Black Willie of Hartlepool
The following account of the story is extracted from ‘Legends Superstitions of the County of Durham’ by William Brockie (1886). ‘The Rev. H. B.
Category: Occult Traditions
When Witches Communed With Fairies
Our modern conventions tend to view the realms of fairies and witches separately. Witches have been viewed as evil, while fairies are seen as benevolent, cute, and kind. As scholars reevaluate witch trials and the confessions of those accused, we are coming to new conclusions on accused witches.
The British Witch: The Biography by Peter Maxwell-Stuart
For over five hundred years witches, male and female, practised magic for harm and good in their communities. Most witches worked locally, used by their neighbours to cure illness, create love, or gratify personal spite against another.
Betty Chidley The Witch
Below is the story of Betty Chidley, originally published in Miss C. S. Burne’s ‘Shropshire Folk-Lore’ and then again in ‘English Fairy and Other Folk Tales’ by Edwin Sidney Hartland [1890].
Ruth Osborn, Thomas Colley and the Black Dog
The following story from ‘English Fairy and Other Folk Tales (1890)’ by Edwin Sidney Hartland concerns a Black Dog that haunted the site of a gibbet in which the body of a witch killer was displayed.
Yorkshire Witches by Eileen Rennison
We no longer believe in witches as our ancestors once did. However, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any unforeseen or unexplained events were likely to be attributed to witchcraft.
Major Thomas Weir’s House
According to an article by Oliver Norton in the Daily Mail on 7 February 2014, part of the home of the occultist Thomas Weir still survives.
The Priest & The Prophetess: Joanna Southcott in the West Midlands
Joanna Southcott was born in April 1750 in Taleford, and raised in the village of Gittisham in Devon, England.
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Socialism in the Midlands
In 1881 Frank Podmore met Edward Pease, a young stockbroker, at a Spiritualist meeting in London. They discovered a mutual interest in socialism, and joined the Progressive Association, founded in November 1882. They took a keen interest in the utopian philosophy of Thomas Davidson, and with a few others formed a society, the Fellowship of the New Life.
The Witch Of Laggan
A hero celebrated for his hatred of witchcraft, was warming himself in his hunting hut, in the forest of Gaick, in Badenoch. His faithful hounds, fatigued with the morning chase, lay stretched on the turf by his side,–his gun, that would not miss, reclined in the neuk of the bothy,–the skian dhu of the sharp edge hung by his side, and these alone constituted his company.
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