Prepare yourself for some wild speculation on who, or what, might be following lone travellers along The Lowes.

Hello Folky Friends,

It’s been another busy month for the Norfolk Folklore Society, despite our best intentions to slow things down a little!

I recently took a trip over to Gorleston to see where Coastguard Graham Grant spotted Black Shuck in 1972. He was on duty at the Gorleston rescue headquarters early one morning when, at around 4.45am, he saw a large black hound on the beach to the North. He watched as it ran, stopped, and appeared to be searching for someone, before vanishing before his eyes after a minute or two. He said the beach had recently flattened by bulldozers, so there was nowhere for the beast to hide, and having only just moved to Norfolk, he wasn’t even aware of the local legend at the time of the sighting.

I didn’t realise until now that the date was so close to when this newsletter reaches you. Maybe a trip out on the 19^th April is in order!

We have been working super hard on the book. Stacia is on a roll with writing the stories up and I’ve been reading through each one to do a fact check (only falling down a few research rabbit holes in the process). It’s been so fun reading through Stacia’s work. Even though we are really familiar with the stories. she’s been telling them in new and beautiful ways. We’re planning to launch a Kickstarter very soon, so keep an eye out.

We’ve also settled into a really good rhythm with the podcast, which makes me very happy. It did slip a little last year, but now that we’re not juggling quite so many events, it’s been much easier to focus on. We’ve got a few fun themed series planned that I think you’ll really enjoy.

Although we had planned to take a step back from in-person events for a while, we are currently finalising a couple of commitments we made before that decision. It’s looking like we’ll have a little something in June, August, October, November and early December.

As always, thank you so, so much for your continued interest and support. It means the world to us knowing you lovely lot are out there, sharing in these stories with us.

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

There are few objects more quietly perfect than an egg, something about its smooth symmetry and self-contained shape giving it the air of a small, oval promise, a beginning that never quite explains itself.

I admire them enormously, both in theory and in practice, not least because my workplace orders them by the thousand each month and I even own an oil painting of a boiled egg, which feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to have on my wall.

And yet, for all this appreciation, I do not eat them.

A fried egg feels altogether too exposed, a boiled egg faintly unsettling, as though it might be thinking its own private thoughts and the moment I am required to acknowledge that it was once something with intention, I find myself politely but firmly opting out.

Eggs are entirely acceptable when they have the good sense to disappear into cakes or pasta, but left to stand on their own, they cross a line I cannot quite follow (I think this is known as hypocrisy).

Milk occupies a similar category, admirable in concept, but deeply unwelcome in a glass, and thinking too long about either is usually enough to push me from vegetarianism to the brink of veganism.

And yet, despite this personal reluctance, eggs have been busy leading far more interesting lives elsewhere. Across centuries and cultures, they have predicted futures, cured illness, protected homes, and, in at least one Norfolk case, been accused of summoning storms and sending 13 men to their deaths at sea, which feels like an extraordinary burden for something that fits so neatly into an egg cup.

If you hadn’t guessed, I’ve written this month’s newsletter about eggs. I will never, ever willingly get to any point quickly. In other news, the past month has been all about work, so it’s nice to lose myself in a bit of magic.

Love, Stacia

Snake eggs, fairy bread and things best left alone

Before they were fairy loaves, they were something far stranger.

In parts of Britain and Europe, these small, domed stones were believed to be snake eggs. Not laid in any ordinary sense, but formed from a writhing knot of serpents, their bodies twisted together on Midsummer’s Eve until a froth rose from them: from this foam, it was said, the eggs were born.

Known as ovum anguinum, these objects were thought to hold considerable power.

If caught before they touched the ground, they could protect against poison, grant influence, or act as a charm against harm. If not handled correctly…it is best not speculate what might happen.

Over time, the sharper edges of the story softened.

What had once been snake-born became something more domestic, more comforting.

The objects were rebranded as fairy loaves: small, risen breads left behind by unseen hands.

Plump, domed and marked with neat starbursts, they look less like fossils and more like something baked by time itself.

These ancient echinoids have been interpreted, reinterpreted and occasionally feared across centuries. Their resemblance to tiny loaves made them feel deliberate, finished, as though they had been placed rather than formed.

In Sussex, they were set on windowsills to ward off lightning, based on the tidy logic that a stone which had already fallen from the sky would not be struck twice.

Elsewhere, they predicted rain, stopped milk from souring and neutralised poison.

But in East Anglia, as ever, opinion divides.

In Suffolk, fairy loaves were welcomed indoors, polished and kept as charms against hunger: if bread failed to appear, this was clearly witchcraft’s fault, not the loaf’s.

Norfolk, meanwhile, preferred not to get involved.

Here, fairy loaves were considered the property of the elfin world and best left exactly where they were found. One woman, unwisely, took one home and was chased all the way back by an invisible voice demanding its return.

She returned it.

Which, given the circumstances, feels like excellent judgement.

The King’s Lynn Witch and storm-raising eggs

Eggs are usually spoken of as beginnings.

Small and sealed things, quiet vessels of life, held carefully in the hand and full of promises and possibilities. The soft architecture of something not yet arrived.

But, as folklore so often reminds us, anything that can hold life can also be persuaded to carry other things entirely.

In 1583, in King’s Lynn, a woman known as Mother Gabley stood accused of causing the deaths of 13 men who had been sailing home from Spain, their ship lost somewhere beyond Wells-next-the-Sea, their bodies never returned for burial and no clear cause ever settled upon, only the uneasy, unsatisfying knowledge that the sea had closed over them and kept its own counsel.

As so often happens when loss refuses to explain itself, a different story began to take shape.

It was said that Mother Gabley had taken a pail of cold water and placed eggs within it, not to cook but to labour, stirring them again and again until the surface broke into motion, until the water churned and frothed as though it had been taught to mimic something far larger than itself.

In this small and deliberate act lay the logic of sympathetic magic, the belief that if a thing could be made to happen in miniature, the greater world might follow its lead, that a storm coaxed into being within the confines of a bucket might find its echo out at sea.

And somewhere, beyond sight, the water answered.

The parish register records it plainly, with no sense of poetry but a great deal of certainty: that these deaths were brought about by “the detestable workings of an execrable witch…by the boiling, or rather labouring, of certain eggs.”

There is something particularly eerie in that phrasing: not boiling, exactly, not cooking, but labouring. As though the eggs themselves were being made to work - as though they were part of the act.

We know, of course, how such stories tend to end.

Mother Gabley was found guilty and hanged, likely in the marketplace at King’s Lynn, where others accused of similar crimes met the same fate. The law had, by then, softened slightly, but not enough to save those blamed for death.

And yet the question lingers, as it always does: was she conjuring storms from a pail of water, shaping the sea with a spoon and a handful of eggs?

Or was she simply a woman standing in a kitchen, stirring something ordinary, while far away the weather turned, as it has always done, without asking permission?

Folklore rarely answers.

It leaves us instead with the image: a bucket, a hand, the restless surface of water, and something small and oval moving within it…holding, perhaps, more than it should.

Naturally dyed eggs

Long before foil-wrapped chocolate, eggs at Easter were coloured slowly, patiently, and often with whatever could be found close to hand.

The act of dyeing them was not simply decorative but quietly symbolic, a way of marking the season’s turning, of celebrating new life with colour drawn directly from the natural world.

There is something rather pleasing in that exchange, in taking an egg, already a small, self-contained promise, and steeping it in the deep pink of beetroot or the soft blue of cabbage, letting it absorb its surroundings until it becomes something richer, stranger and more beautiful than it was before.

If you feel inclined to try it yourself, begin by choosing your colour and simmering it gently in around 500ml of water for 15 to 30 minutes. Around 200g of shredded beetroot will give shades of pink and red; the skins from two or three red onions produce warmer reddish tones, while yellow onion skins lean towards orange and rust. Two tablespoons of ground turmeric create a bright, unapologetic yellow and roughly 200g of chopped red cabbage or blueberries will shift into cooler blues and soft indigos. If you happen to have dried hibiscus flowers, about 200g will yield a lovely lavender or deeper purple hue.

Once the colour has deepened, strain the liquid and stir in white vinegar, using about one tablespoon for every 250ml of dye. This helps fix the colour and gives it a little staying power. Then lower in your hard-boiled eggs and leave them to rest, ideally in the fridge, allowing the dye to gather slowly around them.

What emerges will depend not only on what you use, but how often you return them to the dye. A brief immersion gives a pale, fleeting tint, while repeated dips deepen and enrich the colour, building it gradually until the egg feels almost transformed.

It is, in its way, a very old kind of magic.

Eggs, omens and everyday magic

Across the world, eggs have carried a meaning that reaches far beyond the kitchen, slipping easily between the ordinary and the otherworldly, as though they have always belonged to both.

They appear in the quiet rituals of daily life and in the more uncertain spaces where people have tried, gently and persistently, to understand what might come next.

An egg broken into water could become a form of divination, its drifting whites forming shapes to be read and interpreted, offering glimpses of futures that refused to sit still long enough to be certain.

Elsewhere, an unbroken egg might be passed over the skin to draw out illness, to absorb fever or misfortune, before being buried or carried away, taking something unseen with it.

They have been kept close as protection, slipped into pockets, placed beneath thresholds, or deliberately broken to prevent anything unwelcome from making use of them.

Their condition mattered: a whole egg might promise good fortune, prosperity, even marriage, while a broken one could signal quarrels, disruption, or a love that would not hold.

Even dreams made space for them - to dream of eggs was often taken as a sign of abundance or change, something waiting quietly on the edge of becoming, while damaged or shattered eggs carried a different weight, hinting at things unsettled or undone.

There is something about eggs that invites this kind of thinking.

Perhaps it is their shape, their completeness, or the sense that they contain more than they reveal. They sit so easily in the hand, and yet feel full of consequence, as though they are holding a version of the future in miniature.

Small, portable, and strangely persuasive, they move through folklore as objects of possibility, to be handled with care, or, when necessary, broken with intent.

The April Folklore Calendar

April 1: April Fool’s Day

A day for tricks, reversals and small, sanctioned chaos. Best attempted before midday, after which the fool is you.

April 3: Good Friday

A day marked by reflection, restraint and long-held traditions. Hot cross buns appear with their neat symbolism and very little room for variation.

April 5: Easter Sunday

Resurrection, renewal and an abundance of eggs in all forms. Sacred and secular comfortably sharing the same table.

April 6: Easter Monday

A second pause. A continuation. A day for eating what remains and stretching the moment a little longer.

April 23: St George’s Day

England’s patron saint, dragons included.

April 30: May Day Eve

The threshold of summer. Once a night for gathering flowers, preparing for May and paying close attention to what might be moving in the dark.

April 30: Walpurgis Night

Bonfires are lit, bells rung, and old protections put in place. A night associated with witches, thresholds and the turning of the year, where winter is finally persuaded to loosen its grip.

Anteros Arts Foundation - Call for Submissions

Anteros Arts Foundation is inviting artists based in East Anglia artists to submit work for their upcoming Folklore Exhibition - a group show delving into the tales and traditions of East Anglian folklore. This exhibition forms part of an 11-day folklore celebration at Anteros, which will also feature a programme of workshops, talks, including a film screening in collaboration with Pyschic Visons, all inspired by the theme of Folklore. The theme is open to interpretation to encouraging a wide range of responses.

Theme

The theme of this exhibition explores the rich folklore of East Anglia, where landscape and storytelling are deeply intertwined. From shifting coastlines to rural villages and fenland, the region has long inspired tales that blur the line between the natural and the supernatural.

Figures such as Black Shuck, along with stories of spirits, witches, and uncanny encounters, reflect how communities have made sense of place, memory, and belief through narrative. These stories are not fixed, they evolve over time, shaped by retelling and experience of modern life.

Artists are invited to engage with folklore as both heritage and living practice, drawing on local myths, personal histories, and imagined narratives. The theme is open to interpretation, encouraging responses that explore identity, landscape, and the enduring power of storytelling.

Exhibition Dates: 2^nd June - 11^th June

Submission Deadline: 14^th May

Eligibility

• Open to East Anglian-based artists of all experience levels.

• All mediums accepted

How to Apply

Submit your submission via their website HERE

Stacia kicks things off with a synopsis of the 1954 classic, and from there we rummage through our archives to come up with some, admittedly tenuous, parallels between the Black Lagoon’s mysterious creature and East Anglia’s own creatures of the deep.

We also take a little look at the South American folklore said to have inspired the Creature. There are surprisingly a lot of similarities between those original tales and our East Anglian folklore creatures.

Side note: if you hear knocking, your house isn’t haunted… one of us kept tapping the table.

Good evening folklore friends,

Apologies for this newsletter reaching you a little later in the day than usual. Last month I had promised everyone an adventure for this newsletter. Unfortunately, the particular excursion I had in mind fell through, leaving me without anything to share.

However, my dad saved the day with a suggestion of a Mother’s Day walk at Hardley Staithe. Yes! Haunted stone!

The circular route didn’t quite take us past the stone. But our drive to the Staithe took us right past the haunted stone so leapt out the car said hello and grabbed some photos.

Local stories, first recorded by the 19th-century folklorist William Blythe Gerish, claim that on certain nights of the year, ‘an old woman in red’ appears at midnight sitting on the stone on the corner of Cross Stone Road, watching over all directions, guarding the place where all four meet.

It was hard to imagine this spot feeling spooky. It was bright sunshine and the stone was surrounded by daffodils. But it is pretty remote so I’d probably feel differently about that on a bleak winter night.

The Hardley circular walk is really, really lovely and we were rewarded with a cute little St Margaret’s church at the end. The round tower and the west wall of the nave are Saxo-Norman. The rest of the building dates to the 14th to 15th century. It contains some little interesting bits and bobs. Some beautiful medieval paintings of St Catherine and St Christopher, a 15th centaury font decorated with lions, angels (I liked the angels a lot) and the signs of the Evangelists, and some lovely graffiti of boats scratched into the pews.

So, there you go. A little adventure for you. I’m meant to be heading for a day out in Halesworth next week so I’ll let you know if I find any interesting nuggets when I’m there.

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

March does not arrive politely; it strides in sideways, trailing wind and rearranging the furniture of the sky.

The light is stronger now and less apologetic, but the wind has sharpened its elbows.

The Anglo-Saxons called this month Hlyda, the loud month, which suggests that our ancestors also lay awake listening to something rattle the roof and deliver a message.

In Norfolk, March is rarely subtle. It barrels down the coast, flattens daffodils with casual indifference and sends the North Sea into dark moods.

We are, after all, a county built on edges. Saltmarsh, fen, cliff, beach.

Nothing here is entirely solid, even the Broads were an accident, medieval peat diggings quietly filling with water and becoming landscape.

On a personal note, March is also my birthday month. I find birthdays really tricky, a privilege to have one, but difficult to enjoy as the date is bound up with the anniversary of my Dad’s death, just a day or so later. Since he died, I’ve never been able to separate the two.

(This is, however, very on-brand misery core for someone sworn to wearing only black since they were 10).

Folklore says: “March-born shall be sociable and kind, but fierce of temper and changeable of mind.”

I’ll leave those that know me to ponder this one and see if it applies. Let’s March on.

Love, Stacia

PS This month’s podcast namechecks the iconic legend that is the Castle Museum’s mummifed cat. We know how to reel you in.

Old Hunch and the coach in the dark

There are some graves that feel like endings and others that feel like a pause.

In the round-towered church of Stratton St Mary, near Long Stratton, Sir Edmund Reeve lies in stone.

He does not lie flat, as most medieval effigies do, instead he reclines on one elbow, robed in flowing scarlet, as though he has merely paused mid-conversation.

Beneath him, his wife Dame Mary rests in more familiar fashion, one hand to her gown, the other holding a Bible close to her heart.

He looks comfortable…perhaps too comfortable.

Sir Edmund was born in the late 16th century, the son of a Norfolk attorney.

He rose to become a lawyer and later a judge during one of the most turbulent periods in English history: the years leading into the Civil War. He sided with Parliament against King Charles I, a choice that made him powerful to some and deeply unpopular to others.

Stories linger that he made enemies easily and kept them.

By the 1630s he had bought Stratton Manor House and local whispers suggested the sale was not entirely straightforward.

He died on March 27th, 1647, at the restless hinge of the year, when storms travel fast along the coast and nothing settles easily.

Whether through political ambition, legal severity, or something less tangible, it was said that Sir Edmund left an imprint on the parish that did not fade with his death.

And so the legend begins.

For generations, villagers spoke of “Old Hunch”, a spectral figure said to drive through Long Stratton in a phantom coach pulled by four horses.

The sound of wheels would rumble along empty streets and hooves would strike sparks from invisible stone.

One tale, recorded in the 19th century, tells of a labourer walking home late at night when he heard the furious approach of the carriage.

Terrified, he scrambled into a tree by the roadside as the coach thundered past beneath him.

Gathering courage, the man called out, “Old Hunch!”

A face, twisted and furious, thrust itself from the window: “If I was as far behind you as I am in front of you,” it snarled, “you would never call me Hunch again.”

Even now, some residents claim to hear wheels in the dark and see sparks rising from the road as though someone – or something - is not yet finished with the parish.

Hlyda: The loud month

The Old English name for March, Hlyda, meaning loud or stormy, was recorded by our favourite, the good old Venerable Bede in 725AD in De temporum ratione (my favourite bedtime reading).

I am increasingly convinced Bede would have loved the Shipping Forecast, he did love a detailed weather report.

March is a month that makes a lot of noise about change, coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, as the saying goes.

In Norfolk, it frequently comes in like a lion, stays like a lion, and occasionally leaves like a – well, lion. Buckle up, baby, we’re in for a wild ride.

Wind has long carried folklore weight.

The first strong March wind was said to foretell the summer, east wind brought sickness., west wind rain. North wind signalled hardship while south wind brought warmth.

The east wind, of course, is the one that really bites along our coast.

It slices through layers and opinions alike: an east wind in March feels like the North Sea reminding you that it has swallowed villages before and could do so again.

Which is not paranoia, it is history – after all, Shipden, Eccles-on-Sea, Ness and the old town of Dunwich did not simply misplace themselves.

The sea remembers.

Coastal folklore is thick with warnings: phantom ships, church bells heard beneath the tide, lantern lights that lure vessels onto sandbanks.

In some Norfolk fishing communities, it was once considered unlucky to count boats aloud before they returned; to number them was to tempt absence.

There are also stories of warning lights seen along the shore before storms: some say they were spirits, others say they were the souls of drowned sailors while sceptics attribute them to marsh gas or phosphorescence.

But folklore rarely minds what you call it, it cares only that you noticed.

We write from a county that has lost land and gained myth in equal measure: you do not live beside the sea without understanding that edges are negotiable.

Lady Day: when the year truly began

Before 1752, the legal New Year in England began on March 25: Lady Day.

It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the moment Gabriel tells Mary she will bear Christ.

Somewhat less magically, it was also Quarter Day, a day when landlords would come calling for their rent and contracts were renewed for another year.

Nothing says divine revelation like an invoice.

Yet it makes a certain sense that the year once turned here, near the spring equinox.

The earth visibly changes in March: lambs appear, soil softens, the balance between light and dark tips decisively.

Lady Day was a hinge point when debts were settled, new agreements begun and boundaries were acknowledged.

It is a reminder that timekeeping is cultural: we choose our own beginnings.

The Spring Equinox

The equinox, usually around March 20, gives us mathematical balance when day and night stand equal. But equilibrium in March is brief; it is the pause before acceleration.

For a moment, light and darkness stand level, as though weighing one another. Then the scales tip. From here, light wins.

In some parts of Britain, thresholds were swept and washed at the equinox, not merely for cleanliness but for symbolic clearing: to sweep a threshold is to acknowledge it exists.

The doorway marks a boundary between what is within and what waits beyond and to clean it is to prepare for movement.

The equinox has long been understood as a hinge in the year.

Not a festival of noise like Beltane nor a fire-lit vigil like Midwinter, but something quieter and more exacting. A recalibration.

Egg lore attaches itself here too. The idea that you can balance an egg on its end at the equinox persists, as though gravity itself loosens its grip in recognition of the day.

Scientists insist this is possible at any time with sufficient patience, which sounds like a mission statement for life.

Across cultures, the equinox has been read as a moment of renewal.

Persian Nowruz, rooted in far older Zoroastrian tradition, marks the new year at this turning when seeds are sown, houses aired, tables laid with symbols of growth.

Balance, then, is not an end state, it is a threshold.

The equinox reminds us that stillness is temporary, that light returns by increments, and that the year, having steadied itself, is about to move.

Lent: restraint in a restless month

Much of March sits within Lent.

If February gave us pancakes and indulgence, March holds the longer discipline; fasting, reflection, quiet.

And yet even here, folklore softens the edges.

Simnel cakes appear mid-Lent, crowned with eleven marzipan apostles with Judas remaining conspicuously absent, which feels like an early form of public accountability and brand alignment.

Palm crosses are woven and tucked behind mirrors or over doorframes, protective and symbolic.

March, then, becomes a study in contrast: outside, wind and surge, inside, restraint and ritual, the house as harbour.

The March Folklore Calendar

March 1: St David’s Day

Leeks worn proudly. A reminder that vegetables can be talismans.

March 15: Mothering Sunday

Originally about returning to one’s mother church. Now a far more logistical operation involving bookings and florists.

March 17: St Patrick’s Day

Associated with shamrocks and the banishing of snakes, despite Ireland never having hosted snakes. Folklore does not require zoological accuracy.

March 20, 2.46pm: Spring Equinox

Equal light and dark. A hinge in the year.

March 25: Lady Day

Once England’s New Year. Quarter Day for rents and contracts, spiritual annunciation meets financial realism.

The Borrowed Days (last days of March)

Said to be borrowed from April. If stormy, a fine year would follow, if calm, expect trouble.

*Bit of a naughty swear right at the very end, but it made me laugh a lot - Siofra

Relevant images:

Good evening folky folks,

Sorry for the lateness of this month’s newsletter. Time seems to be a bit slippery at the moment and I lost track of the numbers on the day. We are technically on time as it’s the right date, but I’d usually send out nice and early in the morning.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be preparing for our last in-person event for a while. We are showing one of Stacia’s favourite horror films as part of our collaboration with Reel Connections…The Fog, in Great Yarmouth on Friday February 27. I’ll be making some bespoke bunting (I have so much random horror themed bunting now) and badges based on Matt Willis’s amazing poster. Matt will be there with a stall on the evening and I’ve got some excellent themed ghost stories for the event. All we need now is for the weather to provide some perfectly atmospheric fog for us. We’d love to see you there. You can get tickets HERE.

One of of February highlights was a trip to Colchester take part in the East Anglian Folklore Centre’s Battle of the Podcasts. The event was to raise money for the centre so they can say open, and we were joined by a bunch of excellent podcasts. We were thrilled, and shocked, to have won! And The Smug Onion has settled very nicely into their new home with us. You can listen to the shenanigans HERE.

I think that’s it for this month. I’ll aim to have a little folky adventure to share with you here next month. I’m not sure where I’ll head, but I’ll be sure to find some weird little nuggets for you where ever I end up.

See you soon,

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

February has a particular feel to it: the days are lengthening, almost imperceptibly, yet the mornings still begin in darkness, the world holding its breath somewhere between winter and spring.

It feels like a month that needs tending to carefully, with small acts of comfort and quiet magic.

The Anglo-Saxons called it Soll-Monath, the Month of Cakes and while this newsletter explores the deeper folklore of that name, I confess that I live by the principle year-round. When you run The Assembly House, EVERY month is cake month (shameless plug: we are here for all your cake-based needs, folklore or not, candle magic very much included for birthdays).

At home, February is a month of gentle rituals.

I pot up endless hyacinths and paper whites, narcissi and crocuses, so there is always something bursting into life on the dining room table.

I light candles at breakfast while it is still dark outside, pretending the day has begun by choice rather than necessity. There are casseroles and roast dinners for Sunday Night Dinners with my family, open fires, and the slow, indulgent finishing of the Christmas book pile.

This newsletter is a celebration of cake in all its forms: sacred, protective, communal, and joyful.

From hearth-cakes offered to gods, to pancakes flipped with hope, to birthday wishes whispered into candle smoke, cake has always carried more than calories.

In a world full of bitterness, let us cling to the sweetness that will carry us through.

Love, Stacia

PS This month’s podcast is all about werewolves. My children’s surname is Ware, and I had to be persuaded strongly not to call my son Wolf, solely for the lols on official forms.

Sol-Monath: The month of cakes

February arrives quietly but with intent.

The light lengthens at both ends of the day, catkins loosen into softness, snowdrops hold their ground and the green promise of daffodils inches towards the sun.

Long before it was a month of Valentine cards and half-term, February bore a name far richer and stranger: Sol-Monath, the Month of Cakes.

The name was recorded by the Venerable Bede (a name I will never not love) in 725AD in De temporum ratione, where he tells us that February was so called because cakes were offered to the gods.

For some time, scholars doubted him, arguing that ‘sol’ more likely meant mud, making it the muddy month, which would feel convincing to anyone who has crossed an English field in February.

Yet later discoveries revealed ‘sol’ used elsewhere to mean hearth-cake, restoring Bede’s quiet authority: the cakes were real after all.

Gale R. Owen, in Rites and Religions of the Anglo-Saxons, points to Scandinavian evidence of cakes baked in the shapes of gods or sacred animals.

Birds, boars, horses: creatures tied to fertility, strength, and the returning life of the land. Perhaps these cakes were offerings, coaxing the frozen world to soften, or perhaps they were practical magic of another kind, a way of feeding people when winter stores were running thin, turning the last eggs and flour into something sustaining and celebratory.

Either way, February becomes a hinge month, poised between scarcity and hope.

It is difficult not to see a line stretching from Sol-Monath to Pancake Day, recorded in England as early as the 15^th century.

Shrove Tuesday, from ‘shriven’, meaning to confess and be absolved, marked the final indulgence before the fasting of Lent when eggs, milk, and flour were used up in a final, joyous act of frying and feasting.

This year the date falls on 17 February, though the ritual remains remarkably flexible, happily absorbing sugar and lemon, jam, chocolate spread, bananas, or whatever the cupboard will yield.

Cake, then, persists, as it absolutely should.

It moves easily between pagan offering and Christian observance, between ritual and practicality.

At Twelfth Night, a cake hid a bean to crown the Lord of Misrule, at Christmas, puddings concealed charms that promised luck, thrift, or danger, while at Hallowtide, soul cakes crossed thresholds in exchange for prayers.

Even witch cakes, hard as stone and never eaten, guarded doorways against harm.

Perhaps the cakes of Sol-Monath were not meant for gods or people at all, perhaps they were gifts for the wider world, left to creatures, spirits, and weather alike.

Whether linked by lineage or by instinct, the making of cakes at one of the leanest times of the year feels deeply British: a shared custom, passed not by rule but by appetite.

Whatever February means to you and your ancestors, may it be bright, nourishing, and gently sweet.

Witch Cakes: baking against harm

Not all cakes were made to be eaten: some were made to stand guard.

Witch cakes, most commonly recorded in the 19th century, were objects of domestic protection - baked rock-hard and dried in the oven, they were never intended for the table. Instead, they were hung behind doors, tucked into chimneys, or placed near thresholds, where they acted as apotropaic charms, turning away witches and other malevolent forces.

Their ingredients were humble: flour, water, sometimes salt – often the water was replaced by something even more homegrown: urine.

Their power lay not in luxury but in intention because once baked, they were often studded with pins, nails, or thorns, though frustratingly little was recorded about how, exactly, these spikes were thought to work.

As with much folk magic, the mechanism mattered less than the act itself - the householder had done something by marking their boundary.

Witch cakes belong to a long tradition of defensive magic in the home, where baking and protection intertwine.

Bread and hearth cakes already held symbolic weight as staples of survival, but making one inedible transformed nourishment into guardianship.

What makes witch cakes particularly striking is their practicality.

They were cheap, quick to make, easy to replace, they required no priest nor specialist knowledge and in an uncertain world, a witch cake offered reassurance with minimal fuss.

Like many folk practices, they sit at the blurred edge between belief and habit.

Whether or not a witch ever turned away at the sight of a spiked cake, the presence of one behind the door must have been comforting, and in that sense, witch cakes worked their magic regardless.

Soul cakes and Hallowtide

At Hallowtide, the boundary between worlds thins.

Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day form a three-day pause in the year, concerned with the dead, the remembered, and the restless.

Food played a central role in this negotiation with the unseen, particularly in the form of the soul cake.

Soul cakes were small, spiced buns, often marked with a cross and during Hallowtide, groups known as Soulers would travel from house to house, singing or reciting verses in exchange for these cakes.

In return, they promised to pray for the souls of the household’s dead, easing their passage through Purgatory.

The exchange was both spiritual and practical: for poorer communities, soul-caking provided food at the onset of winter and for householders, it offered reassurance that their dead were not forgotten.

The cake itself became a vessel of memory, a tangible link between the living and the departed.

Though the custom faded in many areas, its echoes linger.

Trick-or-treating, with its doorstep performance and edible reward, is often seen as a distant descendant, all that has changed is the emphasis.

Where soul cakes focused on remembrance and intercession, modern sweets lean toward mischief and excess.

Yet the core of shared memory remains: food crossing a threshold, binding communities together, acknowledging that the dead still matter.

Birthday cakes and candle magic

One of the most widespread pieces of folklore in Britain today unfolds quietly at kitchen tables and party halls.

A cake is brought out and candles are lit, one for each year of life.

A wish is made, silently, and if all the candles are blown out in a single breath, that wish will come true.

Few people would describe this as magic, yet it fits neatly into the older pattern of candle lore as fire has long been associated with transformation, communication, and intention.

To speak a wish aloud risks weakening it, so it is held in the breath instead.

The cake itself becomes a temporary altar, the candles mark time, the years counted and acknowledged: the act of extinguishing them closes one cycle and opens another.

Like many successful folk customs, birthday candle magic is simple, repeatable, and joyful.

It requires no belief system beyond participation and children learn it instinctively, long before they learn the word folklore.

That such a practice thrives in the modern world suggests that folk magic has not vanished, it has merely changed clothes and moved into the everyday.

Pancake Day: A feast before fasting

Pancake Day sits comfortably at the crossroads of necessity and celebration.

Known formally as Shrove Tuesday, it takes its name from the act of being shriven: confessed and absolved before the 40 days of Lent.

The practical origins are well rehearsed: eggs, milk, and fats could not be used during the fast, and so they were gathered into a final meal.

Pancakes, quick and adaptable, offered the perfect solution and by the 15^th century, the custom was firmly established in England.

Yet Pancake Day also absorbed older rhythms: falling in February or March, it echoes Sol‑Monath’s concern with transition and survival.

The batter transforms in the pan, liquid to solid, pale to golden, watched closely lest it burn and even the flipping carries a hint of ritual risk.

Folklore grew up around the day.

Pancake races, particularly those involving aprons and frying pans, turned domestic work into public spectacle. Bells rang to call people to confession, but also, in some towns, to signal the moment when pancakes should be started.

Today, the fast has softened, but the feast remains, sugar and lemon sitting alongside more extravagant toppings, the day is less about abstinence and more about permission.

In that sense, Pancake Day endures because it speaks to something older than doctrine.

It acknowledges that winter is not yet done, but neither is hope: a warm pan, a simple batter, and the shared knowledge that indulgence, however brief, is sometimes exactly what is needed.

The February Folklore Calendar

February in folklore is a time of purification, transition and the first stirrings of spring, marked by Roman cleansing rites (Februa), Celtic Imbolc (the feast of St Brigid) for new life and Candlemas on February 2 for weather prophecy.

Here are some of the traditions that shape the month.

February 1: Imbolc is the second of the four great fire festivals and marks lambing season, ewes’ milk and the promise of Spring. St Bridgid’s Day honours this pagan goddess of the season. During the Imbolc ritual it was customary to pour milk (or cream) onto the earth.

February 2: Candlemas: The midpoint of winter, blessings of candles symbolised the returning light and marks exactly 40 days after Christmas, wrapping up the full celebration of Jesus’ infancy. Weather lore says: “If Candlemas Day be fair and bright, Winter will have another flight. But if it be dark with clouds and rain, Winter is gone, and will not come again.”

February 3: The Feast of St Blaize. The patron saint of people afflicted with throat complaints: during ceremonies, sufferers’ throats are blessed when touched by two candles bound together.

February 12-14: The Borrowed Days. These days were said to have been ‘borrowed’ from January and if they were stormy the weather would be good for the year, if they were fine, the weather for the year would be bad. In a similar way, the last three days of March were said to have been ‘borrowed’ from April.

February 13/14: Jack Valentine. Once upon a time, Valentine’s Eve was just as enchanting to the children of Norfolk as Christmas Eve, filled as it was with anticipation for the visit of Jack Valentine (also known as Father or Mother Valentine) who would leave a sprinkle of magic and small gifts. Snatch Valentine was Jack’s mischievous cousin who would play tricks on Valentine’s Eve.

February 14: Valentine’s Day. Originally a pagan priest in third century Rome, St Valentine became a Christian convert. He became the patron saint of lovers and sweethearts would profess their love on his feast day. The earliest known Valentine was send from Norfolk in 1477 from Topcroft near Bungay.

February 14: Valentine’s Day Fair in King’s Lynn. A fixture in this West Norfolk town since 1537 (40 years before Black Shuck turned up) the King’s Lynn art is the official start of the travelling showmen’s season and always opens on Valentine’s Day.

Shrove Tuesday: The timing of Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Day, is determined by the date of Easter, which varies each year based on the lunar calendar. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the full moon that occurs after the spring equinox. It is the final day of feasting before Lent, a Christian period of 40 days of fasting.

Ash Wednesday: The day after Shrove Tuesday. There was once an old tradition that saw children carrying a piece of twig from an ash tree in their pocket or sock on Ash Wednesday and if it wasn’t produced, children would have their feet trodden on.

Kissing Friday (the Friday after Ash Wednesday): English schoolboys were once ‘allowed’ to kiss girls without fear of punishment or rejection, a custom that lasted until at least the 1940s. We’re glad this tradition has died out…

The Norfolk Folklore Society and Laura Cannell bring Jack Valentine to life: the tale of Norfolk’s mysterious gift-giver, roaming the county on the night before Valentine’s Day. Spoken word, foley, and spellbinding fiddle weave together into something intimate, uncanny, and quietly enchanting.

Head over to Brawl Records HERE if you like what you hear and fancy sending a little bit of love back.

Written by Stacia Briggs
Narrated by Stacia Briggs and Siofra Connor
Composed, performed and produced by Laura Cannell (Fiddle)
Foley by Siofra and Stacia
Recorded and produced by Laura
Artwork by Matt Willis

We heard on the grape vine…

If the rain stays shy and the timing’s right,

with blushing hearts and candlelight,

a big House close to our hearts - warm and bright - may play host to a special visitor on Valentine’s Eve night…

There will be gifts for those that find us ❤️🖤

Hello, hello, hello my dear folky folk,

I know generally January is loved by people, but it’s my second favourite month. There is just so much to look forward to. Twelf

th Night with the Norwich Pagan Moot was absoultly magical up on Mousehold Heath. It snowed and it was the wolf moon. It was just so beautiful. I was honoured to play the part of the Sheringham Mermaid alongside a whole host of Norfolk folklore legends. I was literally glowing as I made a kind of rediculaus sparkling cape and a shell crown. I gifted the new champion a comb and a hag stone.

We also go to a wassail every year and this year the snow was still on the ground. We made rough music, listened to stories and filled our bellies with hot apple juice and homemade apple cake. It was splendid.

And finally I’m off to the Whittlesey Straw Bear Festival on Saturday. It’s one of my husband and mine favourtire day trips. We leave Norwich way too early, but get there in good time for the morning parade. We take our little camping stove to make breakfast on the way and watch the sunrise. It’s just the best.

While I have you, if you lostened to pur December podcast you’ll know we are cutting back on our live events this year. We are still doing anything we commited to and maybe a sprinkling of other bits and bobs, but we don’t have much booked in yet. The last few events are:

Wed 28 January - Carnival of Souls at Cinema City

We don;t have loads of tickets left so make sure you get yours soon. We’ll be sharing some history of the film and specially selected Norfolk folklore before the film. Matt Willis will be there with his Folklore Box offerings and prints of the amazing poster he designed for us. TICKETS HERE

Fri 6 February - East Anglian Folklore Centre fundrasing event

We are adveturing to Colchester to hang out with the EAFC as part of a live podcast recording, and we are pretty excited about it! You can get tickets HERE

And then we have one last film night in February. Date to be announced!

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

January comes quietly, after the doors have closed on Christmas and the decorations have been packed away, when the year feels raw and new.

This is a month of thresholds, of taking stock, of small, deliberate acts meant to carry us safely forward.

Traditionally, the new year begins not with resolutions but with wassailing.

Carried out on Twelfth Night, whether you count it as the 5th or the 17th of January, wassailing is an old, noisy promise made to the land. The word comes from waes hael, good health, and the ritual is simple enough: cider poured for the roots of apple trees, bread soaked in ale or punch, songs sung loudly and badly, sticks banged together, spirits chased off into the hedges.

It is not polite or quiet, but it is hopeful.

If you have no apple tree of your own, you may borrow one. A tree you have taken windfalls from, perhaps, or hope to later in the year. The tree won’t mind. The neighbours might, but that has always been part of the tradition.

Some people hang bread ornaments from branches, others leave offerings for birds, who are hungry now and deserve kindness. Water too, if the frost has hardened the ground: even the smallest acts matter in January.

This is also the month when life begins to show itself again, cautiously as snowdrops begin to push through frozen soil, proof that winter, however long it feels, is never the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.

Happy new year, friends!

Stacia X

The Ghost of Sandy Lane, Dereham

Some roads hold their stories close, revealing nothing by day and everything after dark. Sandy Lane, on the edge of Dereham, recorded a string of stories between the late 1960s and early 1970s, all bound by cold nights and the peculiar stillness that settles over roads after midnight.

The first came from a woman walking home after an evening with friends: it was 11.55pm and the lane was quiet, the air sharp.

Ahead of her she noticed a man, perhaps 30-years-old, walking slightly oddly. He turned towards a weeping willow in a nearby garden.

She stopped to watch: it was then she realised he was not walking on the path at all, but rather floating a foot above it.

There were no footsteps or sound. He appeared to descend invisible steps, turned to face her fully, and then began to disappear, not suddenly but gradually, dissolving piece by piece into the darkness.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she later said, “but I know what I saw.”

After the story appeared in the local newspaper, others came forward.

A teenage girl claimed she had seen a transparent man sitting calmly in a chair in her Sandy Lane bedroom more than a year earlier.

She could see the wallpaper through his body and that he was wearing knee-length breeches, long stockings, and a frilled shirt, clothing out of step with the modern world.

Then came a cyclist, just after Christmas 1971, who encountered something worse: a headless figure on the lane.

Weeks later, in January 1972, postman Leonard Raines was starting his round at 6.30pm in bitter easterly winds when he drove up Sandy Lane.

In his headlights stood a man in a brown overcoat, staring blankly across a children’s play area. Only when Leonard drew closer did he realise the man had no head at all.

An open-minded postie, Mr Raines appealed through the newspaper to anyone who could shed any light on the mystery, the reporter noting: “If the figure he saw last Thursday was a person, he would like to her from him so that he could put his mind at rest.”

There are no records of anyone coming forward, although if they had, it presumably would have been difficult for them to tell their story without a head.

Bumbler’s Farm Poltergeist

There are places where history does not lie flat.

Instead, it folds back on itself, pressing past events into the present until doors slam, objects fall, and the past demands attention.

Bumbler’s Farm in Shelfanger was one such place, its reputation built not on a single event but on years of disturbance that grew louder the more the land was interfered with.

At the tail end of the 19^th century, Bumbler’s Farm became known for doors that opened by themselves, ornaments hurled from shelves, towel rollers spinning as if driven by unseen hands. A woman’s figure was seen again and again.

The story settled, over time, on Dinah Freeman.

Official records tell us she died in 1814 after escaping her sickbed during a fever and falling into a pond. Later tellings sharpened the edges: a land dispute, a throat cut, a heavy candlestick carried into the water.

When the pond was cleaned years later and the candlestick removed, the activity began in earnest. Doors slammed, objects flew, the figure returned.

The candlestick was put back.

Even then, the disturbances lingered. Long after the farm fell to ruin, people avoided the site: fear, like folklore, has a long memory.

Folklore Snippets: January 27 The Day of the Rat

In parts of China, January brings the Day of the Rat, when rats are treated with respect rather than fear. Grain and crackers are left out and people keep their distance.

The belief is simple: honour the rats today, and they will leave you in peace for the rest of the year.

It is an old idea, that even the most unwelcome creatures have their place and that survival often depends on negotiation rather than conquest.

January understands this better than most months.

Whittlesey or Whittlesea?

Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire is one of those places where history shows through the cracks, sometimes even in the spelling.

You may have noticed it written as Whittlesey and Whittlesea, often interchangeably. This is not a modern muddle, both spellings are old, both are correct, and both describe the place as it once was.

The name begins with an Old English personal name, usually Witla or Hwītel. The ending is where things diverge. -ey comes from ēg, meaning an island of dry ground rising from marsh while -sea comes from sǣ, meaning a lake or expanse of water. Before drainage, Whittlesey was both: a fen island set beside Whittlesey Mere, once the largest lake in lowland England.

Medieval scribes happily used whichever spelling fitted what they saw or heard, there was no need to choose.

When the mere was drained in the nineteenth century, the water vanished but the words stayed behind. Whittlesey became the town’s settled spelling, Whittlesea lingered on in maps, memory, and folklore, a ghost-name for a lost lake.

It feels entirely fitting that this place is also home to the Whittlesea Bear, that great shaggy presence hunted through the streets each January.

Part ritual, part revel, part winter defiance, the Bear carries echoes of older customs and the untamed fenland past. Like the name itself, it resists being neatly explained away.

The January Folklore Calendar

January is often dismissed as an empty month, a stretch of cold days waiting to be endured. Folklore knows better. January is crowded with customs, thresholds and small acts meant to steady the year as it begins.

Here are some of the traditions that shape the month.

Twelfth Night: 5th or 6th January (or 17th, depending on the calendar). Twelfth Night marks the official end of Christmas. By this night, all greenery must be taken down: holly, ivy, mistletoe. To leave them up is to invite misfortune.In some places, the greenery was burned. In others, it was fed to animals or returned to the earth. Evergreens had protected the household through the dark. Now they needed to be dismissed properly.

Wassailing: Traditionally on Twelfth Night. Wassailing is one of the oldest and loudest ways to greet the new year. Apple trees are toasted with cider poured at their roots, bread soaked in ale or wassail punch is placed in branches, songs are sung, pots are banged, sticks are beaten together. The aim is to wake the trees, frighten away malign spirits, and secure a good harvest.

La Befana: January 5 evening. La Befana is a folkloric figure in Italian culture, often depicted as a witch-like figure who rides a broomstick through the skies on the night before the Epiphany, January 5th. On this night, she visits children across Italy, bringing gifts to those who have been good throughout the year and leaving a reminder to those who may have been naughty.

Plough Monday: First Monday after Twelfth Night. Plough Monday marked the return to work after Christmas. Decorated ploughs were dragged through villages, accompanied by dancers, musicians, and ploughboys with blackened faces. Households were expected to give money or food and refusal risked symbolic punishment. The message was clear: the land would not be worked for free. Plough Monday reminds us that January has always been about labour, not leisure.

The Whittlesea Straw Bear Plough Monday, Cambridgeshire, future festival dates January 16, 17, 18 2026; January 15, 16, 17 2027; January 14, 15, 16 2028; January 12, 13, 14 2029. The Straw Bear emerges stitched from straw, dances through the streets, and is later destroyed to ensure renewal.

St Distaff’s Day: January 7. Also known as Rock Day, this marked the return to spinning and women’s domestic labour. Men traditionally attempted to disrupt the work, setting flax alight or stealing it. Women retaliated with water, wet cloths, and laughter.

St Hilda’s Day: January 13. Traditionally thought to be the coldest day of the year: it’s reported that on St Hilda’s Day in 1205, the Thames froze over.

St Agnes’ Eve: January 20. A quieter tradition. Young women were said to fast, remain silent, and perform small rituals before bed to dream of their future husbands. Rosemary beneath pillows, walking backwards to bed, no speaking and January dreams were believed to be truthful ones.

Burns’ Night: 25th January. A more recent tradition, but one that fits January perfectly. Poetry, whisky, haggis, warmth, and ritualised remembrance. Even if Robert Burns is not your usual reading, the impulse is ancient: to gather, to eat well, to speak words that remind us who we are.

Day of the Rat: Late January, dependent on the lunar calendar In parts of China, the Day of the Rat is a time to leave grain and crackers out for rats and keep one’s distance. The belief is simple. Treat the rats well today, and they will not trouble you for the rest of the year.

It looks like this might be the start of a series, werewolves next!

And while we have your attention…

We have another vintage horror film nit with Reel Connections. On Wednesday January 28, we have weirdness for you at Cinema City Norwich!

Join the Norfolk Folklore Society for a haunting night of spectral cinema as we present Carnival of Souls (1962), Herk Harvey’s eerie cult classic of life, death and the liminal spaces in between.

After surviving a car accident, Mary Henry tries to start anew - but something has followed her. Shadowed by a pale stranger and drawn to a deserted fairground, she begins to realise that the world of the living may not be where she belongs.

Low on budget but rich in atmosphere, Carnival of Souls is a masterpiece of dreamlike dread that went on to inspire The Night of the Living Dead and Twin Peaks.

Before the screening, we’ll introduce the film, exploring its folkloric themes and eerie influence, while Shuck Zine artist Matt Willis (poster coming soon!) will display his haunting artwork in the gallery.

Presented in collaboration with Reel Connections. Expect ghostly music and a DJ set before and after the film.

You can get your tickets HERE

Hello my dear Folklore Friends,

Well, there we go, another year gone in the blink of an eye. Stacia and I have had a year full of the weird stuff we love. We’ve had a sprinkling downs, but tons of ups so overall it’s been a good ‘un and we’ve loved hanging out with you all. We had a cosy chat about the highlights in this month’s podcast. That’s right, an actual normal podcast, just sitting down with a cuppa and some biscuits at Stacia’s house. Nowt fancy!

You can listen right here on Substack, or HERE is a link to our Spotify.

The next time we talk to you, Yule, Christmas, New Year, and Twelfth Night will have been and gone. And the Whittlesey Straw Bear Festival will be on the horizon. Hopefully we’ll see some of your lovely faces at these festivities (we’ll unofficially be at Arminghall Henge on Winter Solstice if anyone fancies braving a cold, muddy field), but if not, I’m sure we’ll catch you in 2026.

Love Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

December belongs to endings.

The old year stumbles into its grave, the nights draw out as long as they can bear, and for a brief, shimmering moment we live closer to the dead than to the living.

These weeks are thick with ritual, with folklore, with the telling and re-telling of stories. Some are meant to comfort. Others, the ones that last, are meant to unsettle and Norfolk, with its broad skies and its quiet lanes, has always excelled in the unsettling.

So let us sit a while, by fire or lamplight, and share some of the tales that belong to this dark season, Norfolk and Suffolk’s gifts to the dark season: wrens and white ladies, headless horses, singing roads.

Each story is a fragment of the county’s memory, a reminder that Christmas has always been more than tinsel and cheer, it is also a vigil, a time when the nights are longest, and the dead walk closest.

So, when you sit by your fire this year, raise a glass not only to absent friends but to the ghosts who keep company with us in the long dark.

They have been here longer than we have and they will be here long after.

And for now, just for a little while, they are ours to tell… thank you all for following, supporting and enjoying what we do and for letting the Norfolk Folklore Society into your lives. We wish you a spooky Christmas and a folky new year,

Love Stacia X

The Cutty Wren: The King of Birds

The wren is the smallest of birds, quick and secretive, hardly more than a heartbeat with feathers. Yet for centuries it was honoured as the King of Birds, a contradiction which tells you everything you need to know about folklore.

On St Stephen’s Day, Boxing Day to us now, the wren hunt took place. Bands of boys would catch a wren and parade it through towns and villages, knocking on doors, demanding coins. In some versions, the wren was buried in holly, its tiny body carried like a king upon a bier.

In Norfolk and Suffolk, the memory remains, and at Middleton in Suffolk, the Old Glory Molly Dancers perform each year with a wooden wren hidden in ivy. They dress in long, tattered coats and paint their faces with soot, the Lady wears a bonnet and skirts; the Lord is part scarecrow, part soldier.

A broom sweeps the ground, clearing away the old year, ready for the new.

When they chant the words: “Eyes to the blind! Legs to the lame! Pluck to the poor, bones to the dogs, say everyone!” the sound is both playful and strange, as though time has slipped and the voice of some older ritual is coming through.

The wren, bright-eyed and trembling, once bore the weight of sacrifice at midwinter.

It is not hard to imagine villagers long ago watching the tiny bird paraded, feeling the sting of the cold in their bones, and knowing instinctively that the season demanded a victim. That even the smallest life might keep the dark at bay.

Now the bird is carved from wood, safe, eternal. But the chill remains in the chant, in the stamping feet, in the memory of something older than Christmas.

The White Lady of Worstead

Norfolk is a county that overflows with White Lady ghosts.

Pale figures drift along lanes, stand by gates, haunt the upper rooms of halls, but the most famous belongs to the church of St Mary in Worstead, where she makes her presence known at Christmastime.

Her story begins in the 1830s, when a boastful man - a weaver, according to one telling - declared that he would sit in the church on Christmas Eve to prove that no such ghost existed.

He entered, strong in drink, and sat through the night.

In the morning he was found gibbering, broken, unable to speak sense, whispering only that she had come and sat upon his chest until he could not breathe. He died within the year.

Yet the White Lady is not only an omen of death: in 1975, a woman named Diane Berthelot visited the church while suffering ill health, sitting quietly in a pew, praying for healing.

A photograph taken by her husband later revealed the White Lady sitting just behind her, bonneted, calm, a presence both eerie and protective. Diane recovered soon after.

Here is the contradiction that makes ghost stories last: she is both destroyer and healer, curse and blessing, a figure who sits close at Christmas, neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but simply present.

The White Lady reminds us that in winter the boundaries are thin, and that not all who cross them mean us harm.

If you visit St Mary’s this December, pause a moment in the cold silence of the nave…you may feel her close behind you, as so many have before.

The Christmas Coach at Roos Hall

Not all Norfolk hauntings are so gentle. Some are brutal. Some come at a gallop.

On Christmas Eve, the villagers of Beccles listen for the approach of the coach at Roos Hall. The hooves strike first, heavy and fast, cutting across the frozen earth. Then comes the coach itself, black and gleaming, pulled by horses with no heads. The driver, too, is headless, though somehow he guides the team with terrible precision.

At the Hall itself, the coach halts. A woman descends. In some tellings she is beautiful, in others she is veiled, but in all, she carries a curse: to look upon her is to die before morning.

Roos Hall has long had a reputation for darkness. The oak that stands nearby is said to have grown from a gallows-post, its roots tangled with the bones of the executed. Walk around it six times and the Devil is supposed to appear. Inside the Hall itself, there are marks claimed to be the Devil’s footprint stamped into the stone.

But it is the Christmas Eve coach that endures, because it marries two opposites: the season of warmth, of hearths and carols, with the thundering arrival of death.

It reminds us that Christmas, for all its glitter, is built upon much older fears. That not every visitor comes bearing gifts. Some bring only silence, and the smell of horses that should not be breathing.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Singing Road

There is a road in Norfolk - I will not name it - that keeps its secret best in winter.

To walk it in daylight is nothing at all: a hedged lane, an unremarkable path between fields. But when the sun dips, and frost gathers at the edges, the road begins to sing.

At first it is a hum, high and thin, like the whine of wind across telegraph wires - but there are no wires here.

Then the hum swells, becomes voices. A choir. Hundreds of them, all at once. They sing no words you can recognise. Some say it is Latin, others that it is older, a language lost.

If you linger too long, the rhythm will catch you. Your breath will fall into step with theirs, your heart will match their beat - and that is when the danger begins.

No-one knows who the voices belong to but whatever the truth, the rule is simple: do not stop. Walk on. Fix your eyes on the horizon.

For those who pause too long on the Singing Road do not always return. And if they do, their voices are forever changed, hollow, as though part of them still sings in the dark earth below.*

*Permit me my own Christmas story. If, of course, it is a story and not an observation. Listen…can you hear the voices?

Thank you all for sticking with for another year. We promise to get back to sharing podcasts every month. We’ve even got the January 2026 episode in the bag!

’Tis time for our monthly catch-up, I hope you’ve all been keeping well!

I’ve had two lovely adventure to London recently.

Folky and weird highlights included:

Abney Park Cemetery, I’m gradually trying to visit all of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries. This is number three for me. It was very, very beautiful. I actually think autumn might be my favourite time of year to visit cemeteries, the colours and the atmosphere are just perfect.

The monuments weren’t as elaborate as those at Highgate or Kensal Green, but there were still plenty of interesting bits and bobs to spot. There was an area with what seemed like hundreds of very small gravestones, all dated around 1948 which really intrigued me. I’ve not managed to find out much about them yet. but I’ll keep looking. Abney Park gets extra marks for allowing dogs and having a café!

Ben Edge’s new exhibition, Children of Albion, at Fitzrovia Chapel. He was there, but I was far too shy to say hello. It was so cool to see his work in real life. The exhibition is on until 26 November.

Charles Dickens House Museum. Ok, not super weird, but I did spot a Babes in the Wood reference and learnt that Victorians sometimes kept hedgehogs in their kitchens as pest control! It was really interesting in there though, I would recommend.

The Vauxhall Miniature Village. I wouldn’t make a special trip for that one though. It’s super cute, but only about six houses.

Stacia’s dug up some brilliantly themed spooky nuggets for you this month. I hope you enjoy our November offering, it’s certainly something for you to sink your teeth in to…

Siofra

💚

A note from Stacia

This month’s newsletter is a vampire special, stitched together in honour of St Andrew, whose feast day on November 30 was once preceded by “Guarding the Garlic Night” and of Bram Stoker, born on November 8, whose Dracula changed the face of Gothic horror forever.

I have always been very fond of vampires. They are at once ancient and modern, terrifying and oddly tender, creatures that linger at the edges of belief.

Tales of blood-sucking spirits are older than Christianity: scratched into Persian pottery, whispered in Mesopotamia, feared in Greece and Rome.

In Eastern Europe they took their most enduring forms – the strigoi of Romania, the vrykolakas of Greece, the shtriga of Albania.

Folklore brims with the ways you might make a vampire, or stop one from rising.

Keen to repel a vampire? Try a sack of poppy seeds placed in the graveyard so the restless dead would be compelled to count each grain until dawn, lead your horse through churchyards to find the graves where the earth heaves and whispers and resort to garlic garlands, mustard seeds on rooftops, scythes hidden in coffins or, of course, the stake through the heart, if you find yourself with a little…problem.

Even here in Britain, we have not been free of vampiric rumours: Highgate in the 1970s, Birmingham in 2005.

And yet, for all the ways folklore tells us how to spot them, count them, and slay them, vampires endure, slipping through our stories again and again, as immortal as their legends promise.

So, draw the curtains, light a candle, and perhaps keep a clove of garlic handy: this month we walk with the unquiet dead.

In other news, I had my car MOTed this month.

Keep your silver bullets ready,

Love from Stacia X

A winter’s night. A haunted cinema. A cursed film.

On Thursday 20 November, step into the shadows of King’s Lynn’s Majestic Cinema for a chilling evening of folklore and vintage horror…if you dare.

The Norfolk Folklore Society joins forces with Reel Connections and the King’s Lynn Community Cinema Club to summon Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 cult masterpiece Cat People back to the big screen in a venue that already has ghost stories of its own…

Before the feature, folklorists Siofra Connor and Stacia Briggs will guide audiences through tales where the boundary between myth and nightmare blurs.

Siofra will unearth the legend of Norfolk’s very own big cat, the infamous Norfolk Puma, while Stacia will explore the secrets of the Majestic itself and introduce a film that stalks the line between desire and dread, all with the Society’s trademark shiver and a smile.

The evening begins with eerie folk horror artwork from Matt Willis (Shuck Zine/The Folklore Box) lining the corridor to Screen 2, with exclusive posters available to buy and a free commemorative badge for all who dare to attend.

The event also includes a short archive film from the East Anglian Film Archive, introduced by Guy Martin of Reel Connections.

Then the lights dim for Cat People: a taut, terrifying fable of desire, transformation and death, where shadows conceal more than they reveal.

You’ll never look at passion, or your pet cat, in quite the same light again.

Tickets: £6.95/£5.95 concession/£4.95 members at www.majestic-cinema.co.uk/event/103211

The Norfolk doctor who brought a vampire to life

In 1816, the “year without a summer,” Europe was cloaked in volcanic darkness.

On the storm-lashed shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician, John Polidori, told ghost stories by candlelight.

Out of that gathering came two monsters destined for immortality: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Polidori’s vampire.

Polidori’s tale, The Vampyre, transformed the mud-caked revenants of Eastern folklore into something new: an aristocratic predator, charming, seductive, and amoral.

From Lord Ruthven, Polidori’s creation, the lineage runs directly to Bram Stoker’s Dracula; without Polidori, there would be no Count.

But it was in Norfolk that Polidori’s story took its strangest turn.

The bright son of an Italian émigré, John William Polidori was just 19 when he qualified as a doctor, too young to practice, and easily dazzled by the famous Byron, who hired him as a travelling physician.

Their relationship soured, and Polidori eventually returned to England, arriving in Norwich at his father’s urging.

Here he moved into lodgings near Norwich Market and soon became a familiar figure in the city’s literary and scientific circles, joining the Philosophical Society, setting up a dispensary for the poor, and spending time with the Martineaus.

As a Catholic, he was welcomed as a guest at Costessey Hall by Lady Jerningham and her husband Sir George, where the fairytale turrets and chimneys became the backdrop for the last chapters of his life.

It was in the grounds of Costessey Hall that disaster struck: driving a gig through the estate, Polidori was thrown and suffered a serious head injury.

He lingered between life and death, receiving the last rites before eventually regaining consciousness, but he was never the same.

Friends whispered that the bright young man had been altered, Harriet Martineau writing: “If he had (happily) died then, he would have remained a hero in our imaginations. The few following years (which were very possibly all the wilder for that concussion of the brain) disabused everybody of all expectation of good from him.”

Still, he wrote.

He published essays, poems, and another supernatural novel. But his greatest creation was slipping from his grasp.

On April 1, 1819, The Vampyre appeared in print under Byron’s name and though Polidori protested, the damage was done: the world believed Byron had invented the vampire, and John was left embittered, side-lined, and increasingly unwell.

He died in 1821, aged just 25, from a self-administered dose of prussic acid and though the inquest softened the verdict, many believed it was suicide.

He was buried at St Pancras, his coffin later disturbed by railway works: like his own vampire, disinterred to walk again.

And so, Norfolk can lay claim to a strange piece of literary history: it was here, in Norwich drawing rooms and under the shadow of Costessey’s towers, that the doctor who first breathed aristocratic life into the vampire lived, worked, and fell.

Every time Dracula rises from the grave, there is a trace of John Polidori, the Norfolk doctor who gave the monster his first beating heart.

Nine strange facts about Bram Stoker

1. Until the age of seven, Bram Stoker could not stand upright. His mother, Charlotte, kept him entertained with stories from her childhood during a cholera epidemic: tales of mass graves, mistaken burials, and the living clawing their way back from the edge of death. Dracula began not with a vampire, but with a sickly boy in bed listening to his mother’s horror stories.

2. He claimed Dracula was born of a nightmare after eating too much dressed crab for supper. If true, it’s the most infamous seafood supper in literary history.

3. Stoker’s notes show his bloodsucker was first called Count Wampyr. Only after discovering the name “Dracula,” which he believed meant “devil,” did he swap it in. Somewhere in a forgotten drawer lurks the ghost of Count Wampyr.

4. Near the end of his life, Stoker published The Lair of the White Worm, a delirious tale of a monstrous serpent-woman, hypnotists, mongooses, and racial nightmares.

5. In preparing Dracula, Stoker scoured folklore from thirteen different nations: every place where tales of the dead rising to feed on the living could be found. He told one interviewer: “In the Middle Ages the terror of the vampire depopulated whole villages.”

6. An early version of Dracula begins with Stoker insisting it is no mere novel: “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place.”

7. During his civil servant years, Stoker began moonlighting as an unpaid theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. It was through this role that Stoker met his thespian idol, the formidable Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving, marking the start of one of the most important relationships in the author’s life. “Soul had looked into soul!” Stoker wrote of their first encounter. “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.”

8. Bram Stoker’s death on April 20 1912 was somewhat overshadowed by the sinking of RMS Titanic on April 15 of the same year. His wife Florence had told Stoker of the sinking as he lay in his death bed, an event that brought back painful memories. On April 13 1887, Florence and son Noel, 7 at the time, were travelling by steamship when the vessel hit rocks and sank. The pair were marooned at sea for 12 hours before being rescued, and 19 people drowned: it is thought this terror inspired Stoker to include a shipwreck in Dracula.

9. By request, Bram Stoker was cremated rather than buried, his ashes sealed in marble at Golders Green, with his son beside him. To see them now, you must ask permission.

The Thetford Vampire

In the soil of Thetford, beneath the quiet earth of our county town, a chilling discovery was made: a skeleton buried with all the marks of a vampire ritual.

Norfolk Heritage Explorer records that this Saxon grave had been disturbed shortly after burial: perhaps by those who feared the dead might rise again.

Medieval tradition dictated that suspected vampires were buried face down, decapitated, or pinned to the earth with a stake through the chest.

The aim was simple: stop the dead from walking. Thetford’s disturbed grave suggests that even here in Norfolk, people once believed the undead might stir.

This isn’t the county’s only brush with vampiric lore.

In Norwich, at the long-lost cemetery of St Margaret Fybriggate, a burial ground for criminals until the 15th century, a skeleton was found with a brick jammed into its jaw.

The practice mirrors one discovered in plague-ravaged Venice, where the dead were “muzzled” to prevent them feasting on corpses and spreading disease.

Such rituals show that fear of revenants was not confined to far-off Transylvania, but was alive and well in East Anglia.

Vampires, it was thought, caused plagues and drained the living.

Across Europe they were met with garlic, holy water, or even mustard seeds on rooftops, but in Norfolk, more practical measures were taken: bricks, stakes, and desecrated graves.

Thetford’s skeleton reminds us that long before Bram Stoker dreamt of Dracula arriving in Whitby, Norfolk folk were already on guard against the undead.

The vampire isn’t just a foreign import, it’s a shadow that has stalked our own fields and churchyards, hidden in plain sight beneath the flint and chalk.

Vampire Hunter Soup

If you’re worried about things that go bump in the night, or just fancy a warming bowl of seasonal comfort, this is the soup to keep you safe. Garlic-heavy, pumpkin-rich, and with a dramatic “bloody” drizzle, it’s the sort of thing Van Helsing might have whipped up before heading out at dusk…

Serves 4

Ingredients

2 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed

250g pumpkin (or butternut squash), peeled and cubed

3 whole heads of garlic (yes, really)

Olive oil

Salt and black pepper

1 tbsp dried oregano

1 litre vegetable stock

For the bloody topping

1 tsp olive oil

A few drops of red food colouring (oil-based works best)

Method

Preheat oven to 200°C (fan 180°C/gas mark 6).

Slice about 1cm off the top of each garlic bulb, leaving the cloves in their skins.

Place potatoes, pumpkin and garlic bulbs in a large roasting tin. Drizzle generously with olive oil, season with salt, pepper and oregano. Cover with foil and roast for 45–50 minutes, until the potatoes are soft and the garlic golden and fragrant.

Cool slightly, then squeeze the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins. Save a few whole cloves for garnish.

Tip the roasted veg into a blender or large pan, add the vegetable stock and blend with a stick blender until smooth. Adjust seasoning.

To make the bloody oil, mix the olive oil with the red food colouring.

Serve hot in bowls, topped with a roasted garlic clove and a swirl of bloody oil. Black lava salt makes a deliciously eerie garnish, if you can find it.

Best enjoyed by candlelight, with garlic bread on the side… just in case.

Hidden in plain sight: The Aylsham Mortsafe

Walk through the quiet churchyard of St Michael’s in Aylsham and you might miss it.

A patch of grass, a weathered stone, and then…there it is: a mortsafe, a heavy iron cage, its bars curled like the ribs of some buried beast, stretched across a grave.

It’s not decoration or a flourish of Victorian ironwork: it was once the last defence of the dead, because in the early 1800s, the Resurrectionists were abroad.

By day they were labourers, by night they were thieves, slipping into churchyards with spades and sacks – but they didn’t want gold or jewels, they wanted flesh and bone.

Fresh corpses fetched high prices from surgeons desperate to teach anatomy to their students. Bodies disappeared overnight. Families despaired. Fear grew.

So the mortsafe was born: in Scotland they were common, in England they were rare, but Aylsham has one still - a huge, iron frame, locked over a grave like a trap.

The idea was simple: once a few weeks had passed, the body beneath was no use to the anatomists, and the cage could be removed.

Until then, it kept the Resurrectionists out.

Stand beside it and picture the dark nights two centuries ago, when shadowy figures with shovels crept between the stones, when the dead were not safe in the earth, when even in death, you needed protection.

Hello my lovely folkly folk!

It’s been a busy few weeks, as it always seems to be between newsletters. I’ve been adventuring all over the place.

We gave a spooky tour around Sweet Briar Marsh for the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. It was really fun, and actually quite creepy in places. As usual, I haven’t listened back to the recording yet, but if it worked well, we’ll share it so you can listen while wandering the marsh yourself. I swear I heard some strange plinky plonky music in the wood, although Stacia says it was probably her phone…

I made my first trip to Kensal Green Cemetery in London. My favourite grave was Andrew Ducrow’s mausoleum. Ducrow was a circus stunt rider who died in 1842. It was absolutely covered in symbolism and is absolutely stunning. I haven’t been able to track down what crystal balls on a grave symbolise, so do let me know if you have any insights. I’m gradually visiting all of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries, with Abney Park next on my list.

Then I hopped across to the Netherlands for a visit to Efteling, my favourite theme park, and the Bosch Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch. The museum wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but there were some amazing models inspired by Bosch’s work. I bloomin’ love the creatures that came out of his brain! The cathedral there has a beautiful Mary chapel with a really interesting story associated with it. I’ve popped it on our Instagram if you’d like a read.

Back home in Norfolk, Stacia and I spent a very wholesome day at Gressenhall’s Apple Day, handing out rosettes to some excellent fancy-dress folk and taking part in the new tradition of “dusking” the orchard.

We also launched another scent with the Norfolk Apothecary (you can purchase it HERE). This time, the Norfolk Apothecary team took inspiration from the tale of the Witch of East Somerton.

I’ve been busy preparing for our upcoming talk at the Octagon Chapel as part of the Norwich Book Festival. And, if you fancy a spooky cinema night, tickets are now on sale for Cat People at the Majestic in King’s Lynn. Matt Willis has designed another amazing poster for us and will be there on the night selling his wares, and I’ll be sharing tales of the Norfolk Puma. Plus, it’s in King’s Lynn, which is full of fascinating folklore and ghost stories. What more could you ask for?! Get your tickets HERE

And last but not least, my husband has enabled my badge-making habit further with another machine, so expect to see teeny-tiny badges soon!

Have a wonderful Samhain. I’m sure I’ll have lots to catch you up on in November.

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

Ah, it’s Weird Christmas, the month we look forward to all year long…October really is our favourite month of the year, not least because Halloween shares the date with Siofra’s birthday. And while, if we’re honest, Halloween is a 365-days-a-year deal in this partnership, we still have a soft spot for the real thing when it finally rolls around.

We’ve got plenty brewing this season: a live Norfolk Folklore Society event at The Octagon Chapel on October 25 as part of the Norwich Book Festival (expect site specific scares). Then, over at my day job, the cobwebs are being dusted off for The Assembly House of Horrors IX Halloween Afternoon Tea, running October 18 to 31.

The House will also be the venue for our brand-new Bewitching Bazaar: A Halloween Makers’ Market, which will take place at The Assembly House on October 30 from 2pm to 8pm: expect curious crafts, eerie artistry, and plenty of seasonal spirit plus some familiar faces.

As always, it would be wonderful if you could like, subscribe and spread the weird word as far and wide as you can. The more people who join in, the stronger the magic.

Happy Halloween!

Stacia x

Making mischief before Halloween

Everyone knows about Halloween, but how many of us remember Mischief Night?

Once a widespread fixture in the calendar of pranks and play, this half-forgotten custom was the anarchic little brother of All Hallow’s Eve, celebrated with glee across much of the country.

Mischief Night has been recorded since at least the eighteenth century, though its exact date has shifted depending on where you lived.

In parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire it tended to fall on 4 November, the eve of Guy Fawkes’ Day, honouring the rebellious spirit of the Gunpowder Plot.

Elsewhere, notably in the north-west, it took place on 30 October, as though Halloween itself needed a warm-up act.

Here in Norfolk, Mischief Night took on a more enchanted flavour. According to the National Trust, it was believed that elves rode through villages on the backs of cats. While the elves delighted in their steeds, the cats’ owners were less enthusiastic, and many would keep their pets locked safely indoors on that night.

Alongside this otherworldly belief, more familiar tricks were recorded: treacle-smeared door handles, honey daubed across knockers, and even the old fiery prank of placing manure in a paper bag, setting it alight and waiting for an unlucky householder to stamp it out.

Such traditions echo, in a gentler way, Norfolk’s own Jack Valentine custom of February 13, where anonymous gifts and pranks were left on doorsteps. Both reveal a streak of playful misrule woven into the county’s past.

Though the more riotous side of Mischief Night has largely faded, particularly in Norfolk, it still lingers in parts of the north-west, where children expect – and adults dread – an evening of cheek and chaos. Its roots reach back further still, to the seventeenth-century custom of “Lawless Hours,” when social rules were briefly suspended and tricks such as cabbage-stalk throwing or gate-swapping were given free rein.

Halloween may dominate the calendar today, but Mischief Night reminds us that our ancestors relished more than one opportunity to turn the world upside down.

The horrible herring pies of Norwich

Norwich may seem rather a long way from the sea these days, but once upon a time the city had a curious connection with herrings.

In fact, there was an ancient custom that every year the first catch of the season had to be baked into pies and sent to the King, no matter where he happened to be in England.

These weren’t any old fish pies: each was to be stuffed with the freshest herrings, five to a pie at least, and laced with half a pound of ginger, a quarter of cinnamon, a sprinkling of cloves, long pepper and grains of paradise (a medieval favourite somewhere between cardamom and pepper).

In October 1629, however, disaster struck. A royal letter arrived sniffily informing the good sheriffs of Norwich that the pies were simply not up to standard.

The pastry was weak, “not well baked in good and strong payste as they ought to have been,” the herrings were suspiciously meagre - sometimes only four instead of five! - and worst of all, there was doubt whether the fish were even the first herrings of the season.

Imagine the scene: Norwich’s dignitaries standing red-faced at the Guildhall while a messenger from the King’s household reeled off the list of complaints.

The pastry crumbled at the wrong touch, the spice was unevenly mixed, and the herrings, frankly, tasted a little tired. His Majesty demanded better pies immediately.

For all this royal displeasure, the sheriffs received in return for their efforts six loaves, six dishes, a flagon of wine, a flagon of beer, some hay and oats for the horses, and a clutch of candles.

Not exactly a generous exchange for carting dodgy herring pies halfway across the kingdom, but perhaps it was safer than having the King himself spit one out.

Over time, as Norwich became more landlocked and Yarmouth took over the herring trade, the custom fizzled away. Today all that remains is the memory of the Great Herring Pie Scandal, when pastry failed, fish went missing, and Norwich found itself in hot water, or perhaps more accurately, in undercooked pastry.

So, if your Halloween baking goes awry this October, take heart. At least you won’t have a furious king on your doorstep demanding better pie.

The magical stone of Southery fell at Halloween and marked the gateway to hell

It fell to earth during a storm on Halloween and marked the gateway from Norfolk to hell: was the Southery stone a visitor from outer space and why did naked women sit on it for good luck?

As with all the best tales, it began on Halloween during a thunderstorm when a stone from the sky crashed into a small Fenland village on the very edge of Norfolk which locals believed created a hole that led straight to the jaws of hell.

It’s where the village sign stands today – it’s nice to mark something special.

In October 1642, as the first English Civil War raged across the land, the skies were equally tempestuous.

Thunderstorms illuminated the sky on October 31 and in Southery, villagers saw a mighty bolt of lightning strike the earth close to the old mill.

The next morning, the local parson went to investigate and found a large hole in the ground where the supposed lightning had struck.

Inside the hole, a fierce fire burned for several days until it was extinguished by rainfall of almost Biblical proportions: in Southery, rumours began to fly.

Some said that the hole was the opening to a tunnel which led directly to hell, and it became known as The Way In.

Over the following year, Southery’s parson began to act in an erratic manner and, by 1643, he had disappeared without trace.

By this time, the mysterious hole, created on a dark and stormy night, had filled with water and its named had telescoped to the Wayin Pond.

Years later, the decision was taken to drain the pond and clear it of debris.

There, under thick layers of mud, a strange blue stone was found and alongside it, the skeleton of a man wrapped in iron chains: was it the parson?

The Southery parish registers date only from 1706, so no mention is made of the poor wretch found in Wayin Pond.

Opposite the pond was a pound, where animals whose owners owed taxes were held until debts were paid or animals were sold, where stray livestock was kept and where local n’er do wells who needed to sleep off a skinful of ale could avoid a furious spouse.

The stone was taken there to become a kind of makeshift seat outside the stone building.

Quickly, the boulder earned a reputation for having magical powers and became a magnet for locals, who attributed a host of superstitious beliefs to the rock.

Women who were in pain from joint problems would visit the stone at midnight, shed their clothes and sit on top of it naked in the hope of being cured, farmers believed it could foretell the weather - if rain was imminent, it was said that the stone would sweat.

Villagers would spit on the stone to ensure good fortune and a virile 80-year-old credited the Southery Stone with his ability to still be able to father children - every day he drank the dew that collected on top of the stone, although of course it could have been saliva…

When preachers visited the village, they would use the stone as an al fresco pulpit - gradually, the new parson grew tired of the obsession with an inanimate piece of rock and declared that everyone was effectively worshipping a piece of space debris, a meteorite which had shattered as it broke up in the atmosphere.

To hammer home his point, he had the stone removed and placed in a garden on the King’s Lynn to Cambridge road where it enjoyed a peaceful retirement as a buttress for a garden wall.When writer Trevor Heaton went in search of the magical stone of Southery, his investigations led him to Stocks Hill at the junction of Westgate, Upgate, Church Street and Common Lane at the spot where Hill House stood until the 1950s, when it was demolished and - it seems - the stone was removed.

The Wayin, or Waring, pond was filled in many years ago and the village sign stands on the spot where the magical stone was found - as an aside, another meteorite was observed falling to earth in Woodbridge in the same year and lightning struck twice in Southery when, on July 17 1848, Samuel Douglas died when he was struck by a bolt in his own bed.

Whether the gateway to hell in Southery has been completely closed, however, is an altogether different issue.

Hidden in plain sight: The Wellington Arches in Great Yarmouth

The largest mid 19th century brick round headed arch is situated at the southern end of Wellington Road. The Wellington Arch is to the north of the Kimberley Terrace and was built in 1846 by John Brown. It is a brick round headed arch with capitals and flat pilasters on each side supporting the arch with a cornice and parapet above. This was the north entrance to the planned Victoria estate. The Wellington Mews Arch is on the other side of Camperdown. In the 1840s, there were plans to gentrify Yarmouth to capitalise on the influx of holiday visitors thanks to the new railway lines: they never materialised.

Before a wonderful audience, we shared an intriguing new photo taken recently in Norfolk (see below!) and welcomed our special guests, Anne and Tom. The shared their unforgettable and haunting encounter with Black Shuck. Their storytelling and scene-setting are nothing short of magical, and it was an honour to have them with us.

The atmosphere at the festival was incredible. We had such a great time meeting listeners, swapping stories, and celebrating folklore, history, and the paranormal. Thank you to everyone who came along and supported us.

You can listen right here on Substack or over on Spotify LISTEN HERE.

If you’d like to see us live, the are still tickets available our show at the Norwich Book Festival. You can get tickets HERE. We’ll be announcing more events soon, so keep an eye out.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Siofra & Stacia

💚

Hello my lovely folky folks,

I hope you are enjoying the turn towards autumn. ‘Tis my favourite time of year. Since we last spoke I went on a little adventure to North Somerset and South Wales (I shared that on Instagram, so I won’t bore you with the details here). I also started collecting bits for my new dolls house. I even found some teeny tiny hagstones, which I’m pretty excited about! And I had a go at Morris dancing. Turns out I can’t dance in time with other people or music, so I won’t be pursuing that.

We’ve got a couple outings coming up between now and the next newsletter and it would be lovely to see you out and about.

• September 24 - A walk around Sweet Briar Marshes. We’ve been invited by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust to lead a walk around the marsh as the sun sets. We’ll have lantern and spooky stories. We are sold out, but we’ll be recording it as a podcast so all going well we’ll be able to share with you.

• October 4 - LoreFolk. Not an official Norfolk Folklore Society connection, but I think if you like what we do, you might be interested in this too.

• October 12 - Gressenhall Apple Day. We aren’t technically officially at Apple Day, but we will be there for a day out. We’ll have badges, so if you see us come say hello and add a special badge to you collection.

• October 25 - Norwich Book Festival live podcast. Ok, ok, this one is after our October newsletter, but I figured the isn’t any harm in reminding you. We’ll be at the Octagon Chapel telling spooking stories and sharing some weird historical nuggets from the area. It’ll be a great way to start Halloween week and there are still tickets available HERE.

That’s it from me this month. It’s pretty tough out there right now, so be kind to each other and take some time out to enjoy the change in the seasons. I’d love to see what you get up to, so make sure you tag us in your weird folky adventuring. whether that’s in Norfolk or further afield!

See you soon,

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

I’ve written A LOT this month, so I will keep this very short. On September 1, it was a year since my beloved husband Richard died. Escaping into a little bit of folklore and magic has helped me in what has been the very worst year of my life. Thank you for enjoying what we do and giving me the chance to write about ghosts and monsters, which – of course - are nowhere near as terrifying as the bad things that happen in real life.

Love Stacia x

The church where the air turned hostile

On a golden autumn afternoon in 1971, writer and paranormal investigator Joan Forman set out with a friend for a gentle countryside drive. By the end of the day, they would flee a picturesque Norfolk village under the shadow of something they could only describe as ‘evil’.

Forman was no stranger to the strange. Author of The Mask of Time, Haunted East Anglia and other volumes on hauntings, timeslips, and death-survival experiences, she spent her life gathering first-hand accounts of the uncanny. But on this day, the story would be her own.

Having moved to Norfolk from Lincolnshire earlier that year, she was still exploring her new county when a visiting friend suggested a drive towards Breckland. The road led them to a village that seemed lifted from a postcard: a neat green, pretty cottages, and a welcoming church.

At first glance, it was idyllic. But as they walked from the car, details jarred. The once-charming cottages, seen up close, were shabby, many standing empty - the church, however, beckoned.

Inside, the nave was cool and damp.

At first it seemed no more than that, but the atmosphere thickened, the chill turning into a tangible oppression.

“My friend Mary stopped looking at the pews and floor inscriptions,” Forman later wrote.

“She was standing stock still, a frown on her face. Our eyes met briefly. She said, ‘It’s not very pleasant in here, is it?’ And it was getting less so every minute.”

They walked towards the chancel, hoping the sensation might lift. Instead, it grew stronger: so strong that, by the altar, Forman felt not just oppression but “active and evil hostility…almost insupportable.”

Mary broke first, hurrying down the aisle and out into the daylight. Forman lingered for a few minutes more, only to feel the full force of that hostility fixed upon her alone. She fled.

Outside, the pair hurried to the car, only to find it spattered with strange, green, sticky droplets, running down the bonnet and windscreen. There were no overhanging trees, no birds, no other vehicles nearby and the substance was unlike anything they had seen before.

Mary, a Norfolk native, gave her verdict: “I think it’s witchcraft. The county has a reputation for it.”

Forman could find no explanation.

The village’s name she kept to herself, though local archaeology hints at deep roots: near the church, excavations have uncovered Neolithic remains, including a stake-hole within a pit, possibly a marker post or sign of ritual use.

Was it merely an unpleasant atmosphere born of damp and decay, or had they stepped, quite by accident, into a place where something far older still lingered?

Bringing the harvest home in Norfolk

September in Norfolk is a month of gold.

Stubble fields shimmer in the low light, the scent of cut straw hangs in the air, and the last of the swallows gather on telegraph wires before heading south.

The harvest is in, the barns are full, and, if we were living a hundred or two hundred years ago, this would be a time for feast, for folklore, and for the deep satisfaction of work well done.

Across Britain, and particularly in East Anglia, harvest was once not just a season but a sequence of ritual acts designed to thank the land for its bounty and to coax its spirit into returning next year.

The final sheaf of wheat or barley was said to hold the harvest spirit, a living essence that could not simply be left in the field. In some parts of the country it was “Crying the Neck,” in others “Cutting the Mare,” but here in the East, that spirit was often plaited into a corn dolly and kept safe in the farmhouse until sowing time returned.

In Whittlesey, the Whittlesea (look out in January for the reason why the two have different names) Bear is made from the best quality straw from the previous year’s harvest for the festival that ends in a ritual burning across the border in Cambridgeshire.

Much of the back-breaking harvest work was done by travelling gangs of casual labourers who moved from farm to farm, announcing themselves with the rasp of their scythes on cobbles.

Each group elected a Harvest Lord, the spokesman and leader, who negotiated the gang’s pay, often sealed with a shilling and a pint of ale for each worker. His second-in-command, the Harvest Queen, helped lead the line of reapers and presided over the more ceremonial side of the season.

In Norfolk and Suffolk, the last cart to leave the field was sometimes called the Hollerin’ Pot or the Horkey Load. Perched on top might be the Harvest Lord and Lady, or a young girl garlanded with flowers, cheered along the lane while buckets of water were thrown over them to bring luck with the weather ahead.

The Horkey Supper that followed was legendary: an evening of ale, laughter, and songs (most of them too coarse to repeat), with the Harvest Lord crowned in painted and decorated horns.

Harvest time also carried its own weather lore.

A fieldfare arriving early was a sure sign of a hard winter to come.

The last skeins of geese honking overhead were watched as omens, while on river and mere, eels began their mysterious final journey back to the Sargasso Sea to breed and die, a reminder that every living thing moves in time with the turning of the year.

Today, most of us no longer reap or stack, but the impulse to gather, share food, and tell stories endures.

Whether your harvest comes from an allotment, an apple tree, or the farmers’ market, September invites us to pause in the golden light, honour the abundance of the season, and take our place, however small, in the great, unbroken cycle of the year.

Fire in the water

For hundreds of years, fishermen in Norfolk would rely on “the burning” – the glowing sea trail of the boat in front to guide them home on dark, moonless nights. In summer and early autumn, marine phosphorescence is at its shining best.

During the day, North Norfolk’s salt marshes are flushed with purple sea-lavender, but at night they can transform into an eerie fairyland, leaving footprint trails glowing with a spectral green light.

Fishermen regularly report hauling out nets of liquid light, landing crabs and herring which shine softly, while shimmering streamers can be sent sparkling through the water like marine fireworks by the blade of an oar or the prow of a boat.

Phosphorescence is not to be confused with Will o’ the Wisps, the flickering blue flames seen burning over marshland which have been woven into folklore for centuries.

Although phosphorescence is similarly romanticised, the ‘sea fire’ is, in fact, the work of huge clouds of algae which, like certain kinds of bacteria, fungi, fish and fireflies, use chemical energy to release light.

In summer and early autumn, the rich nutrients in the North Sea trigger massive growth of microscopic algae, which in turn are grazed on by an army of ‘zooplankton’, equally minuscule sea animals.

At night, some of these algae glow brightly with phosphorescence, generally a bluish-green light, although in some parts of the world, it can appear as a rainbow of light in shimmering shades of gold, purple, silver and orange.

The incredible spectacle of heatless light in the water was first documented by the ancient Greeks in 500BC and later, in the 15 th century, voyagers commented on the “burning sea” phenomenon.

“Mysterious lights in the water” were witnessed at first hand by Christopher Columbus in 1555 while 100 years later, prolific diarist Samuel Pepys boarded The Prince and set sail, commenting: “In our way I was surprised, and so were we all, at the strange nature of the sea-water in a darke night, that it seemed like fire upon every stroke of the oare and, they say, is a sign of winde.”

A far more recent, and vivid account of Pepys’ ‘fire’ comes from Norfolk author Rafaella Barker, who remembers being enchanted by the phosphorescence she first saw as a teenager at Cley, when she was living in nearby Itteringham with her parents.

Indeed, the experience was so profound that it went on to form the basis of her first novel for teenagers, aptly called Phosphorescence, about Lola, a 14-year-old who has grown up on the North Norfolk coast.

In the book, Lola writes a school project about the magical glowing seas she has loved throughout her childhood. She writes: “Phosphorescence means shining in the dark: luminous without combustion.

“In August, in Norfolk, the sea warms to the point where the algae become phosphorescent. If you swim at night in the moonlight, you become luminous, the water droplets around you sparkle green fire, your skin drips like sequins and you seem to be made of glittering scales.

“You are a mermaid when you swim in phosphorescence, and you glow in the dark.”

Lola’s descriptions are based on Rafaella’s own teenage experiences of night-swimming in phosphorescence when each stroke through the water would send sparks flying from the tips of her fingers as if she were a wizard casting a spell.

“I remember swimming at Cley in the moonlight and seeing the most amazing glow. You get it in August and September, at night, and it’s absolutely magical,” she said.

A fisherman writing on a sea-fishing website has similar memories, recalling growing up on the North Norfolk coast in the 1950s and seeing glowing light in the waves.

“I can remember being scared as a child because glowing footprints were following me on the salt marshes,” he said.

Create your own bioluminescence at home:

Try this simple, but illuminating, experiment which allows you to create ‘mouth lightning’ using just a packet of extra-strong mints.

Technically, you are creating triboluminescence, light produced by impact or friction, but let’s not tangle with terminology.

You will need:

• An extra strong mint (some people swear you can also use Polo mints)

• Pliers

• A very dark room – an under-the-stairs cupboard is ideal.

• Mirror

Procedure:

This experiment must be performed in absolute darkness. Turn off all lights in and near the room you are using and, when your eyes adjust, if you discover light is leaking in under a door or through a window, cover it or find an alternative location.

Carefully, but quickly, crush the mint with the pliers and watch the flashes of blue-white light sparking from the sweet as it breaks.

Now for the real fun: with your mouth open like a rude child at the dinner table, chew some pieces of the sweet while looking in the mirror and watch the flashes inside your mouth.

Magic.

Hidden in plain sight: The ghost signs of Great Yarmouth

Let us direct you to this excellent guide to the ghost signs of Yarmouth, which does the job far better than we could.

That said, we were particularly taken aback by this story, regarding the Old Post Office at 19-20 Regent Street.

“On June 18th 1881 legend has it that a human skeleton and that of a small monkey, were found by two clerks exploring the roof. When removing some tiles from the roof to let light into the pitch dark space, the clerks discovered an iron bedstead enclosed at the sides, head and foot by wood.

“Upon it were the two skeletons, which fell to dust when touched. The premises, which had been acquired by the Government for use as a post office, had previously been the property of Dr Cox, however the skeletons remained a mystery.”

Recorded in the basement of The Holloway in Norwich, hidden beneath St Benedict’s Street, this episode was captured before a live audience, though we can’t promise it was only the living who joined us.

We explore the rich history of the area and share eerie tales from the neighbouring street, including paranormal encounters on Exchange Street and Pottergate.

After recording, we found out that the building is definitely haunted. The owner of The Holloway has had a couple of unexplainable things happen in there. Pop in and ask him about them!

You can listen right here on Substack or over on Spotify - LISTEN HERE

We had such a great evening. As ever, our audiences are just the best. We hung around for ages chatting and catching up with folks. If you’d like to come along to see us, we have another live recording coming up as part of the Norwich Book Festival. You can get tickets HERE.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Siofra & Stacia

💚

We are kicking off our Wednesday talk season in November with a very exciting speaker. Tickets will go back to our usual two week before the event launch with a small capactity after this one, but this one is a big one for us so we wanted to get tickets out earlier than usual.

So, without futher ado…

We’re thrilled to welcome our friend Viktor Wynd as our very special speaker at the Norfolk Folklore Society with a magical evening of Dark Fairy Tales from his new book: be warned, these are not the Ladybird or Disney versions and may not be suitable for the most tender ears…

On a winter’s night, Mr Wynd will be telling some of his favourite tales which have been collected on his world travels and which include nasty Europeans chopping up people and eating them and disgusting and macabre (yet delightful) tales from Borneo.

You may learn about the birth of the leeches, the reason mosquitos are always buzzing around human ears, why it is best not to suckle caterpillars – or indeed strange babies - and something about bedbugs that might give you nightmares.

There could be tales of giant octopuses, man-eating pigs and a buried moon from Papua New Guinea, or possibly shapeshifting magical creatures from Wales, the Good People of Ireland, the Sea Merrow, a Scottish Selkie, Scandinavian trolls and an illicit love affair with an Ice Bear.

The tales will be accompanied by live music from Walberswick legends The Blackshore Collective.

Viktor Wynd is proprietor of London’s eponymous (nay infamous) Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and UnNatural History, and Chancellor of the pataphysical Last Tuesday Society and he has spent the last 25 years telling stories to audiences across the globe.

Fascinated by traditional fairy tales, his repertoire includes tales from the Brothers Grimm, Arabian Nights, Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Ireland, Africa, Papua New Guinea and North America – so far.

Viktor Wynd's Dark Fairy Tales is published by Prestel on September 9 and he is also the author of The Cabinet of Wonders (Prestel 2014) and The UnNatural History Museum (Prestel 2020).

He will be selling signed copies of his book on the night.

In 2020 he was the subject of a major exhibition, Viktor Wynd's UnNatural History Museum at The National Maritime Museum. When not leading expeditions to New Guinea, West Africa and the Amazon, he lives with his family, ever-growing menagerie, overflowing botanical and other collections just outside Halesworth.

www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org

A note about our venue:

The Carrow House Orangery provides a fittingly enchanting setting for our events. Originally part of the Colman estate, this glasshouse, adorned with ornate ironwork and stained glass, now shelters us for these magical gatherings. Gorgeous as it is, the orangery comes with its quirks: the chill of the glasshouse can bite with the evening air. We encourage layers! Blankets and chairs are provided, tea and coffee is available.

Getting to Carrow House:

Carrow House is located on King Street, NR1 2TG, with free parking available on site. For precise navigation, use the What3Words address either.scuba.ended to find the entrance to the car park. Please note that it can be quite dark at night, so take care as you arrive.

Warm wishes,

Siofra and Stacia x

Woah, that was an intense month! I’m so sorry we’ve been a bit quiet on the ole socials. Turns out making giant puppets, planning a whole day of speakers, then carrying said giant puppet and hosting that day of talks (which included two performances — not sure “performance” is quite the right word for what we do, but you get the idea) is… quite a lot. I’m just about back to normal, but I’m still a tiny bit behind with podcast editing and social posts. But let’s talk about that weekend…

We had SO much fun at the Bungay Black Shuck Festival. It was a lot of work (so much work) but so rewarding. I’m so proud of everything we did. Saturday was all about the puppets. I can’t thank our folky friends puppet gang enough — it was just so good for my soul to work with such an amazing bunch of creative, funny, and kind people. We’d never made puppets before, let alone massive ones, and they turned out so well. We had so much fun making them, and I think the love and enjoyment comes across in their auras. They’re full of magic.

So thank you to Matt, Dee, Simon, Ian, Hayley, Mae, Chloe, Peanut, Penny, and Clive. You are all just awesome, and I can’t wait for our next project. And thank you to our lovely assistants on parade day, Sally, Janine, Stacia and the children who carried our mermaid’s tail. We didn’t get your names, but we couldn’t have done it without you!

Sunday was our day of talks, based at the Bungay Fisher Theatre. It’s such a lovely venue and the staff were so helpful. We invited a whole load of amazing speakers who travelled to little old Bungay from all over the country, and we were thrilled when they said yes. They offered a wonderfully varied day of talks for our audience, and from the feedback we’ve had, they all went down really well. I think we had at least 75% of seats full.

So, if you’re reading this — thank you Anne & Tom, John-Henry, Lucy, Kate, Deborah, and Lally. You are the best.

But really, the best bit of the whole weekend was everyone who came along. You’re all so lovely, thank you so much for being there. Hearing you say such kind things about the puppets and what we do was just the best. I sometimes doubt myself, so hearing in person how much you enjoy our shenanigans really meant a lot. I’d convinced myself we’d be having a long break from talks, but I think I’ve changed my mind, thanks to you all being so nice.

Siofra 💚

A note from Stacia

By the time you read this, the Black Shuck Festival will be in our rear-view mirror and we’ll have introduced the Witchfinder General to you at Cinema City, two events that filled our summer with spectral shadows, eerie tales, and your excellent company.

It’s been a very busy year for the Norfolk Folklore Society, and we are so humbled that you’ve come along for the journey, joining us at events, listening to our podcast, sharing stories, and championing local lore with such enthusiasm.

As August stretches out, golden and strange, we begin to feel the turn of the year. Lammas marks the start of the harvest and whispers of autumn ride on the warm wind; hedgerows grow heavy, evenings darken at the edges, and the folklore grows riper by the day. It’s the perfect time to lean into the magic, to walk out at dusk, to look for omens in the sky and stories in the fields.

We say it every month, but it’s worth repeating: if you love this (free!) newsletter, please do like, share or recommend it. Every interaction makes us more visible, which helps more people discover our work and more support means we can keep doing what we do best: digging up forgotten tales, hosting strange gatherings, and keeping Norfolk’s folklore alive.

Let’s dive in to some classic tales…

Love Stacia x

The Phantom Postman of Hopton

When the sea fret rolls in off the North Sea, it brings with it more than just mist and chill…in Hopton, it carries a figure who seems to stride across time itself.

Along the A47, once the old A12, several drivers have encountered the eerie figure of the Old Man of Hopton, a spectral pedestrian who appears, crosses the carriageway with unnatural deliberation, and then vanishes. Some have even driven straight through him.

The most famous sighting came from Frank Colby of the British Transport Police in November 1980. Driving with his wife on the new Hopton bypass, he braked sharply as a figure appeared ahead: stocky, hunched, clad in a shapeless coat, and lifting heavy boots high as he plodded across the dual carriageway. The misty figure seemed to glow slightly, and Colby could see the road markings continuing through it. His wife, sitting beside him, saw nothing.

Colby’s report was investigated by local researcher Ivan Bunn and published in the Lowestoft Journal on Christmas Eve, ensuring this ghost story found its way into many festive households.

The tale chimed with older reports. In 1957, Roger Hammersley and a friend separately witnessed a tall man in a fawn overcoat and enormous boots crossing the same stretch of road…only to vanish before their eyes.

And in 1981, on a wet November night, Andrew Cutajar watched a misty form solidify into a man with long straggly hair and a cape-like coat. He braked desperately, skidding through the figure and ending up facing the wrong way on the verge. Others have spoken of feeling inexplicably uneasy on this road, long before any ghost stories reached print.

One possible identity for this phantasmal walker is William Balls, Hopton’s devoted postman, who died in 1899 after collapsing in a field near the road. Warned by his doctor to rest or die, he is said to have replied: “What am I to do? I must do my duty.” On the day of his death, he began his round at 6am and was found collapsed by 10.30am, having never stopped.

Buried at Hopton’s ruined church - visible from the road - William Balls still walks, perhaps, caught forever in service, striding from mist to mist, one last letter in hand.

A UFO Over Hainford (one for Siofra)

On a warm summer night nearly half a century ago, something glowed in the skies over Norfolk…and the world seemed to hold its breath.

It was August 27, 1971, and Mr Arthur was driving home to New Hainford along the Cromer New Road. The sun had set, the sky was darkening, and as he passed Norwich Airport around 9pm, he spotted something unusual hovering over the fields. A flying saucer: a glowing orange dome, a craft, suspended in mid-air.

He stopped his car, curious and watched as the object began to move towards him. As it did, its orange glow faded and was replaced by five red flashing lights circling its base - “navigation lights “ he called them, though what they were navigating was anyone’s guess.

For 15 minutes, the object hovered, darted, vanished behind trees, and reappeared, lighting the marshy ground below with its eerie glow. And all the while: silence. Total silence. Not the hush of a quiet night, but something deeper. A soundlessness that felt placed, deliberate: as if the world had been muted.

When Mr Arthur got home, shaken, he did what anyone would do: he called a local newspaper, which at that point, had actual reporters who actually worked at night.

While he was on the phone, his mother, without knowing what he was reporting, called out to say she’d just seen something rise from the trees at the bottom of their garden. It was orange, it was glowing and it was about 400 yards away.

The Borderline Science Investigation Group (BSIG), the now-legendary Lowestoft-based team who chronicled East Anglia’s strangest happenings in their newsletter Lantern, investigated quickly.

They found flattened, reed-like grass in the area where the object had been spotted, an area of marshy ground, impossible to drive across, with no footprints, no animal trails, just wide, pressed-down circles. Grey dust coated the nearby bushes and the BSIG took soil and vegetation samples.

No aircraft had flown over, said Norwich Airport, the RAF, and the nearby American airbases and witness Mr Arthur remained adamant that what he’d seen wasn’t a plane. But without another witness, the BSIG couldn’t confirm the sighting…until they heard from Mrs Moore of Motum Road, North Earlham. She had seen it too.

At exactly the same time, she watched an orange object descend slowly from the sky behind a line of trees, before it disappeared and reappeared flashing red. She couldn’t see the craft in detail, but the behaviour - and the glow - matched perfectly.

When investigators plotted her sightline on a map, the bearing pointed directly to the field near Hainford where Mr Arthur had seen the UFO. It was a match who saw the same thing on the same night in the same sky: two strangers, connected by an orange light in the dark.

The soil analysis came back as ordinary, the flattened grass remained a mystery, and the silence, that strange, encompassing hush, left no trace at all.

But what we do know is this: for a few minutes in late August 1971, something came to Norfolk. It glowed, it hovered, it watched. And then, it was gone.

August weather lore

In centuries past, before barometers and forecasts, the people of Norfolk turned to weather lore to read the signs of the seasons.

August, as the gateway to harvest and autumn, held a special place in the country calendar, with sayings and superstitions passed down through generations. Take this old favourite: “If the first week of August be warm, the winter will be white and long.” A sunny start to the month, folklore warned, meant snow-heavy days ahead.

In fact, many August proverbs seem obsessed with predicting the severity of winter, as though the fate of the fields was already written in the clouds.

One particularly intriguing belief is that each foggy morning in August foretells a snowfall in the coming winter. So, if you wake to thick mist curling through the hedgerows, count how many fogs you see in the morning, some say each one means a snow day later in the year.

Other proverbs offer reassurance rather than dread: “Dry August and warm, doth harvest no harm,” or “August rain gives honey, wine, and saffron.” These sayings suggest a balance of sun and showers bodes well not just for farmers, but for bees, winemakers and herbalists alike.

St. Bartholomew’s Day on August 24th was watched closely: a clear, mist-free morning was seen as a sign of a fair and fruitful autumn, while rain on that day supposedly meant 40 days more to follow.

And Lammas, which falls on the 1st of August, was linked to another curious belief: “After Lammas, corn ripens as much by night as by day”, a poetic nod to the heavy dews of late summer doing as much work as the sun in maturing the crop.

Whether or not you believe the truth lies in fog and folklore, August is undeniably a month of transition and quiet prophecy.

The days still blaze, but the whispers of autumn begin. And just maybe, as you step out into a misty Norfolk morning, you’ll remember an old saying or two, and wonder if winter is already watching.

Corn Dollies and the magic of the harvest

As August ripens and the first golden fields are gathered in, thoughts turn to one of the most quietly magical traditions of the British countryside: the corn dolly. These intricate figures,woven from the very last sheaf of the harvest, are far more than rustic decoration. They are, in folklore, the spirit’s last refuge.

The Corn Mother, the Corn Maiden, the Old Woman: all names for the being thought to dwell in the growing crop. Once the field is cut, that spirit needs somewhere to live until she can return to the land again, and so, with reverent hands, a dolly is made.

Every region had its own take: some were plaited into loops or fans, others into crosses or elaborate forms that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum. But they were more than pretty patterns, they were good luck charms, fertility symbols, and winter guardians.

In some villages the dolly would sit in the final pew of the church, tucked behind the hymn books with an air of stubborn rural resistance. In others, it was lovingly kept until spring and then burned or broken, its ashes or fragments scattered to bless the new crops.

Today, dolly-making survives thanks to passionate craftspeople like Janine, Siofra’s sister, whose beautiful work at May Queen Crafts keeps these stories alive in every twist of straw. (If you’ve ever wanted your own handmade corn dolly with deep folklore roots and a sprinkle of magic, she’s the one.)

Of course, some things are harder now: the long-stemmed corn needed for traditional straw work isn’t widely grown, and modern combines aren’t ideal for dolly material. But a few farmers still grow heritage varieties, just for the crafters and the keepers of lore.

So as the harvest moon rises and the first chill creeps into the evening air, spare a thought for the Corn Mother in her ribboned home, waiting patiently for the land to stir again.

Hidden in plain sight: The High Mill in Great Yarmouth

Southtown Tower Mill, also known as The High Mill and Press’s Mill, was a towering 122ft to the top of the 20ft lantern that capped it and was one of Europe’s tallest windmills and probably the tallest in Britain.

Built in 1812, it had 12 storeys and was built on oak piles and a raft: during the Crimean War, it supplied vital flour to the army via Yarmouth’s famous clipper schooners. The mill once stood on what is now Gatacre Road and it is believed that after it was demolished in 1904, its bricks were used to build High Mill Road – look for the houses with red chimney pots.

In its heyday, the mill was hard at work during the day and night and four men worked each shift. On a clear day, from the top of the mill, the views across land and sea were breathtaking – the lantern also helped to call ships safely to port.

Hello friends, and light your lanterns: July is here, and with it comes midsummer mischief, cinematic chills and one giant leap for folklore.

This month we dedicate our newsletter to the moon, not just because it’s 60 years since the moon landing (or, if you’re feeling conspiratorial, 60 years since the hoax was filmed in a studio in Wymondham), but because no other celestial body pulls at the tides, the heart, and the human imagination quite like she does.

The moon rules dreams, witches, wolves and folklore, and she’s watching over everything we’ve planned this month. Which includes something unholy…

We’re teaming up with Reel Connections and Cinema City for a night of rural terror, East Anglian history and righteous horror: a special screening of Witchfinder General (1968), introduced live by the Norfolk Folklore Society. There’ll be eerie archive footage, a folkloric DJ set, artist Matt Willis in residence, and free commemorative badges for all who dare attend. There are still a couple of tickets left, you can get them HERE.

Plus: uncanny talks, strange sightings, and Black Shuck encounters incoming.

So whether you’re moonbathing, sky-watching or storm-chasing this summer, keep one eye on the heavens and the other on the shadows.

Stacia X

A note from Siofra

Ok, full disclosure, I lost track of the days and nearly forgot to send this newsletter today. I’ve been in full “con crunch” in preparation for Fantasy Forest Festival this weekend (three handmade outfits was a great idea…) and working on the giant puppets for the Bungay Black Shuck Festival. So this is your update from me this month. See you soon!

Siofra💚

NFS at the Black Shuck Festival in Bungay!

We will be representing the Norfolk Folklore Society at The Black Shuck Festival as we host, curate and even perform in a series of wonderful talks on Sunday August 3 at The Fisher Theatre in Bungay.

If you like Black Shuck (who doesn’t?) and you like us (not everyone does, but you probably should) then we can’t think where you’d rather be on August 1 to 3. We’ll also definitely be there for the Saturday parade and in St Mary’s Church, waiting for a strange and terrible wunder.

Norfolk Wildlife Trust Events

Those of you who have a sharp eye on our events may have managed to get tickets to our guided walk through Sweet Briar Marshes later this year. But, if you missed out on that event, the team at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust have plenty of other events for you to go along to. You can find out more on the website HERE.

Here’s a highlight though:

Exploring sensory perceptions through a disability lens

Join artist Genevieve Rudd on a walk/wheel around NWT Sweet Briar Marshes to explore different ways to sense the landscape through creative practices. Genevieve will be using a power chair and welcomes the varied ways people might mobilise in the environment along the accessible paths.

Genevieve Rudd is a community artist and Wild Beach Leader of 13+ years, facilitating creative nature-connection programmes. In 2021, she founded Under Open Sky no-for-profit coastal community engagement organisation. Since 2023, GR has been disabled with Acquired Brain Injury which affects her mobility, vision, sensory perception, and cognition.

You can get tickets HERE.

Moon lore: tides, time and the lure of lunar magic

From the silvered surface of Burnham Deepdale’s moonlit stained glass to the whisper of tides drawn across our Norfolk coast, the Moon has long held sway over the world both seen and unseen.

For centuries, its pull has been more than just physical, it’s been deeply mythic, shaping planting cycles, birthing superstitions and binding our dreams to its quiet, nightly watch.

Folklore and science agree on this much: the Moon moves more than the sea. It dances with our bodies, too: just as the Moon waxes and wanes across a 28-day cycle, so too do menstrual rhythms echo its phases.

Some researchers have noticed intriguing patterns: bleeding most often begins after the full Moon, while spikes in births are reported as the Moon’s light begins to wane. The old wisdom knew this long before clinical trials: the Moon governs more than water, it governs the womb.

Our ancestors let lunar logic lead them in the land, too. Peat was cut and harvest reaped beneath a waning Moon, when the pull of the Earth was said to quiet and close, crops were sown during the Moon’s swelling phase, alongside a flowing tide, timed with the notion that the soil, like the body, responds to celestial tugging.

Under spring tides, when the Moon looms directly above or below, the water rises highest, as does the energy. Neap tides, by contrast, arrive with a half-lit Moon and bring stillness.

Moonlight also brings stories, and sometimes, signs: one such tale speaks of a sailor’s wife who awoke one night to find her drowned husband standing beside her bed, dripping wet and bathed in moonlight. Her scream shattered the vision, but when news came of his drowning on that very night, the Moon was remembered as the silent witness.

Another old man, pausing to smoke under a moon-bright sky, saw his own funeral pass before him. A week later, he joined the very pallbearers he’d glimpsed in vision.

Shetland folklore tells these tales with quiet recognition that the Moon knows more than we do. James R. Nicholson recorded them, saying little more than that they were “strange, but true.”

In Chinese myth, the Moon is home to the goddess Chang’e, marooned forever after drinking too deep from the well of immortality while Germanic stories send a man to the Moon for stealing either berries or sheep.

Shakespeare’s Moon is Moonshine, a figure with a lantern and a knowing smile: the Renaissance, too, called him that, giving him shape in the shadows.

Even in the clinical halls of psychiatry, the full Moon holds power: hospital staff report increased agitation; police know the night will be busier than most. Some say pain is sharper then.

So, when next the Moon hangs full above Norfolk, take a moment to stop and look. Listen for what moves within you, and without.

Blue Moon magic: A rare light and rarer luck

Once in a Blue Moon, they say, and when it happens, something in us still stirs.

A Blue Moon is a rare celestial event, occurring only once every two to three years, when two full Moons fall within a single calendar month.

This second Moon isn’t actually blue in colour, but its appearance has long been associated with mystery, magic and the thinning of the veil between our world and the unknown.

In folklore, the Blue Moon is a time of abundance, intuition and heightened spiritual power. Its rarity makes it a moment of pause and potency, a chance to wish boldly, to speak your heart’s desire, and to connect with something greater.

In some traditions, the Blue Moon is believed to offer a clear channel to ancestral spirits, who may be more inclined to grant favours, offer guidance, or stir gently in your dreams.

It is also said that anything gathered beneath the light of a Blue Moon, be it a single flower or a handful of berries, will carry a double dose of enchantment. Herbs picked at this time are thought to hold stronger healing powers; charms made under this Moon’s gaze are considered more effective, protective, and long-lasting.

Whether you watch it rise in silence or mark it with ritual, the Blue Moon invites reflection. It asks us to listen more closely: to ourselves, to the past, and to the unseen world that hums just beyond the edges of the everyday.

The next Blue Moon will be on May 31 2026.

Moon signs and superstitions

Across centuries and cultures, the Moon has been a cosmic omen, a timekeeper, and a bringer of both fortune and foreboding. Whether you’re moving house, cradling a newborn, or just glancing skyward, the Moon’s face might be shining luck, or trouble, your way.

For those welcoming a baby into the world, let the waxing Moon shine upon them as folklore promises it will bring strength and vitality.

Moving house? Best to time it with the new Moon: as the Moon grows, so too will your prosperity. And if you glimpse that first sliver of a new Moon “clear of the brush,” unblocked by branches or buildings, take it as a sign of fortune.

Moonstones hold mystery, too: legend says if you place one in your mouth beneath a full Moon, the future may unfold before you.

And if that full Moon falls on a Monday, or “Moon day”, your luck is shining bright. Even the curious charm of the rabbit’s foot is tied to lunar lore: it’s luckiest if taken from a rabbit caught in a graveyard by a cross-eyed person at the dark of the Moon (don’t try it).

Not all moonlight is welcome: sleeping in it, or worse, being born beneath it, is said to bring misfortune. Spotting the new Moon through a window? That’s a broken dish waiting to happen.

And never point at the Moon or look over your shoulder to see it; such actions are steeped in bad luck. Sailors especially fear seeing “the old Moon in the arms of the new”, a ghostly full Moon cradled within the crescent. It’s said to herald rough seas and rising storms.

So next time you look to the skies, remember: the Moon sees all, and sometimes it shines with more than just light.

A new series: Hidden in plain sight - the mortuary at Zaks Waterside

On a bend in the River Wensum, opposite Cow Tower and wrapped in cheerful bubblegum pink, sits Zaks Waterside, purveyor of burgers, jukebox tunes and, perhaps surprisingly, ghost stories.

But long before it flipped its first patty, this building served a grimmer purpose: it was Norwich’s river mortuary. Tucked beside a centuries-old boathouse, the former morgue is now masked by Americana, but its past lingers. Staff report objects that move on their own, voices that call their names, and fleeting glimpses of shadowy figures.

Most of the paranormal activity centres on the old boathouse, unused by the public and shrouded in cold, even on warm days.

One visitor allegedly saw a tall man in Victorian undertaker’s garb near the water’s edge. Others have heard footsteps or had items inexplicably smashed. Even co-owner Chris Carr had his name called out while alone during lockdown - by no one, and from nowhere.

The building’s eerie energy might echo deeper history still. The land was once part of Pockthorpe, a raucous area of Norwich where fights, mock mayors and folklore beasts once roamed. Before the mortuary came Hassett’s Hall, and even before that, monastic lands.

Stories from the 1800s tell of phantom coaches and rooms sealed tight to keep their secrets. Most visitors to Zaks never guess they’re dining in a building once used to house the dead. But Norwich keeps its secrets close, especially here, where the past may not have left the building.

It’s podcast day!

Ok, somehow we managed to take an extended podcast break. We aren’t exactly sure how it happened, it certainly wasn’t planned. We should be back on track for a monthly podcast now. Thank you all for being so patient.

So, this month we’re exploring a centuries-old city church with an eerie tale of a floating woman, seen twice by an organist practicing for a wedding. We came for the ghost, but stayed for the history! A little digging led us down a rabbit hole and into the remarkable story of Richard Caister, the “Good Vyker,” who served here from 1402–1420 and was a close friend of Margery Kempe. From pilgrimage sites and memento mori to bombings and and a pretty rare type of haunting, this church has seen it all.

While we have you…don’t forget tickets are now on sale for our Bungay Black Shuck Festival day of talks. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of speakers, so let’s show them some classic Norfolk Folklore Society hospitality with a warm, full audience. You can get tickets from the Bungay Fisher Theatre website HERE.

See you all soon, and as ever, thank you for being awesome and so supportive if what we do. We love you (I’m feeling soppy 💚).

Love Siofra & Stacia