The Ghost & Quill Podcast

"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

"I've always had too much sympathy for the devil, because he really just feels so human to me."C.N. Vair wrote her debut novel Fawn around a single image she couldn't shake: a romance between a witch and the devil. What grew around it is a folk horror novel about Tess, a small town, an old religion, and a question the book asks without ever answering — can you live alongside people whose values you don't share?In this episode she and Marlene talk about place as a character, and why the Appalachia of Fawn is the southern tier of New York rather than the West Virginia most people picture. About stumbling sideways into horror from a childhood of Tolkien, Narnia and Redwall. About finding your people when you're not sure how many horror readers live in your village.And about being told, at sixteen, that she had a Jezebel spirit — which was not intended as a compliment, and which she has worn as a badge of honour ever since.Plus: what actually changes when your book goes out into the world (less than you'd think, and more than you'd hope), why the villain had to be a pastor rather than a data centre, and a first look at book two — The Walking Tree, out autumn 2027, about a six-foot-one arborist and a tree haunted by the girl sacrificed to it a thousand years ago.Chapters00:00 – How to say the name (and why it's not on the cover)01:00 – Reading Fawn in Kenya, and writing place as a character03:05 – The Appalachia people don't picture04:40 – Why Appalachian horror is having a moment07:17 – Folklore, deep time, and the comfort of the very old08:13 – "Who are our neighbours?" — the question at the heart of Fawn09:56 – Finding your tribe in the horror community12:18 – Stumbling into horror from a fantasy childhood15:33 – Why Fawn sits comfortably in folk horror17:10 – "You have a Jezebel spirit"20:35 – Tess, the witch and the devil23:07 – The drafts that didn't survive24:21 – Why the villain had to be religion, not a data centre26:18 – Letting the book go29:19 – What actually changed after publication33:36 – The Walking Tree, coming autumn 202738:40 – The earworm: can we coexist?43:21 – What she's reading next45:42 – Reading systems, TBRs and tandem reads

Good Grieving, Spooky Readers. For the very first episode of the Ghost & Quill podcast, Marlene summons the brilliant Kat Dunn — author of Bitterthorn, Hungerstone, and her spellbinding new gothic novel Rottenheart, a gender-swapped reimagining of Hamlet.Together they wander through Kat's earliest stories (a girl, a land of chocolate, a beginning, a middle and an end), how a part-time goth found her way to horror, and the long battle to silence the inner critic and write the haunted house books she was desperate to read. Along the way: teenage Hamlet and who is allowed to suffer, why writing villains means looking your own worst self in the eye, the emotional toll of living inside two very different narrators, Victorian ghost stories churned out to pay the rent, lucid dreams, a showdown with Jigsaw, and the eternal mystery of why nobody ever gives up their secondhand horror books.Whether you believe in ghosts or simply suspect your brain is a badly organised machine, pull up a chair by the fire. The nightlight stays on for this one.Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is available now from Ghost & Quill — Scotland's first horror-themed bookshop. www.ghostandquill.co.ukStay Spooky,Marlene