Boggart and Banshee: A Supernatural Podcast

If it’s a relative, can it be a ghost? Many bereaved people who insist they do not believe in phantoms still talk to their dead relatives and sometimes even visit with them. Are the beloved dead just ghouls with better PR? Simon and Chris share their own experiences of the beloved dead and puzzle over the tokens and signs thought to come from beyond: coins, Elvis songs, and feathers. We go from the delightful (butterflies at funerals) to the horrid: a dead mother threatens a stepmother; a dead father kills one of his sons so he'll have company in the afterlife... Expect to learn: how the beloved dead can put you on the path to snake-charming (at least in Ohio); why dead relatives often come back as revenants; what happened to Pedro the rooster (avert your eyes); and, perhaps most important, the undead's strong preferences in double glazing.

Our daring duo trade barbs for their fifth anniversary episode, answering listeners' questions while taking swipes at each other. Can you make the case for newspaper telepathy and ghosts? How do you film fairies? What are Simon's links with Mossad, Chatgpt and blackmail? And why didn't Chris buy a haunted tree for an anniversary present? Expect mermaids, slender man, the beloved dead, dreams, (wo)men in black, El Dorado, Walt Whitman, fumblewazzuks, tulpas, crisis apparitions, troll crowns, magic lanterns, the seven whistlers, and Angela Carter.

Simon and Chris have a feeling they’re not in Kansas anymore as they follow Jenny Randles down the yellow brick road into the Oz Factor: that peculiar sense of silence, isolation and altered reality that sometimes accompanies UFOs, ghosts, time slips and fairy encounters. Is this strange quiet a gateway into the supernatural, or simply what the brain does when confronted by something terrifying? Can supernatural experiences ever be separated from the people who have them? Chris brings in magnetic fields, neurological auras and the human freeze response, while Simon gets unexpectedly woo-woo about telepathy and wonders why the Victorians seem to have missed the Oz Factor altogether. Also in this month's episode there are pixies in Cornish hedges, a choking incident, God in the desert, Versailles time slips, Chris knowing where the aliens are kept, Simon's life-changing encounter with a fake Jenny Randles and the legal cases that the terrible two are planning against each other.

Chris and Simon sniff out some supernatural scents, ranging from the prosaic, like tobacco and flower perfumes to the sinister, like the odor of rotting bodies. They note the link between scent and memory and wonder whether some ghostly scents are just a spirit’s shortcut to announce its presence or even to communicate. 'Odor Mortis', a musky aroma said to predict death, may, it transpires, be a physiological, rather than a supernatural, phenomenon: ask the hospital cat 'Death'. Simon gives listeners a whiff of why sulphur and brimstone are associated with the devil and our fragrant duo examine fairy stenches (mushrooms and sweaty crowds anyone?). Simon accuses Chris of being in the pay of the powerful Sasquatch lobby, while Chris tells of a strange paranormal odor experience of her own and comes up, as always, smelling of roses.
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Book of the month: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938398645, Josh Cutchin, the Brimstone Deceipt!

You’re walking down a road in the twilight. Suddenly you’re surrounded by a jostling crowd and see a coffin being carried in a funeral cortege with many mourners. You might recognize your neighbors in the procession — or in the coffin — and are the people brushing past you fairies, phantoms, or something worse? In the high heat, Chris and Simon clash on Scotland, the pronunciation of Duchas, William Blake, FFFFs, and the question of what exactly these ghostly funerals are. In a fit of summer madness, Chris even bets a non-existent motorhome against a quarter litre of olive oil for the honour of the Fair People of Wales! Our mourning duo exchange barbs over fairy predictions, the American ghost that allegedly appears once a century, and swap notes on hummingbirds, Excel sheets, and fireflies. There are oh so useful tips on how not to die when you meet a phantom funeral ('get to the side, you fool!'), good reasons never to attend a fairy wedding, and one pressing lesson above all: read Woodyard 2022,* but beware of siren Victorians.

*Woodyard, C. (2022). 'Poets, Pipes, and Petals: Some Accounts of Fairy Funerals.' Fairy Investigation Society Newsletter, 16, 17-25
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