Supernatural Feathers: Death Beds, Witchcraft and Angels

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, m...

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 magn...

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 l...

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 ...

Simon and Chris venture, for this historic episode,* into the nursery at the witching hour to ask why so many children see fairies in bed, in the dark, and at the edge of sleep. Along the way there are tiny soldiers marching across eiderdowns, horse-trading fairy women in pointy hats, airborne night visitors in upstate New York, nasty little wolves running out of wardrobes, and the vexed question of whether these experiences belong to folklore, popular culture, the sleeping brain, or some mor...