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

There is a mountain in South Wales that a man and his friend once walked over on their way home from the pub, and saw an old woman walking ahead of them who was not, it turned out, a woman at all.

If you tell that story as "the old woman of the mountain," it's a nice story. If you tell it as the Old Woman of that mountain — the one you can drive to, park at the foot of, and walk up — something else happens entirely.

That distinction is Benjamin Stimpson's whole project.

Who is Benjamin Stimpson?

"I'm a Wales-based writer of folklore and the occult. I spent thirty years in Canada, and I just returned to the UK last year."

Three books out, two more in the publishing pipeline, and a working knowledge of British folklore, witchcraft and folk practice that he has been assembling since childhood. He's also a practising psychotherapist — that's the day job — and he's currently sitting in the valleys.

We got about ninety seconds in before going off on the first tangent, which is exactly how these conversations should go.

The Old North: why Wales and Scotland are cousins

I mentioned that Wales and Scotland feel similar to me — that pagan practice is quietly folded into ordinary life in both, and that most people going to a fire festival have no idea they're at a Beltane festival.

Benjamin took that and ran somewhere I didn't expect.

"A lot of people don't realise that southern Scotland was part of Yr Hen Ogledd — the Old North. Before Scots became the language, and of course Gaelic in the Highlands, most of the people up there were speaking a cousin language to modern Welsh. It was a Brythonic language."

A lot of the Welsh tradition, he points out, refers to places up there. The Mabinogi names Strathclyde. Cumbria — Cumbri — carries it in the name. Brythonic speech survived in pockets up to the twelfth century.

"So yeah. A lot of connections between Wales and Scotland."

Growing up in Caerwys

He was born in North Wales, in a little place called Caerwys in the Vale of Clwyd, ringed by mountains. His parents were publicans. The pub was about 700 years old. The cottage they moved into — one his parents were flipping to raise money — had parts that were 500 years old.

"I don't know what it was, but just growing up surrounded by the mountains. I had experiences when I was a kid as well. I've met fairies. I've met ghosts. I've had paranormal encounters."

Then, at eight and a half, Canada.

The culture shock was severe, and folklore was the rope back. He watched the 90s television he could still get over there — Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, King Arthur, Robin Hood — because they were from home. There was a book in the house called Ghosts and Legends of Wales that became a touchstone before he could really read it. "Just the images in there. I knew that this was Wales, this was from home."

There was bullying, too. "I wasn't British until I moved to Canada. And then suddenly I was other. I was British. I was different. And then that just continued — the gay came out, the Wicca came out, all of these things came out."

"Folklore was my safe space."

From there: The Mists of Avalon. Paganism. Witchvox, which anyone of a certain vintage will remember with enormous fondness. A community, at last.

Psychotherapy and the occult, which are the same thing

I asked this with genuine respect, because I think a lot of people will wonder: how do you hold a clinical career about the brain in one hand and the occult in the other?

Benjamin's answer took about four seconds to arrive and reframed the entire question.

"It all just comes down to relationship."

A therapist, he explains, is looking at how a client interacts with the world around them and the people in their life. Are those relationships healthy or unhealthy? How is this person connecting? What narratives are they telling themselves, and where did those come from? He works with trauma, which is itself about relationship.

"There's no difference for me between somebody coming and wanting to work on their relationship with their mother — the classic example — and how that affects their other relationships, versus their relationship with their deities, their spirits, their ancestors."

He's careful to say he keeps his own spiritual beliefs firmly out of his clinical work. But the framework holds. His first book was about ancestral practice from a spiritual point of view, and he makes the point that there's no meaningful difference between going onto a genealogy site and reading old parish records to piece together your ancestors' stories, and having a spiritual connection to those same ancestors.

"You're still relating to them. How is their story interacting with your story, and how is that story allowing you to walk in the world?"

Otherness: queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft

Benjamin's private practice is largely with the queer community, and he's blunt about the overlap he sees.

"There's a whole Venn diagram between nerds, and the sheer number of gay witches around. It's ridiculous. I would say the majority of the male witches who are writers right now are all of a queer persuasion. And I think that it makes sense. There's also an element there of autism — questioning."

I recognised a version of this in my own route in. Books were my religion after we left Africa under difficult circumstances. At about fourteen, having watched a formative amount of Buffy, I announced to my mother that I was Wiccan. (She said no I wasn't, don't be silly. She is now a committed atheist and I love her for it.) It wasn't until Scotland that I thought: this is what it feels like to have a community around you.

The common thread is not fitting. Which is, arguably, the founding condition of the whole thing.

"All of those things are empowering," Benjamin says. "All of those are other spaces. Those are outside the norm."

He's careful not to claim the observation as his own — parallel processes run through every marginalised community, he says, and he spent many years involved with an African traditional religion in Canada, specifically Lucumí and the Orisha, where the same reclamation of spiritual roots was happening.

And it's not only pagans. He points to a wave of folk practitioners across Scotland, Wales and England reclaiming Christianity, and some Judaism and Islam, by teasing out the regional folk practices that give them room inside those broader traditions. "I think that it's a very empowering thing."

The problem with modern paganism

Here's where he got interestingly spiky.

The individuality that makes modern paganism so liberating — the fact that you can build a practice that actually connects you, borrow across traditions, take the moment of stillness where you find it — has, he thinks, swung too far.

"There are modern flaws around, you know, the amount of drama that goes on in the pagan community. And what it is, is individualistic egos. Look at what I can do. Look at me. Follow me. That's individualism in a capitalistic sense. And I think that is eventually going to destroy it."

Twenty-five years in, he's watched the cycle repeat. "Every five years a new crop of people come up, they become big, they say the same things everybody has been saying for the past twenty years, and then they disappear and a whole new group come up." TikTok has just made the loop spin faster. "But the ones that stick — they're staying with it, and they're maturing. So I'm going to shut up before I get myself in any more trouble."

I put to him the thing I've felt myself: that you find your like-minded community, and then something happens, and suddenly it's my way or the highway — which is the exact antithesis of why anyone chose this in the first place.

He has a clinical explanation ready.

"When you get people coming from trauma — and there's a lot of trauma, especially religious trauma — oftentimes intermingled with the new thing, paganism, witchcraft, whatever it is, a sense of self and identity can come in. So any questioning of the very strict way that people see their practice then becomes an individual attack."

His example: point out that millions of women did not die during the burning times — we have the records, the scholarly estimate for executions across the whole of Europe runs to tens of thousands, not five million — and watch the reaction.

"It's almost universally condemned as how dare you say that. And at that point it's — okay, I get where that defensiveness is coming from. You've attached your own sense of self-esteem to this thing. That's just a maturity thing."

The books

Ancestral Whispers (Llewellyn, 2023) is about building an ancestral veneration practice. His grounding in Lucumí, where ancestral work is foundational, fed straight into it — as did the observation that almost every culture on earth has some form of ancestor veneration, and the West has largely mislaid its own.

"Because of individualism. Because of the corporatisation of the funeral industry. Death is very uncomfortable to us." He wrote it deliberately non-prescriptive: not do this, but here are the questions worth asking.

Then came the witches.

The fake lore problem

What pushed him into the second project was watching people invent folklore and present it as ancient.

"There's this whole idea of the purple door being connected to witchcraft somehow. And that's just evolved in the past five years. People are still trying to figure out where it came from."

His best guess is that it's a mutation of something real: haint blue, the porch paint you'll see across the American South and in New Orleans. And the actual origin of that is wonderfully mundane — it traces back to laundry bluing, the blue dye used in cleansings, which attached blue to cleansing, which attached it to keeping spirits out. A real folk practice with a traceable, documented evolution, mutating into an invented one inside a few years.

The wider issue is that people building content had no firm grip on the lore — or knew only witch trial records, whatever was accessible, Isobel Gowdie and a handful of others — and filled the gaps with "ancient legend says". And it was being lapped up.

So he went looking properly. He was already back at university doing a medieval studies degree, with a classical studies component, which meant archives and resources. He came out the other side with something like 300,000 words.

Which was, as he cheerfully admits, way too big.

Of Doves and Ravens

The book that emerged — with The History Press — is Of Doves and Ravens: The Witches and Wise Folk of Wales and the Borders. Roughly 92 individuals, each set in the context of their own stories and their own places. Some legendary, some real people with legends attached, some no more than an anecdote about a traveller meeting a wise woman telling fortunes in a market.

"When you go back into the folklore books from a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, they're brimming with these characters." Many of those books are now freely available, and most people don't know it.

England follows — out 10 September, roughly a hundred figures. Scotland lands next September, a country he has his own ancestral ties to. And he's just signed for a fourth: entirely male magicians. John Dee, Michael Scot, Thomas the Rhymer, Friar Bacon, Johann Faust — the classic medieval and early modern legendary magicians, and how they connect to the lore of the cunning folk.

What fascinated him across all three nations was the regionalism. What makes a Cornish witch different from one in Norfolk, different from one in the Highlands, different from one in South Wales — and, just as interesting, which motifs turn up absolutely everywhere.

A face, a place and a story

This is the heart of it, and it's where the psychotherapist and the folklorist stop being two people.

"There are three major ingredients that make a story really memorable: a face, a place, and the story."

Which is why he has a bone to pick with the Brothers Grimm.

"They did a real disservice to their folklore in Germany. There were reasons why they did this — but they went around the country trying to unify German folklore, and they took stories and stripped them of their location. So it isn't the old witch in the Black Forest, it's the old witch in the woods."

It could be anywhere. Which served a nationalist purpose, and which is the defining move of the fairy tale — and which costs you everything.

"It's not the same as going to the Black Forest and imagining: this is the forest that old witch lives in."

Just over the mountain from where he's sitting is the story of the two wanderers walking home from the pub, over the mountain to their village, who see a spectral figure of an old hag walking ahead of them. 

"If that was just the old woman of the mountain, it wouldn't have the same resonance. Then if you go to that place, walking in that environment, the fourth wall disappears and you're in the story suddenly. At any moment, from around the corner, a witch or the wise man of wherever could come, and you could meet them."

So he wrote the book by location. Over 1,500 copies in, and readers are using it as a map — locals connecting to their own landscape, visitors making road trips of it.

"The Witch's Stone of Forres is the Witch's Stone of Forres because it's in Forres, and you can go to it. The Maggie Wall memorial is the Maggie Wall memorial because it's in that location. It isn't just any memorial anywhere."

A relationship with the horizon

We talked about the Scottish resurgence — the campaigning that's finally getting the accused witches of Scotland recognised — and about driving through the Highlands in fog thick enough that you can feel something just off to the side.

My own version of this is Aberdeen beach when the haar comes in. You can see maybe the first three waves. And there is always, in my head, the outline of a pirate ship sitting just past them.

Benjamin took this far more seriously than I expected.

"Whether or not it's there, the fact that you have a relationship with that pirate ship on the horizon — that adds to who you are and how you walk in the world. And that, I think, is really important."

"I've met fairies"

He's told these stories on other podcasts, so he couldn't very well refuse me.

I asked whether his degree changed how he understands them. It didn't — his training was Jungian and transpersonal, a spiritual psychotherapy concerned with how you relate to an experience rather than with proving you wrong about it. He was on a call that same morning with a researcher studying how counsellors handle clients who say they're seeing the dead.

"I think the majority of people have experiences that are outside the norm. Society is very anti that. Society wants what is normal to be the status quo."

"It's not even that I believe it, because that suggests it's a question of belief. I know what I experienced. And what I experienced cannot currently be explained with science."

The hag. As a child, at least three occasions he remembers. Science calls it sleep paralysis, and he doesn't dispute the mechanism. "But that doesn't explain why at five years old, six years old, I was seeing a very tall, dark woman with long fingernails coming to my bed."

The little man. He was small, sitting in the garden, when a tiny man walked straight out of the hedge. Old clothing, eighteenth or nineteenth century. "He looked just like a little hobbit, thinking about it now." The man looked down at him and asked, in a thick North Walian accent, what he was doing down there. Benjamin said he was just playing. He wouldn't make any mess. And the man wandered back into the verge.

He saw them fairly regularly. He told his parents about the little man in the verge; they assumed he meant a neighbour and thought nothing of it.

Years later, researching fairy encounters in North Wales, he found accounts where the fairies address people exactly like that.

"I think this is why kids have a much more open experience with the supernatural — they don't have those psychological blinders that develop over time through socialisation."

The brewery. In Canada, his parents bought a 150-year-old fieldstone building that a German proprietor had commissioned stonemasons to build as a brewery, over a spring. They restored it to being a brewery. Benjamin was nine.

"You would hear whispering in walls. You would just sense people looking at you." Going down there alone at night was creepy for a while and then simply became normal. A psychic friend walked through it once and told him the spirits were content, because the building was being used for what it was built for — which did not surprise him in the least.

His mother, who was president and CEO and did all the accounts herself, looked up one night from her paperwork at a door leading into a dimly lit part of the building. With fluorescent lights above her, it was effectively a mirror. Her father, dead several years, was looking back at her.

The genogram

Part of his psychotherapy training involved building a genogram — a specialised genealogy chart that tracks not just names but sub-personalities, addictions, relationship styles, traumas, inherited narratives.

He interviewed his mother for it. And learned that her great-grandmother, from Ireland, had been a herbalist.

"And I'm like — of course."

His family, by his own description, is a mutt: Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English. Which he thinks is part of why the folklore of these islands connects for him the way it does. "I know that I have had family in those places that would have known these stories themselves."

What's next

He's not giving much away — "writers always have ideas" — but the direction is clear. Now that he's home, he wants to go deep on regional practice, and specifically Welsh tradition.

To do that properly he's finally learning the language. It's one of the real sorrows of his life that he left too young to become fluent in Cymraeg; he's now enrolled on a course in Cardiff.

"There's so much material in Welsh tradition that is locked away. People don't know about it, especially people in the diaspora." He's quick to say he's not alone in the work — Mhara Starling, Kristoffer Hughes and others get warm credit.

And, eventually, fiction. "I have a couple of characters that are niggling at me."

Which brings us neatly to the thing every author I speak to agrees on: characters take on lives of their own, and the writer is frequently the last to know where they're going.

Benjamin, inevitably, has both a Jungian citation and a folkloric one to hand — Jung visualising a figure who eventually began acting under its own steam, and the theory of egregores and thought-forms that grows out of it.

But the version that stayed with me is about the real ones. One of the figures in Of Doves and Ravens is Dr Harris, founder of a dynasty of cunning men in South Wales — quack doctors and cunning folk both, selling charms to protect cattle, finding thieves, doing all the ordinary business of cunning folk. The last Dr Harris only stopped practising in the 1860s.

Their descendants still live in the area. And the stories are still vivid in the culture there.

"It's like they're talking to you."

Frequently asked questions

Who is Benjamin Stimpson?

Benjamin Stimpson is a Wales-based writer of folklore and the occult and a practising psychotherapist. Born in North Wales, he spent thirty years in Canada before returning to the UK. He is the author of Ancestral Whispers (Llewellyn, 2023) and Of Doves and Ravens: The Witches and Wise Folk of Wales and the Borders (The History Press).

What is Of Doves and Ravens about?

It's a location-based collection of around 92 individual witches, cunning folk and wise folk from Wales and the border counties — some legendary, some historical figures with legends attached — organised by place so readers can visit the landscapes the stories belong to. Companion volumes cover England and, from next September, Scotland.

What are cunning folk?

Cunning folk were local practitioners of folk magic across Britain, offering practical services to their communities: charms to protect livestock, healing, finding stolen goods and identifying thieves, and fortune telling. They were distinct from the witches of the trial records, and in some places practised well into the nineteenth century.

How many people were executed in the European witch trials?

Not millions. Benjamin is direct about this: the "five million" or "nine million" figures circulating in some pagan spaces are not supported by the records. Scholarly estimates put executions across the whole of Europe in the tens of thousands.

Why are so many witches queer or neurodivergent?

Benjamin's argument is that queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft are all "other" spaces outside the norm, and all of them are empowering — so people who already sit outside the mainstream find each other there. He notes the same reclamation process running through other marginalised communities and traditions.