Samhain Part Two When the Otherworld Opens: Spirits, Ancestors & the Púca

What did people really do to celebrate Samhain before pumpkins, trick-or-treating and modern Halloween? Join Paula Rolls of Roaming Raven for Part Three of our five-part Samhain Special as we step back into the homes and villages of old Ireland to discover the fascinating traditions, strange superstitions and magical customs of the season. From roaring bonfires and traditional Halloween feasts to barmbrack fortune telling, apple divination, midnight mirror rituals and the rather dangerous game of Snap Apple, we uncover a world where food, laughter, romance and a little supernatural mystery went hand in hand. Discover why turnips were carved into terrifying lanterns, how young people attempted to predict their future marriages, and why Halloween was once a night of mischief, disguises and community celebration. Blending historical accounts, Irish folklore and atmospheric storytelling, we explore how these traditions developed through the centuries and why so many still influence our celebrations today. So pour yourself something warming, light a candle and join us for another journey into the history, folklore and magic of Samhain. Roaming Raven – A Witchlore & Mystical Tales Podcast. www.roamingraven.co.uk

Imagine for a moment that there are no electric lights. No street lamps. No headlights coming along the road. No central heating waiting when you get home. The sun has gone down, and when darkness arrives, it really is dark. Behind you lies summer. The crops have been gathered, the days of growth are ending, livestock are being brought closer to home and the land itself appears to be retreating. Ahead lies winter - cold, hunger, storms and months in which survival will depend upon what has been stored and prepared. And somewhere in that transition, we find Samhain. Tonight, we're going back to the beginning. Not to modern Halloween, not yet to pumpkins and trick-or-treating, and not even to the Samhain rituals that many witches and Pagans practise today. We're going much further back, into Ireland and the world preserved for us in early Irish stories. And we're going to begin with the name itself. Samhain. www.roamingraven.co.uk

Over the course of this series, we’ve travelled through several centuries of witch trials. We’ve seen people accused, interrogated, imprisoned and executed because their neighbours, their communities — and sometimes the law itself — believed that they were witches. And eventually, in the places we’ve mostly been talking about, the trials stopped. The laws changed. Witchcraft ceased to be a crime. So that should really be the end of the story. Except it isn’t. Because people are still being accused of witchcraft today. And I don't mean someone being criticised online and calling it a witch hunt. We’ve already talked about the way that phrase gets thrown around in the modern world. This time, we mean it literally. People living in modern Western countries have been accused of being witches, of casting spells, of causing illness or misfortune through supernatural means, or of being possessed by evil spirits. And some of those accusations have led to horrific abuse — and even murder. So for our final episode of this series, we’re bringing the witch hunt right up to the present day. And perhaps the most unsettling thing about these stories is that they didn't happen in some distant century, in a world completely unlike our own. Some of them happened here. In Britain. Within our lifetimes.

In our last episode, we left Helen Duncan in a British courtroom in 1944, prosecuted under a Witchcraft Act that was already more than two hundred years old. Even Winston Churchill thought its use was absurd. But the law remained. For Britain's growing Spiritualist movement, that wasn't simply an embarrassing historical relic. Mediums could still be prosecuted under legislation that effectively began with the assumption that their spiritual practices were fraudulent. Then, in 1951, something finally changed. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 was repealed and replaced by a new law: the Fraudulent Mediums Act. On the surface, the distinction seems simple. Being a medium wasn't the problem. Deliberately deceiving people was. But after more than two centuries of British law attempting to decide what was—and wasn't—possible in the supernatural world, was Parliament finally stepping away from people's spiritual beliefs? And who had persuaded them to do it? Today, we're looking at the end of Britain's Witchcraft Act—and the curious story of the law that took its place. www.roamingraven.co.uk

It's 1944. Britain is at war. Allied forces are preparing for D-Day, London is still being bombed, and secrecy can quite literally mean the difference between life and death. And at the Old Bailey, one of Britain's most famous mediums is about to stand trial under a law passed more than two hundred years earlier. Her name is Helen Duncan. She claimed to communicate with the dead. During her séances, spirits apparently spoke, walked around the room and even materialised in front of witnesses. Her supporters believed she had an extraordinary gift. Her critics thought she was an extraordinarily talented fraud. But then Helen apparently revealed something she shouldn't have known: that a British battleship had sunk, before the loss had been publicly announced. And suddenly, a woman talking to dead sailors in darkened rooms potentially became more than an eccentric medium. She became a wartime problem. So was Helen Duncan really prosecuted because the British government was frightened of what she might reveal next? Was she simply a fraudulent medium finally caught in the act? And why, in twentieth-century Britain, was anyone still being prosecuted under something called the Witchcraft Act? www.roamingraven.co.uk