"The Fourth Wall Disappears": Benjamin Stimpson on Welsh Witch Lore, Cunning Folk and Growing Up in a Haunted House

"It is not the old witch in the woods. It is the old witch in the Black Forest. And if you go there, the fourth wall disappears and you're in the story."Benjamin Stimpson is a Wales-based writer of folklore and the occult, a psychotherapist, and the author of Ancestral Whispers and Of Doves and Ravens: The Witches and Wise Folk of Wales and the Borders. He grew up in a 500-year-old cottage in North Wales, emigrated to Canada at eight, spent thirty years there — much of it in a haunted fieldstone brewery — and came home last year.This conversation goes everywhere. The linguistic thread that ties South Scotland to Wales. Why psychotherapy and the occult are the same discipline if you accept that both are really about relationship. The overlap between queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft, and why othered people find each other in othered spaces. The individualism eating modern paganism alive. And the fake lore proliferating online — where did the purple door thing come from? — and why Benjamin went into medieval archives to build a proper encyclopaedia of Britain's cunning folk instead.Plus: hag attacks, a great-great-grandmother who turns out to have been a herbalist, a dynasty of cunning men in South Wales whose descendants still live there, and a pirate ship in the Aberdeen haar that may or may not exist.Chapters00:44 – Introductions: Wales, Canada, folklore and the day job01:33 – The Old North: what links Wales and southern Scotland03:05 – Growing up in Caerwys, with a 700-year-old pub and a 500-year-old cottage04:36 – Folklore as a lifeline after emigrating05:55 – Psychotherapy and the occult: it all comes down to relationship09:07 – Otherness: queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft11:59 – Reclaiming Christianity, Judaism and Islam through folk practice12:33 – The individualism problem in modern paganism15:35 – Trauma, identity, and why a fact can feel like an attack17:00 – Ancestral Whispers and why the West lost its ancestors18:42 – The fake lore problem21:29 – Building a 300,000-word encyclopaedia22:42 – Of Doves and Ravens24:07 – Book four: the male magicians24:36 – A face, a place and a story25:03 – What the Brothers Grimm got wrong26:03 – The Old Woman of the Mountain27:29 – Scotland's witch memorials29:10 – Haar, pirate ships, and having a relationship with the horizon30:39 – Hag attacks and the little man in the verge35:46 – Growing up in a haunted brewery37:14 – The genogram and the herbalist great-great-grandmother38:23 – What's next: Welsh, regional practice and fiction41:19 – Dr Harris and the cunning dynasty of South Wales