Bedlam, or Bethlem Royal Hospital to give it its full name, is actually the world's oldest psychiatric institution. It began life in 1247 in the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, which stood where we now find Liverpool Street Station. 

Yet the hospital has inspired a range of books, films, and TV series, with its infamous reputation lasting well into the 21st century. The hospital has since become a valued institution for psychiatric treatment, yet the ghost of its former incarnations still linger.

After all, the word 'bedlam', meaning chaos, came from this very hospital. People shortened 'Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem' to Bethlem, and then Bedlam, in around the 1660s. The word even went on to inspire the word 'Bedlamite', used to describe someone suffering from insanity, from the 1620s.

So how did this hospital gain such a fearsome reputation, and how has it survived well beyond the hospital's adoption of new practices? Let's find out in this week's episode!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/bedlam-reputation/

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Foxes appear in literature and legend across the world. Look at Brer Fox in the American South. In Rebel Folklore, I discussed the Jiuwei Hu of China, or nine-tailed fox, who drains men of their life force. Korea's kumiho is a similar spirit, while Japan has the supernatural fox spirit, the kitsune.

Scholar Al-Biruni, magician Cornelius Agrippa and astrologer William Lilly put the fox under Mercury's rulership. Mercury is the trickster of the Roman gods, and represents communication, cleverness, speed, and resourcefulness - all qualities traditionally associated with the fox. It probably explains why dreaming of foxes meant you should beware of treachery and thieves.

I have an exclusive article about foxes for Patrons on the lowest tier, but I've also made it available for sale if you'd like to read some additional fox folklore. As it is, it seems foxes also appear in folk tales and literature so I managed to write a whole new episode that didn't involve the lore from the article!

So let's explore the way foxes appear in folk tales and literature!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/foxes-folk-tales/

Foxes and Folklore article: https://www.patreon.com/posts/exclusive-foxes-106946093

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Natalie Lawrence is an author and illustrator who explores our relationship with the natural world, looking through multiple lenses - from the biological to the mythic and psychoanalytic. She completed a MSc and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, exploring the making and meanings of monstrous creatures in seventeenth century Europe.

She published her first book as a teenager, Feathers and Eggshells, inspired by Hampstead Heath and the birds she was entranced by as a child, and published Planta Sapiens with Paco Calvo in 2022. She has also given a TedX talk, appeared on BBC Radio, and worked with installation artists. 

In this chat, we talk about humans' fascination for monsters, how the walrus was originally conceived of as being a monster, the Hydra of Hamburg, cryptids as contemporary monsters and the ways in which our understanding of what is real and what exists has changed over the centuries.

Buy Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meanings: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/12992/9781474619035

Find Natalie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natalie.j.lawrence/

And her website: https://nataliejlawrence.com/

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Hedgehogs are one of the stranger mammals you might encounter. They're nocturnal, they hibernate, they're prone to rolling into a ball when frightened, and they're extremely vulnerable to habitat loss. While some of you will undoubtedly have first thought of Sonic, others might have thought of Mrs Tiggywinkle from the Beatrix Potter books. 

Either way, those are quite positive associations. I've been feeding hedgehog visitors to my garden since June 2023, and I find them charming, adorable, and slightly idiosyncratic. Yet in the past, hedgehogs have had a much more sinister reputation that they certainly didn't deserve. People linked them with witches, the devil, and even fruit theft.

So let's explore the folklore surrounding hedgehogs! 

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/hedgehogs-folklore/

Sign up for the Bonfire Night talk: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gunpowder-treason-and-plot-the-legends-and-customs-of-bonfire-night-tickets-1687030616989

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Moles are fascinating creatures. They're phenomenal diggers and while they weigh around 120g, they can shift 540 times their body weight of earth.

Given they live entirely underground, they're a rarely seen mammal, and we only know they're there when we see their molehills. Surprisingly, there is more folklore about them than more commonly encountered animals, like badgers. 

Used in folk medicine, they're also creatures connected with omens for both death and the weather. Their appearance as folk remedies is somewhat cruel, and reflects earlier times when humans had less regard for animal welfare.

So how do moles appear in folklore? Let's find out in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/moles-folklore/

Tickets for the Northern Spiritualism talk: https://bit.ly/spiritualism2025

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Otters are some of the most charming mammals you might encounter. Sometimes nicknamed the "water sausage" by the internet, otters are playful, intelligent, and capable of using tools.

They also appear in popular culture, most notably in Tarka the Otter and The Wind in the Willows.

Yet in reality, they're incredibly elusive. They might live in wetlands, along rivers, and at the coast, but seeing one isn't easy! They also enjoy woodland habitats, and even in towns, so they're a very interesting species.

In this post, I'll be talking about the European otter. They're listed as near threatened on the global IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They also raise their cubs in holts, or underground burrows, and they mostly eat fish, amphibians, crustaceans, and aquatic birds.

I've seen one of the otters that lives at the Gosforth Park Nature Reserve, which was very exciting given how elusive they are! It's a woodland setting surrounding a lake, so I thought otters would make a good first stop on our Woodland Mammals tour.

But given how good they are at hiding from humans, is there much folklore about them?

Let's find out in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/otters-folklore/

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When we think about folklore, we often think about the characters involved: King Arthur, Queen Mab, Lady Godiva, and more. Yet folklore has an intrinsic link with place, too. 

Even the most throwaway comment about a place can reveal stories linked with them. Such stories can reveal how we feel about places, especially when human activity moves away.

They’re also stories that get easily lost when people move on, so I asked the wonderful listeners of Fabulous Folklore if they wanted to share any stories they’d been told about places - and they did!

I wanted ghosts at a person's school, houses they ran past because someone in the neighbourhood said they were haunted, local legends of grey ladies, creepy back roads people avoided at night because of a local cryptid - that kind of thing! 

I didn't want personal experiences this time around, which I've collected before, because I wanted the focus to be on the place, not someone's experience of it.

Let's see what people came up with in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

Find the blog post with the images and the references here: https://www.icysedgwick.com/tales-of-space-and-place/

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English folklore is full of peculiarities. The legends of the so-called screaming skulls are definitely among them.

These are skulls kept in mansions and farmhouses, sometimes considered to be guardians of the property. Legends abound of the violent deeds done to the owners of the skulls.

But many of these stories come with hauntings attached if the skulls are disturbed. Sometimes the skulls even repeatedly return, no matter how often they're removed or even destroyed. 

Given our focus this month on ghosts and poltergeists, let's explore some legends of screaming skulls in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/screaming-skulls/

Tell me the supernatural stories of places that you've heard: https://forms.gle/WzXyGZLoe8iLZh656

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I'm talking to Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux from the Three Ravens podcast about the difficulties in defining 'folklore', the importance of storytelling, which of England's 39 historic counties has the best folk tales, why people love ghost stories, and making folklore accessible to wider audiences!

Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux are the brains behind the Three Ravens podcast, and they are a real life couple, based in Sussex. Eleanor was born in Suffolk and grew up in Sussex, and after developing a passion for storytelling and stage performance as a child, become involved in amateur dramatics and completed her BA in English Literature and earned her MA in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama. She also founded the theatre company Rust & Stardust, which tours original work and education projects rooted in English folklore. Martin was born in Somerset and grew up in the developing world, including in Uganda and Papua New Guinea. After leaving school, he completed his BA in English and won National Student Television Awards for comedy and directing. Having been a freelance journalist, radio presenter, and English teacher, he also won the BBC Moo! New Writers Prize in 2009. He gave up teaching after the pandemic to undertake his MA in Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, and to launch Three Ravens.

Buy their book, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/12992/9781803999685

Visit the Three Ravens Podcast website: https://www.threeravenspodcast.com/

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Poltergeist marked Hollywood's big-budget engagement with the ghost film in 1982. Produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, it took the haunted house film and mashed it together with the family adventure film. Throw in some special effects courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, and you end up with the film that relocated haunted houses to the suburbs.

The film obliquely references the settlement of land in California and a failure to acknowledge earlier inhabitants of that land. It also explicitly engages with the growing consumer boom of the 1980s, using technology - here in the form of the TV set - as a means to communicate with the other side. It's a film worthy of study for various reasons.

But one of the talking heads in the special feature on the 25th anniversary edition of the film exclaims that everything in the film 'really happened'. Does the depicted activity bear any relation to historically recorded cases of poltergeist activity? Where does the film draw on this record? What are these earlier cases? Let's find out!

Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/poltergeist-1982-film/

Tell me your supernatural stories: https://forms.gle/WzXyGZLoe8iLZh656

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Get your free guide to home protection the folklore way here: https://www.icysedgwick.com/fab-folklore/

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