December 31, 2025 • 43 mins
What is folklore and how does it connect to witch hunts? Join us for an author talk with Professor Owen Davies and Dr. Ceri Houlbrook from the University of Hertfordshire, discussing their new book Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present. Discover how folklore shapes our daily lives, from cheese rolling traditions to social media rumors.
Episode Highlights:
• Folklore definition and what folklore actually means today
• British folklore traditions and American folklore customs explored
• How folklore practices became legal evidence in Salem witch trials
• The three types of British witches: conflict witches, accidental witches, and outcast witches
• Folk devils versus theological devils in witch hunt history
• Spectral evidence, pricking tests, touch tests, and folk magic in historical witch accusations
• Why debunked theories like the ergot explanation persist in popular culture
• How contemporary folklore evolves through podcasts and social media
• The ritual year framework and material culture in folklore studies
• Magical thinking and supernatural beliefs across cultures
• How folklore cycles between revival and decline
Whether you’re studying folklore definition, researching folklore examples, or interested in folklore and popular culture, this author talk explores how folklore studies reveals patterns in human behavior across time.
Pick up Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present at https://bookshop.org/shop/endwitchhunts to support our work and explore opportunities to study folklore at the University of Hertfordshire’s MA folklore program.
Links
Buy Book: Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Did you know that cheese rolling, underground raves, and
even the ice bucket challenge are all folklore?
Or that rumors spreading throughyour social media feed follow
the exact same patterns as WorldWar 1 trench gossip.
Today we're diving into the living, breathing world of
folklore with two distinguished scholars from the University of
(00:21):
Hertfordshire, Professor Owen Davies and Dr. Carrie Holbrook,
co-authors of the new book Folklore A Journey Through the
Past and Present. Welcome to the thing about witch
hunts. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
And I'm Sarah Jack. Professor Owen Davies of the
University of Hertfordshire is one of the world's leading
(00:43):
experts on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts and
popular medicine, with decades of groundbreaking research into
how supernatural beliefs shape society.
Doctor Holbrook is a senior lecturer in Folklore and History
at the University of Hertfordshire, specializing in
contemporary folklore and the material culture of ritual.
(01:03):
Basically all the things we do today without realizing their
folklore. We'll explore how folklore
connects to witch hunts and how social media has supercharged
the spread of folklore. Plus, we get into the juicy
stuff like how rumor and legend fuel witch accusations, why
folklore practices ended up in the Salem courtrooms, and what
(01:25):
it means when an excavated cat skeleton becomes a witch cat in
the headlines. It's a fascinating conversation
that'll change how you see the everyday customs, stories and
beliefs all around you. Let's get started.
Welcome to The Thing about witchHunts, Doctor Carrie Holbrook
and welcome back Professor Owen Davies.
(01:48):
Please tell us about your specialized expertise and
interests. Do.
You want to go to Carrie? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I'm a senior lecturer in
folklore and history, but despite the history and the
title, I'm mainly interested in contemporary folklore, things
that we do today in our everydaylives, things that we don't
recognize as folklore. Hopefully you will once you read
(02:11):
the book, But yeah, kind of how folklore adapts as society
changes, culture changes, how it's always adapted and how it's
going to continue adapting. I'm also really interested in
the material culture of ritual, so how we can kind of gain
insights into people's beliefs and traditions and rituals
through looking at the kind of tangible objects that they're
(02:34):
engaging with and how they're engaging in the landscapes.
So yeah, there's a main, main interests.
Yeah, and most of my work is on history of the supernatural,
witchcraft, magic, ghosts, but also in the fields of popular
medicine, folk medicine and alsopopular region.
You can't understand witchcraft,magic and ghosts unless you also
explore history of religion as well.
(02:55):
And we were fortunate, Owen, to meet you last year at the
Witchcraft and Human Rights Conference at Lancaster
University, and we really appreciate you coming out and
giving a keynote there. Yeah, that was a very
interesting event and thanks to you both also for the ways in
which you're organizing international sort of set of
(03:18):
interested organisations and groups around the contemporary
witchcraft and the abuse of women and children.
So you're doing a fine job as well.
Thank you. So how did folklore journey
through the past and present come together?
It came really from teaching on the folklore studies master's
programme. We're in the seventh year of
(03:38):
this programme running now. It's the only one in England and
our students would ask before the course started, a key text
that we could recommend for themthat covered kind of the main
topics that we'd be looking at in the masters.
And even though there are thousands of books on folklore,
most of them excellent books on folklore, They're either kind of
(03:59):
very, very focused in on a particular element of folklore
or they're very focused in on a particular geographical region
that might be the folklore of a certain county or kind of
England or Wales or Scotland specifically.
And they're but also quite narrow in terms of time.
So they kind of get a snapshot of folklore in a particular
century, a particular period. What we wanted to do with
(04:21):
folklore was to show how dynamicand current folklore is, as I
said, to show how folklore has always adapted and will continue
to adapt and is just as much alive today as it was in the
past. And to really kind of cover, I
mean, not all folklore topics, but the main ones that we teach
(04:42):
and the main ones that we specialized in.
There will always be gaps. We couldn't possibly cover
everything. Things like folk dance, folk
music have been so well covered in other publications that we
didn't think we could do justiceto them in just a single
chapter. And other things like folk
religion, for instance, we did consider having a chapter that
(05:02):
was just focused on folk religion, but because that comes
up in nearly all the other subjects, we've let that kind of
be a thread that runs throughoutthe whole book.
So yeah, Long story short, the MA the book.
There's also at the moment in the last few years in in
Britain, there's a kind of been a groundswell sort of revival of
interest in folklore since the last one, which was in the
(05:25):
1970s. So there has been huge numbers
of books. Most of them, as Kerry was
saying, aren't particularly analytical, but a lot of them
are coming from a kind of very good.
I'm not this is not a criticism,but coming from a kind of crazy
angle. People looking at travelling the
landscape, looking for significance of meaning.
And obviously it's this is partly this groundswell is
(05:45):
partly tied to concerns over environmentalism, people wanting
to connect with folklore as an aspect of the environment and
landscape. There's also time when, in
England in particular, there's agroundswell of nationalism and
as in other many other countries, nationalists do tend
to try and draw upon what they consider to be true, authentic
(06:05):
folklore of the English. So we do use the book to explore
Englishness in relationship to Scottish national and Welshness
and the ways in which identity is shaped and draws upon
folklore. I appreciate it, the overall
context, but as Carrie, you pointed out, the threads that
you pull through these focused chapters, but this overall
(06:28):
context I feel like was a reallykey element of this book, the
showing the cycle and the revival and dying off.
Was that part of the point of this collection?
To create a bigger context? Absolutely.
To show really that you can't look at folklore in isolation,
(06:49):
You can't look at one element offolklore without thinking about
how other elements have developed, without thinking
about how society is developing and what changes we're
experiencing. So yeah, it was trying to bring
it all together. And it can be read for chapter,
you can just dip into it and just read 1 chapter stand alone.
But hopefully, yeah, that message of kind of the dynamic,
(07:12):
but the political nature of folklore and the constantly
adapting nature of folklore tiesthe chapters together.
We have a line in the introduction that basically says
you after you're reading this bit, people might start
realising that what they're doing is folklore.
Because the idea is that actually people are shaped by
folklore, whether it's an intimate level or a domestic
level or national level or a regional level, and people are
(07:33):
doing things which folklore should go.
Well, that's folklore. But the people doing it aren't
necessarily realizing that or thinking in those terms anyway.
On that note, what does folkloreactually mean?
What is included? What might somebody be doing
that they don't realize is folklore?
I'm never to carry on that one. Yeah, I have a kind of Tiffy
(07:54):
definition of folklore, but it is, it's too short really for
what it covers. But if people want a very, very
quick definition, then it is thecustoms we practice, the stories
we tell and the beliefs we hold.But obviously, you know,
beliefs. When does religion become
folklore? So those lines are very, very
blurred stories that we're telling.
(08:16):
When does that kind of a memorial, you're kind of
retelling of something that happened to you?
When does that become folklore again?
Blurred Line. And the same with customs.
Does a practice have to have no kind of practical function in
order for us to interpret it as folklore or not?
So yeah, that's my short definition.
But really there is so many things that are and aren't
(08:39):
included, and it's also really subjective.
I think every folklorist would have a slightly different
opinion of what is considered folklore, and that is also
changing. What we see as folklore today is
very, very different to what people were seeing as folklore
100 years ago. That's why we were so reluctant
to write a definition in the book, because we know that any,
(09:02):
any definition will eventually become outdated.
You will need to add other things, look at it from a
different angle. And you know, first draft, there
was no definition. We just wanted people to read
the content and come up with their own idea of what they
thought folklore was based on what we believe in it.
But yeah, after the peer review came back and they said no, you
need a definition. So yeah, we put in a definition,
(09:25):
but we kept it quite broad. Yeah, I mean, American
folklorists have spent, you know, decades trying to define
what folklore is. There's a whole screeds and
screeds of articles debate amongst American folks in
particular. British folklore has a very
different trajectory in terms ofit's, it's has no academic
footing. So there's been less sort of
(09:47):
soul searching over the definitions of folklore in
British folklore as there has been in American folklore as
well established in academic discipline.
Yeah, I really appreciated reading your book for me as
American as a cultural experience, and it did make me
more curious about American folklore heritage, reading your
(10:09):
introduction. And so I'm excited to learn more
about what's uniquely a British tradition, what's uniquely an
American tradition, even though I did get the message that our
traditions have really been fed from different cultures in
space. Part of that is the American
experience was obviously very distinct.
(10:30):
It's not going to say unique because the same thing happens
in Australia where you've got the encounter between indigenous
peoples and Europeans and the same thing obviously happens in
North America. And that brings it in those
contexts, brings very quite interesting dynamics.
And actually to compare Australia with America is really
interesting in terms of the waysin which obviously place names
in, in America, loads of place names which are of indigenous
(10:52):
origin and which that Europeans didn't really understand what
they were. So they made basically English
or German sort of understandings, which are a
classic bit of folklore about telling, finding a legend that
explains the name because the name itself is not part of the
language. So you do get these really
interesting traditions, but whatwe do in the book also is
looking at the ways in which, and I've done it in other work,
as well as the ways in which some aspects of folklore, it's
(11:14):
like translate and migrate to the States and others don't.
And that in itself is a really interesting area of why that
happens. Sorry, Kerry, you were going to
say something. I was just going to say it's
actually really interesting to speak to American readers of our
book because we're both British and the examples that we
included, we're quite familiar with them and writing it.
(11:35):
There was this assumption that alot of our readers would know at
least some of the customs that we're writing about and have
some idea in their mind and hopefully that we could have
made them reconsider the historyof them.
But to actually have it read by someone who's not from Britain,
it'd be interesting to know which customs you were familiar
with and which which ones were completely new to you.
(11:58):
I was really informed by your book about the ritual year
framework and a lot of the things that were in there I was
seeing for the first time, even though I mean, we have a
calendar year and holidays, government holidays and
religious holidays. That was a really fresh way for
(12:18):
me to look at a year. But one of the things that stuck
out to me were these work fairs and how that had evolved,
because that's such a big part of our culture now is work
fairs. And now they're online.
So even that's an example of transition in time, you know,
because I know media and the internet's a part of folklore.
(12:41):
So that stuck out to me. What about you, Josh?
Yeah, basically at least half ofwhat was in the book was new to
me as an American, because we didn't.
Those ones didn't translate overacross the sea to us, and there
(13:02):
were just so many. There's cheese rolling.
I don't know anybody in America who does a cheese.
We do lots of things like pumpkin smashing and pumpkin
launching, but no cheese rolling.
Part of the discussion really isthat a lot of customs are quite
(13:23):
localised. They may be on the same point in
the year because of the religious calendar, because of
the markets and fair calendar, etcetera, or charitable
calendar. But different traditions get
shaped in different ways in a localized and regionalized
level. So you do to get customs which
are across the country, like traditional football, which is
(13:43):
played between villages or two different parts of a town which
is quite violent. Of Highland came which didn't
really translate partly partially because it was being
suppressed in the 19th century when you know, most Europeans
were migrating to the States. So it doesn't come that way, but
yet there's kind of two different things going on.
One is the migration of the Scots, the Welsh and the English
(14:05):
to, to North America and elsewhere, to South America and
to different parts of the empireand, and they bring with them
aspects to preserve their own identity.
And that normally sheds all the stuff which has got to do with
drinking and aspects of festivity.
It's a more decorous sort of form of the folklore that ends
up in America and Australia, etcetera.
(14:26):
Just there's some complex processes going on.
I just have to share this one little tidbit that just jumped
in my mind on when you were talking about the football.
So I'm here in Colorado and there's this daily podcast
Colorado Public Radio puts out everyday.
It's a few minutes, 10 or 15 minutes.
And yesterday they were coveringbasically it was a tunnel rave
(14:51):
that popped up. Ravers wanted to have an
unsanctioned unofficial rave where they could get that
experience from the 90's, the underground music, dance.
And they actually covered it on the podcast and they talked
about the police showing up, apologizing for having to shut
it down. And then they of course used the
(15:14):
opportunity to talk about a verytragic incident where something
went very wrong in the past withone of these to warn against
doing such a thing. But if that just, it's that
suppression and pushing back forculture that we just see it
everywhere you turn if you're looking, yeah, people want to
come together and do what they want.
(15:34):
Yeah, one of our former MA students that are really good to
assignments based around underground rave culture
basically was taking a folkloristic lens and looking at
sort of the rituals and the reactions exactly as you're
expecting, Sarah. The reactions to it, the reason
why it's underground, is based around a whole series of tropes
regarding young people and what's meant to be illicit
(15:56):
behaviour and drugs as well. But yeah, you can study exactly
that from a folkloristic lens and with a historical sort of
gaze on it as well. What does the modern mass media
accelerate? The development of folklore
Beliefs and interest in folklore.
Hugely so. Absolutely huge.
(16:17):
I mean, it's not only kind of speed up the transmission, but
it's just globalized it. That idea of folk groups aren't
geographical really anymore. You can be a member of a folk
group with somebody who lives ina different continent to you,
and you can be sharing the law with them within seconds.
And just think when things go viral, you know, how rapidly and
(16:39):
widely they spread things like what we write about in the book,
the ice bucket challenge, for instance.
I mean, that was big in America as well, wasn't it?
Yeah. And kind of how huge that very,
very quickly became. And you know, it's for a good
cause, but it was also quite ritualistic behaviour.
If you think about somebody justsitting there and having
somebody pour ice cold water on you and then you're kind of
(17:02):
you're daring somebody else to do it.
So it's almost like a chain letter of dares.
So kind of very, very folkloric behaviour that just became huge
so quickly because of social media.
So, yeah, Americans have been ahead of this, ahead of the
Brits in terms of recognising that folklore online is folklore
is worthy of study. We're catching up.
(17:24):
But yeah, it's, it's really not necessarily changed the kind of
folklore that's being created and changed.
I've just slightly changed the form, certainly changed the
speed and the breadth of transmission.
It's also supercharged conspiracy theory, which in folk
artistic terms we might considerto be rumour legends.
(17:44):
And rumour legends have been studied since the First World
War. You know, the First World War
was considered to be a laboratory of the ways in which
rumours spread through the trenches and then found its way
back to the home front. So people were studying that at
the time on on both sides of theconflict.
So this has long, long been an era of interest for folklorists.
But today with social media, youknow, just literally within
(18:06):
minutes and hours, it's popping into people's social media for
millions of people's social media.
But at the core of it, the core of it is kind of classic, same
old sort of, let's say rumour legends are what we call friend
of a friend tales, faux F tales.And I've seen loads of ones,
sort of American ones, particularly obviously with the
political atmosphere in America,there's a lot of conspiracy
(18:26):
theory floating around. But I've seen some classic ones
about my friend told me about his brother who works at the
Pentagon and he says, you know, and immediately that can go
viral. And obviously UFO stuff, you
know, that I was down at whatever Area 52 and blah, blah,
blah. But it's always a friend of a
friend. It's never direct.
This is classic vocal stuff and you can see it in real time
(18:48):
happening across the world, not just in America or Britain, but
across the world because of social media.
But also the the concern is obviously politically is how
this stuff, because it is so easily spread, what are the
negative consequences of that dark folklore?
Yeah, and it's almost like they pile on top of each other like
there there's not even time for.I mean, they do get their feet,
(19:10):
but as soon as there's just likeanother one, you just, it's
just. Relentless.
It can be. It's relentless, Yeah,
Particularly when most historical context, yes, rumor
legends were put around for propaganda reasons when they say
in the First World War or in thesecond.
Second, we see plenty of examples in which rumor legends
are spread to undermine morale in the other side.
(19:32):
Again, it's the concentration ofit now and the ways in which you
know, it's so you don't need thewhole propaganda machine to get
a rumor going as you would have done 6070 years ago.
And now one person in his bedroom can set things rolling
very quickly, as the founder of Q Anon did.
But we're seeing what, if you think about, I'm not an expert
(19:53):
in kind of beliefs in witchcraft, but historically it
was these kinds of rumours that were causing a huge amount of
damage to people. And you're seeing the same, but
on such a wider, faster scale. Yeah.
So that idea of damaging rumoursthat spread very quickly through
a community, whether that's a very local community or a global
(20:14):
community, has a very, very longhistory.
Sarah and I were actually talking about a bit of dark
folklore transmitted in our age.There's in Papua New Guinea,
there's sorcery, accusation related violence, where there
are witch hunts going on. But we've heard from people in
(20:34):
Papua New Guinea that there was also a period of Dracula hunts
because the movie Dracula had been imported into the country
and people were looking for vampires.
The last one was classic exampleof cultural transmission,
whereby you know you see that ina in a long dark form.
(20:55):
The founders of manga, for example, were really interested
in European and classical myth and so actually in in benign
ways. If you look at a lot of manga
for 67 design today, you'll finda lot of kind of ways in which
they're drawing upon European orclassical types of monster, for
example. So you can see how these sites,
(21:16):
as you're saying with a Dracula or whatever, blood suckers can
easily be drawn into other cultures through through
cultural contact. Speaking of witch hunts, how
does folklore intersect with witch hunts?
Yeah, well, no, it's multiple levels, isn't it?
(21:37):
Kerry was just bringing it up tothe point about rumour and how
rumours spread. Obviously that's fundamental to
many witchcraft accusations, particularly, particularly, you
know, if you look at a lot of classical sorts of accusations
in place, like England, which has a common law as it does in
America, and you see the witnessstatements from witch trials,
(21:57):
you can see it's 15 up to 30 years worth of people having
experiences and suspicions of that person.
When you read those decisions go, well, 15 years ago I was
walking past the house and suddenly I went lame or
whatever. Boom.
So people dredge all of this stuff up, which has been
discussed and circulated within the family or elsewhere for that
one moment. When an accusation is formally
(22:19):
made, it kind of unlocks decadesworth, sometimes, not always,
but it can do, unlike decades worth of rumour that has
circulated of what Kerry was talking about.
Member. It's the idea as the ways in
which an actual experience, often with the supernatural,
ends up becoming a bit of folklore and then on the process
gets embroidered on the way and you see all this sort of mixing
(22:40):
up in some of these accusations.So you know that that aspect of
it is really important. Obviously there's the archetype.
We talk about that in the book, the stereotype, the
stereotypical witch, I think in the book are banging on, on
these kind of 33 typology of witches for decades now.
But anyway, one of my typologiesis the kind of folkloric witch.
And these people, these classic stereotypical ones who look the
(23:02):
part, live the part, so to speak, are rarely ones who
actually end up in accusations in terms of formal accusations
or trials. But they're there and we can
find them in 17th century sources, whether it's here or
continent. There are these people who are
living out lies under the suspicion of witchcraft.
But it's in a, it's in a more folkloric way, which as I say,
(23:24):
sometimes never gets to the point of accusation.
But they are witch like. So that that's really quite
important for understanding witch trials, having that
folkloristic perspective on it. I was thinking, you know, in
Salem we have a lot of those examples of 17 years ago.
So and so told me if I ever cheated them again, they would
(23:46):
stick to me like the bark on a tree or they told me to go to
the devil 25 years ago. And I was thinking that those
like, remember, it's they createa legend of the person that's
being accused of witchcraft. You have this whole folklore
around what the person is capable of and what things
(24:08):
people have witnessed in the past.
Yeah. And then of course, you have the
folk tests that were happening in the courts in New England,
but specifically Salem, with themagistrates having touch tests
and working with puppets. Why do you think that these
(24:30):
practices had legal authority? Folklore practices having legal
authority. Depends.
Depends which ones we're talkingabout.
If it's creutation, which is essentially a trial by blood.
In other words, you touch the body and it bleeds and that is
or you've got swimming witches of course as well.
There's another one. Or weighing, weighing on the
church Bible. All these things are only quasi
(24:50):
official. They're not.
It's not formally evidence that is recognized by courts
generally, but you know, the juries in these trials, they may
be of a certain status obviouslyby, but they have to be to be on
the juries. But at the same time they are
part of their community and theydo share the same sets of
(25:11):
beliefs and ideas as the people accused and the people who make
people who are making the accusations.
So there are a shared set of ideas and beliefs which
transcend social level and education, but they're generally
not specific. Swimming, which is, is the
classic one, which yes, the evidence does get introduced
(25:31):
into courtrooms, but at the sametime is usually usually
certainly later on dismissed or not really taken into account.
It's a trial, but it's discussedand it's talked about etcetera.
So yeah, we sometimes over exaggerate social
differentiations based on property with distinctions of
(25:54):
cultural belief level or tradition or tradition level
where the things are shared. And I imagine, again, I'm not an
expert, but I imagine in this kind of quite uncertain
situations, they were relying onwhat they believed.
They knew they relied on those folk beliefs that they'd had up
until that time. And as Owen said, that kind of
those beliefs will have just cutacross class.
(26:15):
And even if they weren't making it into the official verdicts
and things they were still, theywould have been part of people's
thought processes. Because you do.
When you're in an uncertain situation, you fall back on what
you believe you know. And people are also in those
trials. People are, you know, those who
are making the accusations, those who are witnesses in
court. I have no depositions taken.
(26:37):
They're making decisions about what they say, how they said,
what beliefs are acceptable or not acceptable.
And again, if you look in a British context, where there's
in an English context, I should be more specific than where
there's no torture involved. Apart from the Matthew Hopkins
era, you very rarely get talk about, oh, I saw the witch
flying over my house or the witch flew here or a witch flew
(26:58):
there now. But if you look at folklore of
the period, it's a common thing.And again, the folklore, which
is one of the key properties of folklore.
So they can do that, they can fly around.
But people are clearly when it comes to making formal legal
accusations going on. But maybe that's probably not
the sort of evidence that is going to get me to where I want,
which is to get rid of the witch, you know.
So again, we sometimes don't think through the ways in which
(27:23):
what people are saying in those court records is carefully
calculated. We need to give agency to these
people, no matter how unpleasantit is that they hold on these
base and trying to get someone executed.
It's all about strategising. We encounter a lot of myths
about witch trials and witch hunts when we're interacting.
(27:44):
So I feel like there's this thiswhole folklore that sprung up
about the folklore, the meta level of folklore.
But some things we get are, you know, in Salem, they burned the
witches in Salem, they were accusing because of ergot and
they were all poisoned and drugged out of their minds,
(28:06):
Things like that. Are those kinds of explanations
that arise of things? Are those typical of how popular
explanations become embedded in lore?
Well, I mean, the idea of folklore is an interesting one.
I think there's lots of examplesin that carrier the ways in
which folklore is consciously orsubconsciously developed for a
(28:31):
purpose. It's not organic.
It is actually someone's thinking about the creation of
Hex legend or Hex custom or ex ritual.
We tend to think of it organic, you know?
Somehow it springs from the earth, you know?
Yeah, so often you can kind of, you may not be able to trace the
(28:52):
kind of the origins of a piece of folklore book.
They will have been shaped by a person with an agenda, whatever
that agenda was. It could have just been like,
I'm going to create something sothat my family can have a good
time. Or it could be a political
agenda. It could be religious so if
individuals and groups who are consciously creating a lot of
(29:13):
the folks or and how it changes tends to be more organic.
But yeah, I think that idea I'm also there is, as I'm sure
you'll know, people love the idea of witches.
They want to see them in so muchof the kind of mystery that
they've come across in history, so much so that there is that
folklore of witchcraft that's sofirmly embedded.
(29:34):
I remember some years ago when Pendle Hill in Lancashire, there
was a the ruins of a cottage wasfound and we that was a cat, the
remains of a cat. And that instantly in popular
imagination and in print that was a witch's cat.
So even though there is no evidence to support the
connection between this kind of ruin and the Pendle witch
(29:54):
trials, and also no evidence to suggest that witches had cats,
this just became the narrative. And you saw it in newspapers,
social media, because people love that idea.
Rather than seeing this cottage ruined where a cat possibly
accidentally crawled into an airtight space and couldn't get
out again, and that's why it's there.
(30:15):
Or it was a beloved pet who was buried there.
No, no, no, it's a witch's cat because people love that.
People find that the mystery andthe magic very appealing.
And that's how folklore can be created.
And again, we have that agenda. I don't know who found it and
I'm not sure who was the first person to write about it, but
that was going to sell papers more than cat remains found in
(30:37):
ruins. I think that would which the
headline that will extol papers that will have generated
interest. So again, we have that agenda
creating folklore. So yeah, you see that in so many
things. You're Speaking of cats?
Actually reminded me of an example from the last major
election in the US. There was the rumour of people
(30:59):
eating cats, specifically the Haitian.
Yeah, in Springfield. OH, that There was that rumor
because it started with the missing cat flyer, and then
somehow that got connected because it was politically
expedient. It was the agenda was immigrants
(31:20):
are bad. So that rumor was able to spread
all over the country just based on nothing.
Yeah, no. And several American folklorists
quickly got onto their podcasts about that one because they were
basically saying this is a classic, classic folkloric, you
know, folkloric trope of of sortof outrageous, whether it's
cannibalism or eating animals and dogs.
(31:41):
It's an old one. You can trace it back centuries.
So yeah, folklorists were immediately going, oh, God, here
comes that one again. And was sadly quite effective.
That's the power of it. It's instantly picking up,
knowing how you're going to pickup on certain motifs, which will
basically provoke certain types of emotional reaction or fear.
Boom. That's the effect.
(32:03):
But you've got to know your folklore to do it properly.
We saw it with Brexit, all that folklore they created about the
EU as the evil, evil overlords. And yeah, again, it worked.
It worked. It was successful, sadly.
But that was, and that was deliberately ceded for political
purposes and by the British right wing press.
(32:25):
So basically they were people like Boris Johnson were making
up stuff which become essentially legends, but he was
making it up for bashing the EU.So things like bendy bananas
that we had the things that the EU was going to ban bendy
bananas and we could only get straight.
That's a classic bit of folklore.
But behind it is a very pernicious intent.
And these things tend to then permeate and start getting made
(32:48):
on from the ground level as well.
So there there was an example that in another thing I wrote
ice cream vans and, and in the early 2000s in the northeast of
England, there's a type of red Raspberry sauce, which is called
monkey blood. And it's only known as monkey
blood in northeastern England. But anyway, someone was
recollecting asking for some monkey blood on their ice cream
(33:10):
from an ice cream van and the blood going, sorry mate, it's
been banned by the EU which is absolutely rubbish.
They're saying we can't call it monkey blood anymore because the
EU we can't say monkey blood, which is absolutely rubbish.
You know, the EU really has not got the rear to the ground about
the North East dialect and ice cream monkey blood.
But there you go. That's it spreads and other
(33:31):
aspects of it develop. I'm just soaking it in for a
second. I just love it.
I love this and I in my journey as a podcaster and as an
advocate for witch hunts, the presentation you gave at the
Folklore Society about your article on the ice cream trucks.
Oh yeah, yeah. That was a moment where I was
(33:52):
realizing what folklore was like.
I was still looking back and thought it, it was heritage and
this was a couple years ago, so it's changed so much for me.
But that was I just was so fascinated with that research
and it just, I was like, Oh my goodness, everything's folklore.
So that was like one of those light bulb moments for me.
Good, good. Glad it did.
(34:14):
Yeah. Yeah, I was kind of surprised
there. There's some folklore in the
book that I'm familiar with because I believed it, at least
as a child. Things like the earwigs going
into your ears. I used to be afraid of that
happening at night. And other things like if you
swallow an apple seed, it's going to grow in your belly and
(34:38):
you're going to have a tree coming out your mouth.
It's absurd looking back on someof that, but I bought into it.
It's everyday kind of things. But also children inventing
their own stuff that they carry.Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I distinguish between kind of the folklore that we often
associate with children, the things like carving pumpkins or
(34:59):
writing letters to Father Christmas, Santa.
But actually so much of what children do and so many of the
stories that they tell are familiar with at least are
instigated by adults. So they're the adult will sit
them down and say, let's write aletter to Santa.
The adult will tell them a fairytale or sing them a nursery
rhyme, and that kind of enters their consciousness.
(35:21):
Child law is something different.
Child law is the law that is passed from child to child
without adult intervention, often without adults knowing
about it or approving of it. But there are so many examples
of this just in the playground of rhymes that that children
tell. I don't know whether 6-7 is
still a big thing in America. Yes, it's absolutely 6-7.
(35:44):
Everything 67 and nobody really knows what it means and the
children don't know what it means.
But I dropped my son off at school and it's written on all
the walls. People have written the
condensation and I think the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer
said it in a school the other weekend that was told no, no, we
don't say that. We don't encourage that.
What's really interesting is that that's an example of child
(36:04):
law. That's just children doing it
and it's kind of part of their language, part of their
expression. And yet it's being banned in
schools, which is bizarre to me because it's not offensive.
It doesn't hurt anybody. But there are, there are so many
things flying around online of kind of videos of Santa saying,
well, any child who says 6-7 isn't getting presents this
year. And so it's we're utilizing
(36:25):
folklore, the folklore of FatherChristmas and Santa to actually
suppress child law to say, no, you're a bad boy or girl if you
say 6-7. So, yeah, I find that kind of
interplay between folklore and kind of adults use of folklore
and child law, which for some reason is really getting on
adults notes. But it's just a bunch of
numbers. Yeah.
(36:45):
I feel quite strongly about this.
Yeah. I'm going to March into my son's
school and go, oh, are you banning the use of 6-7?
It's just. Yeah.
But I find that the fact how quickly that spread and how
widely it's known, I don't know if you have Elf on the Shelf in
America. The cheeky elf.
Yeah. So I've seen so many pictures
(37:06):
from the cheeky elf and what they're up to these days, and
they're adopting 6-7. So many cheeky elves now are
writing 6-7 on walls across households and holding up
playing cards 6-7. We've got an example there of
Child Lord that's partly being suppressed by adults, but also
adults who are looking for a cheeky elf idea, again, drawing
(37:27):
on child's law. So yeah, I woke up with 6-7
written on my cheek in lipstick this morning cuz the cheeky elf
was at it again. That is so fun.
Yeah. It's definitely like you can't
get away from it. It's on the radio.
And there is. It's like the adults are
complaining. I think some of the youth are
like, why are you sticking your nose in here?
(37:51):
Like you think you know now, butyou don't.
It's been really fun for me to watch it.
I've a young teenager and in ourhousehold we I knew I was like
already like before it blew up. I was kind of like using it to
just code my son a little bit because we thought, well, you
don't know you're talking about mom, but it's just so fun.
So I have thoroughly enjoyed that.
(38:12):
I wonder, is there an element tochildren aren't allowed to have
agency with a term that I didn'tmake up?
Like is there that play between the generations and isn't there
all this generation strife too, Boomers and millennials like
that? I've really enjoyed that.
What's going on with that too? It's interesting how that is
(38:35):
playing out. Yeah, yeah.
I think it's this kind of case of, well, it doesn't mean
anything and that's why it's annoying, but it means something
to the children, even if they can't articulate it, almost like
the secret language, and only some people are cool enough to
say it. So yeah, I think it's that lack
of understanding. We don't get it, so you
shouldn't be allowed to do it. Yeah, and there's a long, long
(38:56):
history of this being done. I remember famous author Robert
Southie who's early 19th centuryand a craze went round London
where whereby young people were writing Quas on walls, QUOZ
quas. And everyone's going what's
quas? What's quas?
What does this mean? And it's spread.
So the quas and you've got all these middle class, what the
Earth is going on here? I can't I don't understand this.
(39:19):
But that was not exactly the point.
Again, that was exactly the point.
You know, it was a kind of code and it the whole point was to
provoke, but at the same time had no ostensible meaning to it.
So Quas. Let's get it back up again.
Let's get it started. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, be a nice way to start a little panic.
What is Quas is this? It's terrorists who knows what.
(39:42):
That's right. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. I'm sure that would get into
rumor. Legend would turn it into some
sort of conspiracy. Yeah.
Oh, everything's a conspiracy now.
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining
us. I know we're nearing the end, so
I just wanted to see, is there anything we haven't covered
today that you wanted to express?
(40:05):
There's lots more in the book. There's lots more in the book.
We've got chapters on folk medicine, we've got chapters on
folklore of the natural world, we've got stuff on looking at
early media history and the influence of the BBC on people's
understanding of the folklore. And lots and lots to say, lots
of sort of pertinent contemporary resonance with
notions of identity and folkloreas well.
(40:27):
So yeah, there's lots in there. I'll be giving it a reread soon.
It's this complete work, but youcan just take it a chapter at a
time. And as I was going through it,
trying to pack it in and processit, I was like making little
bookmarks. I'm going back to this.
I'm going back to this because there was so much that is so
(40:50):
important that's in there that will help me look at things that
I care about and I'm researchingthat's.
Good. Great to hear, good endorsement.
Thank you. I thought of just another one
that stood out to me in there with the nature folklore was
around the cuckoo bird. Oh yeah, I wasn't familiar with
(41:12):
the cuckoo bird changing into a whole other kind of bird in the
winter. So that explains why you don't
see him exactly in winter, that it kind of makes a little sense
to wait. What exactly?
A lot of that law makes sense within the context of the time.
I mean, it's only in the late 18th century that anyone
understood migration fully. Or it is in one sense common
(41:34):
sense, trying to make sense of the things around you, but it
just happens to be completely wrong.
But within the context of knowledge, it's a kind of.
A rational thought. Process.
I think a lot of folklore, whichin the past is it's about trying
to explain things simply. And at 1°, I think we've kind of
lost a bit of that, which ties it back into stuff I've written
(41:55):
about witchcraft. And people go, why?
I always tell my students, so you've got to think like a,
think like the time when your car breaks down.
Do you think, why is it broke down here?
Why did it break down at 12 O one?
People, don't you just call you rescue?
But you know, if your cartwheel broke, that's just what you'd
think. My cartwheel broke.
Why did it break there? Why was it there?
Why did it just happen now? Why today?
(42:17):
Why this time of day? So anyway, that's just an
insight into the ways in which you were trying to understand
why folklore is created and how people thought in the past that
folklore is a good way of getting into that.
And how much do we think we know?
Now that's going to turn out to be Yeah, well, in 100 years
time, yeah, yeah. Something I would like to be
around to find out. Thank you so very much.
(42:39):
This has been. Wonderful.
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Thank you. What an.
Incredible conversation. I hope you're as fascinated by
folklore as we are now. Folklore Journey.
Through the past and. Present by Professor Owen Davies
and Dr. Carrie Holbrook is available for you to read now.
(42:59):
You can even pick it up at bookshop.org/shop slash end
witch hunts our bookshop and support our projects.
Both experts have extensive. Bodies of research worth
exploring. Professor Davies work on
witchcraft and magic history is essential reading for anyone
interested in these topics, and Doctor Holbrook's research on
(43:19):
contemporary folklore and material culture offers fresh
perspectives on the rituals and customs all around us.
Thanks so much. For listening to the thing
about. Witch hunts have a great today.
And a. Beautiful tomorrow.
Did you know that cheese rolling, underground raves, and
even the ice bucket challenge are all folklore?
Or that rumors spreading throughyour social media feed follow
the exact same patterns as WorldWar 1 trench gossip.
Today we're diving into the living, breathing world of
folklore with two distinguished scholars from the University of
(00:21):
Hertfordshire, Professor Owen Davies and Dr. Carrie Holbrook,
co-authors of the new book Folklore A Journey Through the
Past and Present. Welcome to the thing about witch
hunts. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
And I'm Sarah Jack. Professor Owen Davies of the
University of Hertfordshire is one of the world's leading
(00:43):
experts on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts and
popular medicine, with decades of groundbreaking research into
how supernatural beliefs shape society.
Doctor Holbrook is a senior lecturer in Folklore and History
at the University of Hertfordshire, specializing in
contemporary folklore and the material culture of ritual.
(01:03):
Basically all the things we do today without realizing their
folklore. We'll explore how folklore
connects to witch hunts and how social media has supercharged
the spread of folklore. Plus, we get into the juicy
stuff like how rumor and legend fuel witch accusations, why
folklore practices ended up in the Salem courtrooms, and what
(01:25):
it means when an excavated cat skeleton becomes a witch cat in
the headlines. It's a fascinating conversation
that'll change how you see the everyday customs, stories and
beliefs all around you. Let's get started.
Welcome to The Thing about witchHunts, Doctor Carrie Holbrook
and welcome back Professor Owen Davies.
(01:48):
Please tell us about your specialized expertise and
interests. Do.
You want to go to Carrie? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. I'm a senior lecturer in
folklore and history, but despite the history and the
title, I'm mainly interested in contemporary folklore, things
that we do today in our everydaylives, things that we don't
recognize as folklore. Hopefully you will once you read
(02:11):
the book, But yeah, kind of how folklore adapts as society
changes, culture changes, how it's always adapted and how it's
going to continue adapting. I'm also really interested in
the material culture of ritual, so how we can kind of gain
insights into people's beliefs and traditions and rituals
through looking at the kind of tangible objects that they're
(02:34):
engaging with and how they're engaging in the landscapes.
So yeah, there's a main, main interests.
Yeah, and most of my work is on history of the supernatural,
witchcraft, magic, ghosts, but also in the fields of popular
medicine, folk medicine and alsopopular region.
You can't understand witchcraft,magic and ghosts unless you also
explore history of religion as well.
(02:55):
And we were fortunate, Owen, to meet you last year at the
Witchcraft and Human Rights Conference at Lancaster
University, and we really appreciate you coming out and
giving a keynote there. Yeah, that was a very
interesting event and thanks to you both also for the ways in
which you're organizing international sort of set of
(03:18):
interested organisations and groups around the contemporary
witchcraft and the abuse of women and children.
So you're doing a fine job as well.
Thank you. So how did folklore journey
through the past and present come together?
It came really from teaching on the folklore studies master's
programme. We're in the seventh year of
(03:38):
this programme running now. It's the only one in England and
our students would ask before the course started, a key text
that we could recommend for themthat covered kind of the main
topics that we'd be looking at in the masters.
And even though there are thousands of books on folklore,
most of them excellent books on folklore, They're either kind of
(03:59):
very, very focused in on a particular element of folklore
or they're very focused in on a particular geographical region
that might be the folklore of a certain county or kind of
England or Wales or Scotland specifically.
And they're but also quite narrow in terms of time.
So they kind of get a snapshot of folklore in a particular
century, a particular period. What we wanted to do with
(04:21):
folklore was to show how dynamicand current folklore is, as I
said, to show how folklore has always adapted and will continue
to adapt and is just as much alive today as it was in the
past. And to really kind of cover, I
mean, not all folklore topics, but the main ones that we teach
(04:42):
and the main ones that we specialized in.
There will always be gaps. We couldn't possibly cover
everything. Things like folk dance, folk
music have been so well covered in other publications that we
didn't think we could do justiceto them in just a single
chapter. And other things like folk
religion, for instance, we did consider having a chapter that
(05:02):
was just focused on folk religion, but because that comes
up in nearly all the other subjects, we've let that kind of
be a thread that runs throughoutthe whole book.
So yeah, Long story short, the MA the book.
There's also at the moment in the last few years in in
Britain, there's a kind of been a groundswell sort of revival of
interest in folklore since the last one, which was in the
(05:25):
1970s. So there has been huge numbers
of books. Most of them, as Kerry was
saying, aren't particularly analytical, but a lot of them
are coming from a kind of very good.
I'm not this is not a criticism,but coming from a kind of crazy
angle. People looking at travelling the
landscape, looking for significance of meaning.
And obviously it's this is partly this groundswell is
(05:45):
partly tied to concerns over environmentalism, people wanting
to connect with folklore as an aspect of the environment and
landscape. There's also time when, in
England in particular, there's agroundswell of nationalism and
as in other many other countries, nationalists do tend
to try and draw upon what they consider to be true, authentic
(06:05):
folklore of the English. So we do use the book to explore
Englishness in relationship to Scottish national and Welshness
and the ways in which identity is shaped and draws upon
folklore. I appreciate it, the overall
context, but as Carrie, you pointed out, the threads that
you pull through these focused chapters, but this overall
(06:28):
context I feel like was a reallykey element of this book, the
showing the cycle and the revival and dying off.
Was that part of the point of this collection?
To create a bigger context? Absolutely.
To show really that you can't look at folklore in isolation,
(06:49):
You can't look at one element offolklore without thinking about
how other elements have developed, without thinking
about how society is developing and what changes we're
experiencing. So yeah, it was trying to bring
it all together. And it can be read for chapter,
you can just dip into it and just read 1 chapter stand alone.
But hopefully, yeah, that message of kind of the dynamic,
(07:12):
but the political nature of folklore and the constantly
adapting nature of folklore tiesthe chapters together.
We have a line in the introduction that basically says
you after you're reading this bit, people might start
realising that what they're doing is folklore.
Because the idea is that actually people are shaped by
folklore, whether it's an intimate level or a domestic
level or national level or a regional level, and people are
(07:33):
doing things which folklore should go.
Well, that's folklore. But the people doing it aren't
necessarily realizing that or thinking in those terms anyway.
On that note, what does folkloreactually mean?
What is included? What might somebody be doing
that they don't realize is folklore?
I'm never to carry on that one. Yeah, I have a kind of Tiffy
(07:54):
definition of folklore, but it is, it's too short really for
what it covers. But if people want a very, very
quick definition, then it is thecustoms we practice, the stories
we tell and the beliefs we hold.But obviously, you know,
beliefs. When does religion become
folklore? So those lines are very, very
blurred stories that we're telling.
(08:16):
When does that kind of a memorial, you're kind of
retelling of something that happened to you?
When does that become folklore again?
Blurred Line. And the same with customs.
Does a practice have to have no kind of practical function in
order for us to interpret it as folklore or not?
So yeah, that's my short definition.
But really there is so many things that are and aren't
(08:39):
included, and it's also really subjective.
I think every folklorist would have a slightly different
opinion of what is considered folklore, and that is also
changing. What we see as folklore today is
very, very different to what people were seeing as folklore
100 years ago. That's why we were so reluctant
to write a definition in the book, because we know that any,
(09:02):
any definition will eventually become outdated.
You will need to add other things, look at it from a
different angle. And you know, first draft, there
was no definition. We just wanted people to read
the content and come up with their own idea of what they
thought folklore was based on what we believe in it.
But yeah, after the peer review came back and they said no, you
need a definition. So yeah, we put in a definition,
(09:25):
but we kept it quite broad. Yeah, I mean, American
folklorists have spent, you know, decades trying to define
what folklore is. There's a whole screeds and
screeds of articles debate amongst American folks in
particular. British folklore has a very
different trajectory in terms ofit's, it's has no academic
footing. So there's been less sort of
(09:47):
soul searching over the definitions of folklore in
British folklore as there has been in American folklore as
well established in academic discipline.
Yeah, I really appreciated reading your book for me as
American as a cultural experience, and it did make me
more curious about American folklore heritage, reading your
(10:09):
introduction. And so I'm excited to learn more
about what's uniquely a British tradition, what's uniquely an
American tradition, even though I did get the message that our
traditions have really been fed from different cultures in
space. Part of that is the American
experience was obviously very distinct.
(10:30):
It's not going to say unique because the same thing happens
in Australia where you've got the encounter between indigenous
peoples and Europeans and the same thing obviously happens in
North America. And that brings it in those
contexts, brings very quite interesting dynamics.
And actually to compare Australia with America is really
interesting in terms of the waysin which obviously place names
in, in America, loads of place names which are of indigenous
(10:52):
origin and which that Europeans didn't really understand what
they were. So they made basically English
or German sort of understandings, which are a
classic bit of folklore about telling, finding a legend that
explains the name because the name itself is not part of the
language. So you do get these really
interesting traditions, but whatwe do in the book also is
looking at the ways in which, and I've done it in other work,
as well as the ways in which some aspects of folklore, it's
(11:14):
like translate and migrate to the States and others don't.
And that in itself is a really interesting area of why that
happens. Sorry, Kerry, you were going to
say something. I was just going to say it's
actually really interesting to speak to American readers of our
book because we're both British and the examples that we
included, we're quite familiar with them and writing it.
(11:35):
There was this assumption that alot of our readers would know at
least some of the customs that we're writing about and have
some idea in their mind and hopefully that we could have
made them reconsider the historyof them.
But to actually have it read by someone who's not from Britain,
it'd be interesting to know which customs you were familiar
with and which which ones were completely new to you.
(11:58):
I was really informed by your book about the ritual year
framework and a lot of the things that were in there I was
seeing for the first time, even though I mean, we have a
calendar year and holidays, government holidays and
religious holidays. That was a really fresh way for
(12:18):
me to look at a year. But one of the things that stuck
out to me were these work fairs and how that had evolved,
because that's such a big part of our culture now is work
fairs. And now they're online.
So even that's an example of transition in time, you know,
because I know media and the internet's a part of folklore.
(12:41):
So that stuck out to me. What about you, Josh?
Yeah, basically at least half ofwhat was in the book was new to
me as an American, because we didn't.
Those ones didn't translate overacross the sea to us, and there
(13:02):
were just so many. There's cheese rolling.
I don't know anybody in America who does a cheese.
We do lots of things like pumpkin smashing and pumpkin
launching, but no cheese rolling.
Part of the discussion really isthat a lot of customs are quite
(13:23):
localised. They may be on the same point in
the year because of the religious calendar, because of
the markets and fair calendar, etcetera, or charitable
calendar. But different traditions get
shaped in different ways in a localized and regionalized
level. So you do to get customs which
are across the country, like traditional football, which is
(13:43):
played between villages or two different parts of a town which
is quite violent. Of Highland came which didn't
really translate partly partially because it was being
suppressed in the 19th century when you know, most Europeans
were migrating to the States. So it doesn't come that way, but
yet there's kind of two different things going on.
One is the migration of the Scots, the Welsh and the English
(14:05):
to, to North America and elsewhere, to South America and
to different parts of the empireand, and they bring with them
aspects to preserve their own identity.
And that normally sheds all the stuff which has got to do with
drinking and aspects of festivity.
It's a more decorous sort of form of the folklore that ends
up in America and Australia, etcetera.
(14:26):
Just there's some complex processes going on.
I just have to share this one little tidbit that just jumped
in my mind on when you were talking about the football.
So I'm here in Colorado and there's this daily podcast
Colorado Public Radio puts out everyday.
It's a few minutes, 10 or 15 minutes.
And yesterday they were coveringbasically it was a tunnel rave
(14:51):
that popped up. Ravers wanted to have an
unsanctioned unofficial rave where they could get that
experience from the 90's, the underground music, dance.
And they actually covered it on the podcast and they talked
about the police showing up, apologizing for having to shut
it down. And then they of course used the
(15:14):
opportunity to talk about a verytragic incident where something
went very wrong in the past withone of these to warn against
doing such a thing. But if that just, it's that
suppression and pushing back forculture that we just see it
everywhere you turn if you're looking, yeah, people want to
come together and do what they want.
(15:34):
Yeah, one of our former MA students that are really good to
assignments based around underground rave culture
basically was taking a folkloristic lens and looking at
sort of the rituals and the reactions exactly as you're
expecting, Sarah. The reactions to it, the reason
why it's underground, is based around a whole series of tropes
regarding young people and what's meant to be illicit
(15:56):
behaviour and drugs as well. But yeah, you can study exactly
that from a folkloristic lens and with a historical sort of
gaze on it as well. What does the modern mass media
accelerate? The development of folklore
Beliefs and interest in folklore.
Hugely so. Absolutely huge.
(16:17):
I mean, it's not only kind of speed up the transmission, but
it's just globalized it. That idea of folk groups aren't
geographical really anymore. You can be a member of a folk
group with somebody who lives ina different continent to you,
and you can be sharing the law with them within seconds.
And just think when things go viral, you know, how rapidly and
(16:39):
widely they spread things like what we write about in the book,
the ice bucket challenge, for instance.
I mean, that was big in America as well, wasn't it?
Yeah. And kind of how huge that very,
very quickly became. And you know, it's for a good
cause, but it was also quite ritualistic behaviour.
If you think about somebody justsitting there and having
somebody pour ice cold water on you and then you're kind of
(17:02):
you're daring somebody else to do it.
So it's almost like a chain letter of dares.
So kind of very, very folkloric behaviour that just became huge
so quickly because of social media.
So, yeah, Americans have been ahead of this, ahead of the
Brits in terms of recognising that folklore online is folklore
is worthy of study. We're catching up.
(17:24):
But yeah, it's, it's really not necessarily changed the kind of
folklore that's being created and changed.
I've just slightly changed the form, certainly changed the
speed and the breadth of transmission.
It's also supercharged conspiracy theory, which in folk
artistic terms we might considerto be rumour legends.
(17:44):
And rumour legends have been studied since the First World
War. You know, the First World War
was considered to be a laboratory of the ways in which
rumours spread through the trenches and then found its way
back to the home front. So people were studying that at
the time on on both sides of theconflict.
So this has long, long been an era of interest for folklorists.
But today with social media, youknow, just literally within
(18:06):
minutes and hours, it's popping into people's social media for
millions of people's social media.
But at the core of it, the core of it is kind of classic, same
old sort of, let's say rumour legends are what we call friend
of a friend tales, faux F tales.And I've seen loads of ones,
sort of American ones, particularly obviously with the
political atmosphere in America,there's a lot of conspiracy
(18:26):
theory floating around. But I've seen some classic ones
about my friend told me about his brother who works at the
Pentagon and he says, you know, and immediately that can go
viral. And obviously UFO stuff, you
know, that I was down at whatever Area 52 and blah, blah,
blah. But it's always a friend of a
friend. It's never direct.
This is classic vocal stuff and you can see it in real time
(18:48):
happening across the world, not just in America or Britain, but
across the world because of social media.
But also the the concern is obviously politically is how
this stuff, because it is so easily spread, what are the
negative consequences of that dark folklore?
Yeah, and it's almost like they pile on top of each other like
there there's not even time for.I mean, they do get their feet,
(19:10):
but as soon as there's just likeanother one, you just, it's
just. Relentless.
It can be. It's relentless, Yeah,
Particularly when most historical context, yes, rumor
legends were put around for propaganda reasons when they say
in the First World War or in thesecond.
Second, we see plenty of examples in which rumor legends
are spread to undermine morale in the other side.
(19:32):
Again, it's the concentration ofit now and the ways in which you
know, it's so you don't need thewhole propaganda machine to get
a rumor going as you would have done 6070 years ago.
And now one person in his bedroom can set things rolling
very quickly, as the founder of Q Anon did.
But we're seeing what, if you think about, I'm not an expert
(19:53):
in kind of beliefs in witchcraft, but historically it
was these kinds of rumours that were causing a huge amount of
damage to people. And you're seeing the same, but
on such a wider, faster scale. Yeah.
So that idea of damaging rumoursthat spread very quickly through
a community, whether that's a very local community or a global
(20:14):
community, has a very, very longhistory.
Sarah and I were actually talking about a bit of dark
folklore transmitted in our age.There's in Papua New Guinea,
there's sorcery, accusation related violence, where there
are witch hunts going on. But we've heard from people in
(20:34):
Papua New Guinea that there was also a period of Dracula hunts
because the movie Dracula had been imported into the country
and people were looking for vampires.
The last one was classic exampleof cultural transmission,
whereby you know you see that ina in a long dark form.
(20:55):
The founders of manga, for example, were really interested
in European and classical myth and so actually in in benign
ways. If you look at a lot of manga
for 67 design today, you'll finda lot of kind of ways in which
they're drawing upon European orclassical types of monster, for
example. So you can see how these sites,
(21:16):
as you're saying with a Dracula or whatever, blood suckers can
easily be drawn into other cultures through through
cultural contact. Speaking of witch hunts, how
does folklore intersect with witch hunts?
Yeah, well, no, it's multiple levels, isn't it?
(21:37):
Kerry was just bringing it up tothe point about rumour and how
rumours spread. Obviously that's fundamental to
many witchcraft accusations, particularly, particularly, you
know, if you look at a lot of classical sorts of accusations
in place, like England, which has a common law as it does in
America, and you see the witnessstatements from witch trials,
(21:57):
you can see it's 15 up to 30 years worth of people having
experiences and suspicions of that person.
When you read those decisions go, well, 15 years ago I was
walking past the house and suddenly I went lame or
whatever. Boom.
So people dredge all of this stuff up, which has been
discussed and circulated within the family or elsewhere for that
one moment. When an accusation is formally
(22:19):
made, it kind of unlocks decadesworth, sometimes, not always,
but it can do, unlike decades worth of rumour that has
circulated of what Kerry was talking about.
Member. It's the idea as the ways in
which an actual experience, often with the supernatural,
ends up becoming a bit of folklore and then on the process
gets embroidered on the way and you see all this sort of mixing
(22:40):
up in some of these accusations.So you know that that aspect of
it is really important. Obviously there's the archetype.
We talk about that in the book, the stereotype, the
stereotypical witch, I think in the book are banging on, on
these kind of 33 typology of witches for decades now.
But anyway, one of my typologiesis the kind of folkloric witch.
And these people, these classic stereotypical ones who look the
(23:02):
part, live the part, so to speak, are rarely ones who
actually end up in accusations in terms of formal accusations
or trials. But they're there and we can
find them in 17th century sources, whether it's here or
continent. There are these people who are
living out lies under the suspicion of witchcraft.
But it's in a, it's in a more folkloric way, which as I say,
(23:24):
sometimes never gets to the point of accusation.
But they are witch like. So that that's really quite
important for understanding witch trials, having that
folkloristic perspective on it. I was thinking, you know, in
Salem we have a lot of those examples of 17 years ago.
So and so told me if I ever cheated them again, they would
(23:46):
stick to me like the bark on a tree or they told me to go to
the devil 25 years ago. And I was thinking that those
like, remember, it's they createa legend of the person that's
being accused of witchcraft. You have this whole folklore
around what the person is capable of and what things
(24:08):
people have witnessed in the past.
Yeah. And then of course, you have the
folk tests that were happening in the courts in New England,
but specifically Salem, with themagistrates having touch tests
and working with puppets. Why do you think that these
(24:30):
practices had legal authority? Folklore practices having legal
authority. Depends.
Depends which ones we're talkingabout.
If it's creutation, which is essentially a trial by blood.
In other words, you touch the body and it bleeds and that is
or you've got swimming witches of course as well.
There's another one. Or weighing, weighing on the
church Bible. All these things are only quasi
(24:50):
official. They're not.
It's not formally evidence that is recognized by courts
generally, but you know, the juries in these trials, they may
be of a certain status obviouslyby, but they have to be to be on
the juries. But at the same time they are
part of their community and theydo share the same sets of
(25:11):
beliefs and ideas as the people accused and the people who make
people who are making the accusations.
So there are a shared set of ideas and beliefs which
transcend social level and education, but they're generally
not specific. Swimming, which is, is the
classic one, which yes, the evidence does get introduced
(25:31):
into courtrooms, but at the sametime is usually usually
certainly later on dismissed or not really taken into account.
It's a trial, but it's discussedand it's talked about etcetera.
So yeah, we sometimes over exaggerate social
differentiations based on property with distinctions of
(25:54):
cultural belief level or tradition or tradition level
where the things are shared. And I imagine, again, I'm not an
expert, but I imagine in this kind of quite uncertain
situations, they were relying onwhat they believed.
They knew they relied on those folk beliefs that they'd had up
until that time. And as Owen said, that kind of
those beliefs will have just cutacross class.
(26:15):
And even if they weren't making it into the official verdicts
and things they were still, theywould have been part of people's
thought processes. Because you do.
When you're in an uncertain situation, you fall back on what
you believe you know. And people are also in those
trials. People are, you know, those who
are making the accusations, those who are witnesses in
court. I have no depositions taken.
(26:37):
They're making decisions about what they say, how they said,
what beliefs are acceptable or not acceptable.
And again, if you look in a British context, where there's
in an English context, I should be more specific than where
there's no torture involved. Apart from the Matthew Hopkins
era, you very rarely get talk about, oh, I saw the witch
flying over my house or the witch flew here or a witch flew
(26:58):
there now. But if you look at folklore of
the period, it's a common thing.And again, the folklore, which
is one of the key properties of folklore.
So they can do that, they can fly around.
But people are clearly when it comes to making formal legal
accusations going on. But maybe that's probably not
the sort of evidence that is going to get me to where I want,
which is to get rid of the witch, you know.
So again, we sometimes don't think through the ways in which
(27:23):
what people are saying in those court records is carefully
calculated. We need to give agency to these
people, no matter how unpleasantit is that they hold on these
base and trying to get someone executed.
It's all about strategising. We encounter a lot of myths
about witch trials and witch hunts when we're interacting.
(27:44):
So I feel like there's this thiswhole folklore that sprung up
about the folklore, the meta level of folklore.
But some things we get are, you know, in Salem, they burned the
witches in Salem, they were accusing because of ergot and
they were all poisoned and drugged out of their minds,
(28:06):
Things like that. Are those kinds of explanations
that arise of things? Are those typical of how popular
explanations become embedded in lore?
Well, I mean, the idea of folklore is an interesting one.
I think there's lots of examplesin that carrier the ways in
which folklore is consciously orsubconsciously developed for a
(28:31):
purpose. It's not organic.
It is actually someone's thinking about the creation of
Hex legend or Hex custom or ex ritual.
We tend to think of it organic, you know?
Somehow it springs from the earth, you know?
Yeah, so often you can kind of, you may not be able to trace the
(28:52):
kind of the origins of a piece of folklore book.
They will have been shaped by a person with an agenda, whatever
that agenda was. It could have just been like,
I'm going to create something sothat my family can have a good
time. Or it could be a political
agenda. It could be religious so if
individuals and groups who are consciously creating a lot of
(29:13):
the folks or and how it changes tends to be more organic.
But yeah, I think that idea I'm also there is, as I'm sure
you'll know, people love the idea of witches.
They want to see them in so muchof the kind of mystery that
they've come across in history, so much so that there is that
folklore of witchcraft that's sofirmly embedded.
(29:34):
I remember some years ago when Pendle Hill in Lancashire, there
was a the ruins of a cottage wasfound and we that was a cat, the
remains of a cat. And that instantly in popular
imagination and in print that was a witch's cat.
So even though there is no evidence to support the
connection between this kind of ruin and the Pendle witch
(29:54):
trials, and also no evidence to suggest that witches had cats,
this just became the narrative. And you saw it in newspapers,
social media, because people love that idea.
Rather than seeing this cottage ruined where a cat possibly
accidentally crawled into an airtight space and couldn't get
out again, and that's why it's there.
(30:15):
Or it was a beloved pet who was buried there.
No, no, no, it's a witch's cat because people love that.
People find that the mystery andthe magic very appealing.
And that's how folklore can be created.
And again, we have that agenda. I don't know who found it and
I'm not sure who was the first person to write about it, but
that was going to sell papers more than cat remains found in
(30:37):
ruins. I think that would which the
headline that will extol papers that will have generated
interest. So again, we have that agenda
creating folklore. So yeah, you see that in so many
things. You're Speaking of cats?
Actually reminded me of an example from the last major
election in the US. There was the rumour of people
(30:59):
eating cats, specifically the Haitian.
Yeah, in Springfield. OH, that There was that rumor
because it started with the missing cat flyer, and then
somehow that got connected because it was politically
expedient. It was the agenda was immigrants
(31:20):
are bad. So that rumor was able to spread
all over the country just based on nothing.
Yeah, no. And several American folklorists
quickly got onto their podcasts about that one because they were
basically saying this is a classic, classic folkloric, you
know, folkloric trope of of sortof outrageous, whether it's
cannibalism or eating animals and dogs.
(31:41):
It's an old one. You can trace it back centuries.
So yeah, folklorists were immediately going, oh, God, here
comes that one again. And was sadly quite effective.
That's the power of it. It's instantly picking up,
knowing how you're going to pickup on certain motifs, which will
basically provoke certain types of emotional reaction or fear.
Boom. That's the effect.
(32:03):
But you've got to know your folklore to do it properly.
We saw it with Brexit, all that folklore they created about the
EU as the evil, evil overlords. And yeah, again, it worked.
It worked. It was successful, sadly.
But that was, and that was deliberately ceded for political
purposes and by the British right wing press.
(32:25):
So basically they were people like Boris Johnson were making
up stuff which become essentially legends, but he was
making it up for bashing the EU.So things like bendy bananas
that we had the things that the EU was going to ban bendy
bananas and we could only get straight.
That's a classic bit of folklore.
But behind it is a very pernicious intent.
And these things tend to then permeate and start getting made
(32:48):
on from the ground level as well.
So there there was an example that in another thing I wrote
ice cream vans and, and in the early 2000s in the northeast of
England, there's a type of red Raspberry sauce, which is called
monkey blood. And it's only known as monkey
blood in northeastern England. But anyway, someone was
recollecting asking for some monkey blood on their ice cream
(33:10):
from an ice cream van and the blood going, sorry mate, it's
been banned by the EU which is absolutely rubbish.
They're saying we can't call it monkey blood anymore because the
EU we can't say monkey blood, which is absolutely rubbish.
You know, the EU really has not got the rear to the ground about
the North East dialect and ice cream monkey blood.
But there you go. That's it spreads and other
(33:31):
aspects of it develop. I'm just soaking it in for a
second. I just love it.
I love this and I in my journey as a podcaster and as an
advocate for witch hunts, the presentation you gave at the
Folklore Society about your article on the ice cream trucks.
Oh yeah, yeah. That was a moment where I was
(33:52):
realizing what folklore was like.
I was still looking back and thought it, it was heritage and
this was a couple years ago, so it's changed so much for me.
But that was I just was so fascinated with that research
and it just, I was like, Oh my goodness, everything's folklore.
So that was like one of those light bulb moments for me.
Good, good. Glad it did.
(34:14):
Yeah. Yeah, I was kind of surprised
there. There's some folklore in the
book that I'm familiar with because I believed it, at least
as a child. Things like the earwigs going
into your ears. I used to be afraid of that
happening at night. And other things like if you
swallow an apple seed, it's going to grow in your belly and
(34:38):
you're going to have a tree coming out your mouth.
It's absurd looking back on someof that, but I bought into it.
It's everyday kind of things. But also children inventing
their own stuff that they carry.Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I distinguish between kind of the folklore that we often
associate with children, the things like carving pumpkins or
(34:59):
writing letters to Father Christmas, Santa.
But actually so much of what children do and so many of the
stories that they tell are familiar with at least are
instigated by adults. So they're the adult will sit
them down and say, let's write aletter to Santa.
The adult will tell them a fairytale or sing them a nursery
rhyme, and that kind of enters their consciousness.
(35:21):
Child law is something different.
Child law is the law that is passed from child to child
without adult intervention, often without adults knowing
about it or approving of it. But there are so many examples
of this just in the playground of rhymes that that children
tell. I don't know whether 6-7 is
still a big thing in America. Yes, it's absolutely 6-7.
(35:44):
Everything 67 and nobody really knows what it means and the
children don't know what it means.
But I dropped my son off at school and it's written on all
the walls. People have written the
condensation and I think the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer
said it in a school the other weekend that was told no, no, we
don't say that. We don't encourage that.
What's really interesting is that that's an example of child
(36:04):
law. That's just children doing it
and it's kind of part of their language, part of their
expression. And yet it's being banned in
schools, which is bizarre to me because it's not offensive.
It doesn't hurt anybody. But there are, there are so many
things flying around online of kind of videos of Santa saying,
well, any child who says 6-7 isn't getting presents this
year. And so it's we're utilizing
(36:25):
folklore, the folklore of FatherChristmas and Santa to actually
suppress child law to say, no, you're a bad boy or girl if you
say 6-7. So, yeah, I find that kind of
interplay between folklore and kind of adults use of folklore
and child law, which for some reason is really getting on
adults notes. But it's just a bunch of
numbers. Yeah.
(36:45):
I feel quite strongly about this.
Yeah. I'm going to March into my son's
school and go, oh, are you banning the use of 6-7?
It's just. Yeah.
But I find that the fact how quickly that spread and how
widely it's known, I don't know if you have Elf on the Shelf in
America. The cheeky elf.
Yeah. So I've seen so many pictures
(37:06):
from the cheeky elf and what they're up to these days, and
they're adopting 6-7. So many cheeky elves now are
writing 6-7 on walls across households and holding up
playing cards 6-7. We've got an example there of
Child Lord that's partly being suppressed by adults, but also
adults who are looking for a cheeky elf idea, again, drawing
(37:27):
on child's law. So yeah, I woke up with 6-7
written on my cheek in lipstick this morning cuz the cheeky elf
was at it again. That is so fun.
Yeah. It's definitely like you can't
get away from it. It's on the radio.
And there is. It's like the adults are
complaining. I think some of the youth are
like, why are you sticking your nose in here?
(37:51):
Like you think you know now, butyou don't.
It's been really fun for me to watch it.
I've a young teenager and in ourhousehold we I knew I was like
already like before it blew up. I was kind of like using it to
just code my son a little bit because we thought, well, you
don't know you're talking about mom, but it's just so fun.
So I have thoroughly enjoyed that.
(38:12):
I wonder, is there an element tochildren aren't allowed to have
agency with a term that I didn'tmake up?
Like is there that play between the generations and isn't there
all this generation strife too, Boomers and millennials like
that? I've really enjoyed that.
What's going on with that too? It's interesting how that is
(38:35):
playing out. Yeah, yeah.
I think it's this kind of case of, well, it doesn't mean
anything and that's why it's annoying, but it means something
to the children, even if they can't articulate it, almost like
the secret language, and only some people are cool enough to
say it. So yeah, I think it's that lack
of understanding. We don't get it, so you
shouldn't be allowed to do it. Yeah, and there's a long, long
(38:56):
history of this being done. I remember famous author Robert
Southie who's early 19th centuryand a craze went round London
where whereby young people were writing Quas on walls, QUOZ
quas. And everyone's going what's
quas? What's quas?
What does this mean? And it's spread.
So the quas and you've got all these middle class, what the
Earth is going on here? I can't I don't understand this.
(39:19):
But that was not exactly the point.
Again, that was exactly the point.
You know, it was a kind of code and it the whole point was to
provoke, but at the same time had no ostensible meaning to it.
So Quas. Let's get it back up again.
Let's get it started. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, be a nice way to start a little panic.
What is Quas is this? It's terrorists who knows what.
(39:42):
That's right. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. I'm sure that would get into
rumor. Legend would turn it into some
sort of conspiracy. Yeah.
Oh, everything's a conspiracy now.
Yeah. Thank you so much for joining
us. I know we're nearing the end, so
I just wanted to see, is there anything we haven't covered
today that you wanted to express?
(40:05):
There's lots more in the book. There's lots more in the book.
We've got chapters on folk medicine, we've got chapters on
folklore of the natural world, we've got stuff on looking at
early media history and the influence of the BBC on people's
understanding of the folklore. And lots and lots to say, lots
of sort of pertinent contemporary resonance with
notions of identity and folkloreas well.
(40:27):
So yeah, there's lots in there. I'll be giving it a reread soon.
It's this complete work, but youcan just take it a chapter at a
time. And as I was going through it,
trying to pack it in and processit, I was like making little
bookmarks. I'm going back to this.
I'm going back to this because there was so much that is so
(40:50):
important that's in there that will help me look at things that
I care about and I'm researchingthat's.
Good. Great to hear, good endorsement.
Thank you. I thought of just another one
that stood out to me in there with the nature folklore was
around the cuckoo bird. Oh yeah, I wasn't familiar with
(41:12):
the cuckoo bird changing into a whole other kind of bird in the
winter. So that explains why you don't
see him exactly in winter, that it kind of makes a little sense
to wait. What exactly?
A lot of that law makes sense within the context of the time.
I mean, it's only in the late 18th century that anyone
understood migration fully. Or it is in one sense common
(41:34):
sense, trying to make sense of the things around you, but it
just happens to be completely wrong.
But within the context of knowledge, it's a kind of.
A rational thought. Process.
I think a lot of folklore, whichin the past is it's about trying
to explain things simply. And at 1°, I think we've kind of
lost a bit of that, which ties it back into stuff I've written
(41:55):
about witchcraft. And people go, why?
I always tell my students, so you've got to think like a,
think like the time when your car breaks down.
Do you think, why is it broke down here?
Why did it break down at 12 O one?
People, don't you just call you rescue?
But you know, if your cartwheel broke, that's just what you'd
think. My cartwheel broke.
Why did it break there? Why was it there?
Why did it just happen now? Why today?
(42:17):
Why this time of day? So anyway, that's just an
insight into the ways in which you were trying to understand
why folklore is created and how people thought in the past that
folklore is a good way of getting into that.
And how much do we think we know?
Now that's going to turn out to be Yeah, well, in 100 years
time, yeah, yeah. Something I would like to be
around to find out. Thank you so very much.
(42:39):
This has been. Wonderful.
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Thank you. What an.
Incredible conversation. I hope you're as fascinated by
folklore as we are now. Folklore Journey.
Through the past and. Present by Professor Owen Davies
and Dr. Carrie Holbrook is available for you to read now.
(42:59):
You can even pick it up at bookshop.org/shop slash end
witch hunts our bookshop and support our projects.
Both experts have extensive. Bodies of research worth
exploring. Professor Davies work on
witchcraft and magic history is essential reading for anyone
interested in these topics, and Doctor Holbrook's research on
(43:19):
contemporary folklore and material culture offers fresh
perspectives on the rituals and customs all around us.
Thanks so much. For listening to the thing
about. Witch hunts have a great today.
And a. Beautiful tomorrow.
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Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.