In Pendle, the witch as historical figure is displayed in a variety of ways, becoming ubiquitous to the extent of acting as cipher for a sense of located-ness in the region. In the article, examples of tourist sites and ephemera are analysed alongside site-based research exploring mapped walks, sculptures and performance. By analysing depictions of the history embedded within the landscape, and the ways audiences engage with them, this research will examine the political and gendered implications of using this type of contested, traumatic history as a key component in establishing a local heritage and tourism identity. I argue that the retelling of the events as physically closely located yet historically distant lends them the patina of folk mythology, a process further compounded by the visual and material representations used to illustrate these versions of the story to visitors and locals alike. Witches are made present in Pendle and have become arguably an unofficial motif for the region where the caricature emblem of the witch is used to signpost walking routes and identify bus operators, and are sold as fridge magnets and novelty stuffed toys. This is contrasted to documentation of sculpture and temporary artworks marking the fourth centenary of the executions. This paper investigates how this historic trauma has been transformed into a multi-layered contemporary legend for local residents, tourists, and arts audiences, whilst also analysing the effect of repackaging this history somewhere between local folk mythology and commercial interest. By combining theories from Heritage Studies, Dark Tourism and Contemporary Legend, I have sought to offer up a means for exploring the material culture relating to the Pendle Witches and how these souvenirs, ephemera and artworks in the landscape connect to ways this legend is communicated today.

Read ON THE HILL: REPRESENTATIONS AND RETELLINGS OF THE PENDLE WITCHES’ HISTORY WITHIN THE RURAL LANDSCAPE OF LANCASHIRE, ENGLAND

The Crying Boy is a label used to describe a genre of inexpensive, mass-produced portrait print that were popular during the 1970s with working class families in the UK. In 1985-86 a tabloid newspaper, The Sun, published a series of hyperbolic stories reporting a ‘curse’ that was allegedly attached to this example of folk art. The source of the rumour were fire fighters who reported the frequent occurrence of undamaged examples of the prints at domestic property fires in one South Yorkshire mining community. The intervention of journalists introduced the idea of the ‘curse’ and added a supernatural/inexplicable element to the story. This article revises content from a summary account of the ‘crying boy’ narratives published in 2008 (Clarke 2008; Clarke 2011). This analysis updates the developing legend with new material including interviews with the journalists and the results of a content analysis of news coverage. It examines the specific role played by journalists in the evolution of the nascent contemporary legend from print to social media.

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Michigan has a rich tradition of contemporary legends involving hybridised, humanoid figures that occupy the space between the human and the nonhuman. These legends—ranging from Bigfoot-type creatures to narratives centered on individuals with perceived physical difference—emerged primarily during the mid-twentieth century and continue to circulate today. This article examines several prominent Michigan legends, including the Dog Lady of Monroe County, the Monroe Monster, the Michigan Dog Man, and the Whiteford Waterheads/Melon Heads, situating them within broader frameworks of othering and cultural anxieties surrounding bodily difference and social deviance. Drawing on folklore scholarship and contemporary legend theory, the article argues that these figures function as sites where fears of abnormality, social transgression, and marginalization are projected onto both imagined creatures and real individuals. By contextualizing these legends within their historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions, the article illustrates how monstrosity operates as a means of expressing fear of those who are perceived as different.  

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The YouTube documentary series Hellier (2019) tracks the evidence of supernatural creatures in Kentucky’s extensive cave system. Four paranormal researchers begin their investigation of “goblin” sightings in the small town of Hellier in Eastern Kentucky. They connect their findings with two well-known legend cycles of the 20^th century: the Hopkinsville Goblins and the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. This series exemplifies how disparate legend cycles may be combined into a coherent narrative about the paranormal in the southeastern United States. The longstanding folk tradition of mysterious caves inhabited by fairy folk are entwined with yet another oral tradition: legends of Satanic cults. These narratives have been fostered by institutional, “literate” culture of the media as well as by stereotypes about Appalachian Kentucky. This article explores the intersection of these distinct sources in the development of the legends presented in this documentary series.

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Abstract Although locations named Lover’s Leap dating back hundreds of years are to be found around the world, academic research investigating the origins and development of such sites; the myths, legends and hauntings associated with them; and the material culture they produce is relatively limited, especially for sites within the United Kingdom. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of one such site, Lover’s Leap in Ashwood Dale just south of Buxton, Derbyshire, exploring the complex interplay of folklore, superstition, legend, and landscape, alongside notions of the picturesque and sublime associated with this site. This mix of folklore, landscape and the sublime is shown to have been instrumental in the creation of a Peak District beauty spot which played a previously overlooked role in the establishment of Buxton as a tourist destination in the 18th century. For over 150 years, Lover’s Leap and the legend attached to this picturesque limestone gorge at whose entrance the precipice stands were praised by travel writers, described in florid terms by poets, and sketched, painted and photographed by artists, revealing the important role played by folklore in providing a slice of the sublime just a short walk from the centre of this Peak District town. Please note that 'Lover’s Leap’ and ‘Lovers Leap’ are used interchangeably throughout the source material, so Lover’s Leap will be used for consistency here.

Read A Postcard from Lovers’ Leap – Pride, Prejudice and the Picturesque, the story of a Peak District Legend

The Teenage Psychic is HBO Asia's first Chinese-language original series. It received favourable reviews and commercial success in 23 Asian countries and is regarded as a watershed moment in folklore representation. It has not only allowed international collaborations in Taiwan's drama production industry but also introduced Taiwanese folklore to a large cross-cultural audience via streaming services. How did The Teenage Psychic create an image that appeals to people of various nationalities and cultures? How did the characteristics of Taiwanese folklore resonate across all of these countries while meeting commercial and ratings expectations? This paper will present The Teenage Psychic's archetypes and plot structure as well as analysing the creation of a cultural platform that represents folklore, including folk belief, superstition, and contemporary legends. Taoist temples and high school campus are the two main settings in this drama. The plot is discussion-rousing and filled with opposing ideas such as life and death, social versus political conflicts, and superstition versus rationality. As streaming services such as Netflix and HBO become more open to Asian-oriented projects, this paper aims to demonstrate the value and role of domestic film productions in the promotion of Taiwanese culture and folklore across different countries, as well as to discuss the significance and influence of such localized folkloresque on the construction of Taiwanese cultural autonomy.

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This article explores how Joe Berlinger’s Netflix true crime docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021) has appropriated the apparatus of the modern urban legend. The article demonstrates how Berlinger merges the aesthetics of true crime documentary, websleuthing, and urban legend to reconfigure the unusual circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Canadian student Elisa Lam into a form of participatory infotainment. The article contends that Berlinger’s recreation of the events and aftermath of Elisa Lam’s disappearance and death uses the processes of urban legend creation to first attract and entertain the audience, only to later challenge the audiences’ susceptibility to such legends. The article proposes that this mode of consumption functions as a form of ‘honey trap’ which, while passive, allows the viewer to become embedded in the narrative, inviting them to create and critique the processes of contemporary legend construction.

Read Netflix, Websleuths and the Contemporary Urban Legend

Occultism is prominently situated within metal music’s practices and its position has been evident since the genre’s emergence in the late 1960s. Commonly, pioneers such as Black Sabbath receive the credit for introducing occult themes to the genre; however, in the mid-2010s, Coven with their frontwoman, Jinx Dawson, made a resurgence and attempted to lay claim to heavy metal’s occult aesthetics. This article aims to investigate the lack of academic exploration of Coven’s work, through evaluating the current understanding of metal’s history with occultism, and examine how the metal genre defines itself, while limiting who can be recognised as pioneers. Additionally, this article interrogates Coven’s claims to metal’s occult aesthetics by analysing their use of the horned-hand gesture and the Black Mass. By doing so, a new appreciation for occult themes within early metal music will be gained, which sees the occult in metal as not merely a gimmick to achieve a level of shock value, but also a method of practicing esotericism.

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This article argues that procedural systems, such as the magic systems of the tabletop roleplaying game Invisible Sun, have the capacity to produce not only representations but enchantments. The article begins with an overview of the origins of tabletop roleplaying games, illustrating how their systems are ultimately rooted in two interleaved developments at the turn of the nineteenth century: the rise of hobbyist wargaming and the emergence of a new literary genre called the New Romance. It continues with a short history of magic in the fantasy game urtext Dungeons & Dragons and highlights key magic systems that followed in subsequent games, paying critical attention to the ways that each system has continued to uphold a hegemony of diegetic difference over procedural difference between distinctly unique forms of magic. It then analyzes Invisible Sun through a close reading of its magic systems, positioning the procedural, non-diegetic differences between them as a critical site of meaning-making central to the game’s project of (re)enchantment.

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The article proposes an approach based on sound studies to highlight the affective and atmospheric dimensions of contemporary practices of paranormal investigation. To do so, it analyses Hellier, a 2019 independent documentary series, vastly popular among paranormal communities online thanks to its novel approach to the field and the peculiar methodology of investigation it portrays. Sound, and in particular an ecological approach to listening and sonic practices, is the main epistemological tool employed in the analysis of the case study. In this sense, the article aims at demonstrating how tracing the relationalities and interactions that sound mediates with and within the environment allows for a deeper understanding of the affective, embodied and pre-representational dynamics of the paranormal. Moreover, it will highlight the processes by which, in Hellier, everyday spaces, situations and events are progressively charged with the potentiality of the paranormal, through specific auditory interactions with place. Instead of focusing on why paranormal entities emerge and get represented, the fruitful resonances between pre-representational theories and sound studies that form the theoretical framework of this paper allow for a study on how certain processes, dispositions and practices can trigger specific sensations of agency that are charged with supernatural meaning.

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Read Mysteries of Birth, Blood, and Appetite: The Interplay, Role and Function of the (Oc)cult in Indie Games

“Without magic we are mindless robots, our choices are predictable,” says the prologue to Peter J. Carroll’s The Ouranos Rite, an occult operation that exemplifies both the methods and ethos of chaos magic. Carroll’s conflation of machines and predictability echoes Ada Lovelace’s claim from nearly two centuries prior, that the Analytical Engine, a direct ancestor of today’s computing machines, is incapable of originating or revealing anything truly new; it can only assist us in making available what we already know. Machines cannot surprise us, cannot generate novelty; and as Carroll’s statement suggests, there is something inherently magical, and perhaps even necessarily occult or hidden, about that ability. This image of the machine (Imago Machinae) as an essentially mindless or soulless automaton is deeply entangled with questions about whether living entities, and humans in particular, are merely biological machines, or endowed with some divine spark that grants us an aspect of our image of the divine (Imago Dei). Generative art is created in collaboration with autonomous systems to produce works that are not consciously determined by the artist. For example, in the 18th century several composers made music by rolling dice to select from a set of precomposed phrases, and in the mid-20th century John Cage composed music by drawing a staff on a sheet of paper and then placing notes where tiny imperfections occurred in that paper. The avant-garde artist George Brecht indicated two aspects of chance that may be involved in generative art: images originating in psychic processes at unconscious strata of the mind, and images derived from mechanical processes not under the artist’s control. I assert that these correspond to two broad categories of magical divination: signs received via dreams, clairvoyance, and automatic drawing and writing; and signs resulting from mechanical processes such as what randomize the positions of coins or cards, or that determine the courses of flying birds or floating tea leaves, or that shape the physiognomies of sheep livers or human hands. Although generative art predates computers, computers have become its chief instrument due to their ability to algorithmically generate and assimilate stochastic, chaotic, and other kinds of variety and render it in diverse forms and media. Such functions are employed also to add unpredictability to electronic games. In the same way that a cup of dice or deck or cards may be used for playing games or making decisions as well as foretelling fortunes or communicating with spirits, the technology that allows us to play and create with computers also enables us to divine with them, even venturing beyond simulation of known mantic designs to invent novel expressions of divinatory play and playful divination. This paper explores these themes through the lens of an actual, robotic performance of the Ouranos Rite, combining algorithm and ritual to examine the possibility of programmable, performing objects that transcend autonomous mediums of art to become numinous mediums of the daemonic and divine—the Imago Machinae reaching toward the Imago Dei.

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Read “’Black Candles Burn:’ Ghost’s Invitation to the Occult”

Associations between BDSM and the occult have created tensions for occultists and historically been ‘whitewashed’ by scholars. Published in 1997, Bitch Goddess: The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman (out of print), was a transgressive anthology of fiction, essays and poetry edited by Patrick Califia and Drew Campbell which subverted dominant occult narratives. Foregrounding perspectives of dominant women, Bitch Goddess challenged heteronormative and radical feminist notions of both female sexuality and occult practices. This paper discusses links between kink and the occult; charting the trajectory of ‘sacred kink’ prior to and in the twenty-five years since the anthology was published. I then revisit Bitch Goddess, reading its representations of women’s sacred kink practices through the lens of emerging scholarship. I argue that Bitch Goddess challenged the marginalisation of female occultists who are BDSM practitioners and feminists; and catalysed representations of ‘sacred kink’ as an important somatic technology for occult workings.

Read Kinking the Occult: Representations of Sacred Kink in Bitch Goddess: The Spiritual Path of the Dominant Woman

When we gaze into the night sky, the naked eye encounters stars that have perished nearly 900,000 years ago, when humans on Earth still resembled homo erectus (Antón 03). We look into space and see ghosts: phantom images in our present time. And yet, the farthest reaches of the universe were thrust into existence 14 billion years ago— its echoes carried by light are still traveling to see us in our lonely corner (Frank 20). The longer the Astronomer holds open the aperture of a camera or a telescope, the more voices of light she collects. In the pitch blackness of endless space, this practice becomes a scrying of the past. Similarly, the Necromancer holds open her subtle senses to the dead, collecting visions from airier, quieter voices the longer she waits. For both, the world of the dead quickly becomes not so distant, not so out of reach. The creatures encountered by the Astronomer, the corpses of self-immolated stars, are places where gravity reigns supreme, unwavering and unsympathetic—Death in its truest, most deterministic form. Listening to these spectres, evoking them to appear with esoteric instruments, and then dissecting their ethereal bodies are all a form of necromancy and a pursuit of that which lies beyond our human lives. Studying the life cycles and death throes of these ancient, alchemical engines teaches an immortal intelligence, not because death ceases to be, but because memory reaches aeonic magnitudes. The astrophysicist witnesses a metempsychosis — the transmigration of souls — in the whirling vortices of stardust that, for another brief moment, become a planet, an ocean, a puddle, or a person.    

Read The Yawning Grave: Sleepless Nights and Astrophysical Lights

This paper draws from Sianne Ngai’s work Our Aesthetic Categories to identify and discuss three different aesthetic categories of ghosts: cute ghosts, interesting ghosts, and zany ghosts. I examine the appearance of ghosts in three video games: the cute Wisp in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and its relation to acquiring rare and unusual items; the interesting puzzle givers of Little Nine and Dusky Ming in Genshin Impact; and the hardworking zany shades of Hades who, reflecting the game’s own thematic interest in continued effort, exist as eternal water-cooler gossips and workers in the Administrative Chamber in the House of Hades. In doing so, I examine the aesthetic experience these ghosts produce in their respective games, and use Ngai’s aesthetic categories of the cute, interesting, and zany to explore how the form and function of this occult being has evolved in the context of the Capitalocene.

Keywords: ghost, game studies, video games, Sianne Ngai, aesthetic, cute, interesting, zany, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Animal Crossing, Genshin Impact, Hades, Nintendo, Hoyoverse, Supergiant Games

Read Cute, Interesting, Zany Ghosts: Examining Aesthetic Experience of Ghosts in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Genshin Impact and Hades

Unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), it is not only the body of the monster which is fragmented, broken and piecemeal. Rather, the source of horror in the novel is the brokenness of the city of Baghdad, torn apart by violence and war. In Saadawi’s text, when the creature made out of the body parts of bomb victims comes to life, we have a living palimpsest of the stories about the victims of the land. Frankenstein in Baghdad, therefore, situates the supernatural in the junction between the city and its people, scarred by war. In this paper, I will argue that Saadawi’s narrative of the supernatural interpolates and blends into the cultural and political history of the city of Baghdad in the period after the US invasion of Iraq. I will argue that the supernatural interacts with the memory of the city, piecing together its tumultuous past with the equally volatile and violent present. By doing so, I wish to show that the supernatural here is not merely a product of fantasy but an alternative method of recreating the history of a city riddled with the politics of violence.

Read Piecing the City Together: Studying Violence on the Land and the Body in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Jeff VanderMeer’s novels are constantly in dialogue with the changing face of the Anthropocene and his city novels, City of Saints and Madmen, Borne and Dead Astronauts, explore how cities might develop into supernatural entities through colonisation and extreme developments in technology, bioengineering, and ecology. The hostile bioengineering corporation, ‘The Company’, in Borne and Dead Astronauts, mirrors the current corporate endeavour towards ‘Smart Cities’, spearheaded by Amazon’s search for a city to host their second headquarters. Amazon promise the ‘ultimate upgrade’ to the public sector through their Smart City approach in return for seemingly unlimited access to people’s lives. Between Amazon’s proposed Smart Cities and VanderMeer’s supernatural cities, this paper will explore when and how the city starts to be reconfigured as a supernatural space through aggressive corporate colonisation and technological augmentation.

Read Stranger Than Fiction: Jeff VanderMeer’s Supernatural Cities and Amazon’s Smart Cities

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions have highlighted revived demand in armchair travelling and a re-exploration of the urban environment. This article argues that reading urban fantasy literature as a special case of armchair travelling provides valuable insights into contemporary real-world spatial practices and socio-political discourses. By introducing supernatural elements to the mundane environment, urban fantasy frequently achieves a de-familiarising effect. It marks a significant shift in armchair travelling, as it moves the destination from exotic and idyllic far-flung places to well-known, grittier urban locations and can thus contribute to a re-enchantment with the contemporary metropolis. Whereas pre-existing definitions of urban fantasy stress the texts’ inside perspective on the city, this article analyses travel and displacement in China Miéville’s The City and the City to reveal a juxtaposition of inside and outside perspectives on the urban setting. It thus calls for a more nuanced definition of urban fantasy that accounts for this duality.

Read Supernatural Staycation: Armchair Travelling and Urban Fantasy Literature

Despite the tendency to associate narratives that focus on technology and their societal impact as within the genres of science fiction or dystopia, this common tactic ignores the supernatural nature of the technology presented within these narratives, and it is worth exploring the magical aspects of unobtainable technology in comparison with more traditional depictions of magic. This article examines the titular city of San Junipero in Season Three, Episode Four of Black Mirror (2011-) as one example of such unobtainable technology, and resituates it as a supernatural city akin to the versions of Hades presented by both Aristophanes in The Frogs and Homer’s Odyssey, chosen because of their status as predecessors to Christian theology, better illustrating the evaluation of San Junipero as supernatural rather than sacred. Further, the article compares the technological necropolis to Swift’s satirical Glubbdubdrib from Gulliver’s Travels, highlighting the importance of the ritual of necromancy to San Junipero’s status as supernatural city.

Read The Supernatural Necropolis of San Junipero: Technological Necromancy, Satire, and Frogs