Serpents: Flying, Milking and Shape-Changing Snakes

Apr 01 2025 46 mins

Chris and Simon lift the stone on a nest of ancient terrors, with bosom serpents, snakes on tombs and in graves, helpful household ophidians, and the medicinal horrors of Asclepius’s temple. ('It did what to you?!') Simon tells of his own blood-chilling encounter with a poisonous hisser, while fake snake women, flying serpents, and the perils of vino alla vipera slither revolting

The Green Children of Woolpit: Fairies or Foreigners?

Mar 01 2025 45 mins

The Green Children of Woolpit: Fairies or Foreigners? Simon and Chris celebrate the new and definitive book by John Clark on the Green Children of Woolpit: two children with ‘leek-green’ skin who, in the middle of the twelfth century, said that they came from a twilight place called ‘St Martin’s Land’. They wore strange clothes of an unknown fabric and spoke a language no

Supernatural Music: Fairy Bagpipers, Phantom Fiddlers, and The Choir Invisible

Feb 02 2025 44 mins

***This episode has been our Jonah and has been cursed from the beginning! We are re-releasing it because the first version had fuzzy audio*** Chris and Simon wind up the old gramophone and share some numbers from angelic choirs, the nodding ones beyond the grave, and from the rarely good people in the hollow hill. Sing along with a banshee! Trill to a phantom air from Dartmoor! Rh

Pixy-Led? The Truth about Fairy Disorientation!

Jan 01 2025 48 mins

Get lost in familiar places? You're not alone! Simon and Chris are bewildered by supernatural disorientation, including cases of people being pixy-led by Newfoundland fairies and Balkan witches. Discover traditional defenses against non-human misleaders, from carrying bread to wearing clothes inside out (and yes, sometimes even stripping naked!). While our hosts consider scientific

Hells Bells: Polts, Underground Cities and Supernatural Disinfectant

Dec 01 2024 46 mins

Chris and Simon ring the changes on bell folklore: bells mysteriously rung by polts (or rats or monkeys or blackbirds), bells ringing in churches beneath the waves and in coalmines, and bells with the power ('supernatural bleach') to drive away plague, the Devil and the Fae. Bells toll as death omens the 'death-bell' or ringing in the ears predicts imminent death, and Big Ben chime

The Cottingley Fairies Exposed: Beyond Photos and Fakes

Nov 01 2024 53 mins

Simon and Chris focus in on the new collection of essays on The Cottingley Fairy Photographs, developing the psychic experiences that inspired the images. The two clash over Elsie and Frances’s personalities, recounting Frances’s sightings of “little men” and Elsie’s run ins with a ghost family haunting her own home. They also trade blows over Cottingley conspiracies. And

Dead Famous: Celebrity Ghosts from Mary Queen of Scots to Michael Jackson

Sep 30 2024 43 mins

From Tinseltown to Windsor: tales of mysterious encounters with James Dean, Rudolph Valentino, Elvis Presley, Lord Byron (in Florida), Elizabeth the first and second! Does the late Princess Diana visit her butler in Cheshire to console him? Has Marilyn Monroe reincarnated to marry the ghost of Michael Jackson? Are these tulpas, “real” ghostly encounters, or para-social fantasie

Fairies, Nereids and Trolls: Welcome to the Social Supernatural

Sep 01 2024 43 mins

Simon has just published a book on European fairies, trolls, and other supernatural creatures, who like humans live in societies: going to war, dancing, seducing, holding weddings and funerals, burying the elderly alive.... Looking at beliefs from Ireland to Ukraine and from Iceland to the Balkans, Simon and Chris debate the merits of trying to classify supernatural beings, find ch

Time Slips: Ghosts, Fairies or Black Holes?

Jul 31 2024 54 mins

Chris and Simon take a quantum leap as they ponder the mysteries of vanishing houses and time slips. Did two English ladies walk back in time at Versailles? Is there a street in Liverpool where visitors are transported to the 1950s? Did three Royal Navy cadets find themselves in a 14th century plague village? Vanishing hotels and diners, mysterious visions of medieval Paris, and in

Mermaids 101

Jul 01 2024 48 mins

Chris and Simon, don their snorkels and flippers to explore the world of mermaids. Join them as they sail past shaved monkeys, triton hot-spots and a prized vintage tuna doll. Dive in, with our daring duo, to search out mermaid fakes in Belfast, the only living Fish woman, and a singing mer-vicar in Cornwall. Then we navigate around mermaid graves in Scotland, murdered sirens in Ge