Where Rebels Come to Be Better Read: Ghost Stories with Three Ravens

I got the surname wrong within the first fifteen seconds, which feels like a fitting start to an episode about things that don’t behave as expected.

It’s Vaux, with a hard X. Almost nobody gets it right. It rhymes with hawks. The spelling is Norman French, but Martin’s family came over with the Conquest, so he hasn’t been French since the eleventh century and has, as he put it, been in recovery ever since. The ongoing work involves resisting the urge to conquer people and make them build him elaborate cathedrals. I pointed out that Britain is hardly in a position to lecture anyone on invading places. We agreed the Normans are probably to blame for the whole spirit of the thing.

This is roughly the register the entire hour operated in, and I loved it.

My guests were Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, the award-winning writers behind Three Ravens, the independent podcast dedicated to folklore, folktales and folk culture. They were here to talk about their new collection of ghost stories.

George, and the matter of false Martyns

The first thing I noticed was the skull on their shelf. His name is George, after Lord Byron, because Martin is a Byron scholar by background and Eleanor once gave him a skull to drink wine out of, Byron having famously done the same. Apparently George is very difficult to keep clean.

I showed off my own recent acquisition, a conjoined twin skull who still doesn’t have names. Eleanor and Martin were suggested, on the grounds that the pair of them are completely codependent and spend an unreasonable amount of time together. My brother is also a Martin, which helps. We’ll put the naming to the followers.

We did have to establish that it’s Martin with an I. Martin holds firm views on people who spell it with a Y, whom he calls false Martyns, and believes they should be ritually done away with in some elaborate fashion. Alternatively, name changes are easy to arrange these days.

From the circus to the bookshop

Martin came through academia. Eleanor has a master’s in Shakespeare and early modern drama and then, as she puts it, ran away to join the circus. In practice that meant theatre, performance and costume: over a decade running a touring puppet theatre company, and a good stretch as a wardrobe mistress. She trained at Shakespeare’s Globe in original practices costume and spent serious time in their archive with garments made using traditional historical methods, which sounds like the best possible way to learn.

It also means she is the person who watches historical dramas muttering about the hats. The understructure is pathetic. The underwear is all wrong. They’re not even trying.

I mentioned that my mum always worried I’d run away with the circus, and that opening a bookshop is my version of it. Martin reckons starting a bookshop is one of the more rock and roll things you can do right now, and passed on something their friend Christina Oakley Harrington of Treadwell’s in London says: that every intellectual rebellious movement comes about because there’s a bookshop at the hub of it.

So apparently I’m fostering discontent and rebellion. Then Martin produced a tagline on the spot. Where rebels come to be better read. I’m stealing it, and I’ve told them so.

Thirty-nine counties and counting

Three Ravens launched in March 2023 as an experiment: explore the history and folklore of England’s thirty-nine historic counties, not the modern ones, with a literary retelling of a local folk tale each week.

By that first Christmas it was clear the podcast needed more time than they’d imagined, and that it was starting to turn a profit. Martin went full time on production, editing and marketing, and Eleanor joined him full time about a year ago. The History Press then asked whether they could put the stories into a book, which became their first collection: thirty-nine stories, one per historic county.

Since they’d split the counties between them the first time round, they did the whole thing again, which they call their widdershins lap, this time with better microphones, better ideas, and room for things like regional food traditions. Then came bonus series on the history of magic and magical belief, monsters and cryptids, historical true crime, traditional crafts and folk music, plus interviews with experts, authors and folklorists county by county, so the whole thing isn’t just the two of them talking.

They’ve since covered the thirteen historic counties of Wales, which they described as genuinely revealing, and they’ve just launched series eight: a punt across the Atlantic to the folklore and history of the original thirteen American colonies.

Why ghost stories?

Eleanor’s answer is the clean one. We’re fascinated by death because it’s the great unknown. We can never know what happens, if anything, and so we’ll never stop asking, and we never tire of new iterations of the question.

Martin went philosophical. Our understanding has limits. We process the world through a handful of senses and can’t possibly handle all its strangeness, so we’re constantly reaching for explanations. Ghosts are one of the few remaining socially acceptable ways of saying that the world is uncanny. Five hundred years ago we might have called the same things fairies, or beings from the underworld. Which makes “ghost” an enormous umbrella term, and therefore a brilliant thing to play with, because the parameters can be whatever you want them to be.

He also made a point I keep coming back to: ghost stories are almost always genre blends. Someone is dead, so there’s usually a crime in there. There’s often history. It’s nearly always a ghost story plus. And the most effective ones tend to be the ones with no explanation at all, because that lack of catharsis echoes our own unresolved feelings about mortality. A ghost story isn’t always a horror story, and a horror story isn’t always a ghost story.

The ghost who left Lego

Then we got onto their own experiences, and this is where it got properly good.

Martin is the more sensitive of the two and describes the onset as horripulation, the hairs standing up, followed by shortness of breath and the strong sense that he’s trespassing somewhere he’s perfectly entitled to be. Eleanor is more sceptical about herself, though she grew up in a house where her dad was obsessed with ghosts and M. R. James, Sunday afternoons meant Jonathan Miller’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You, and the family cat’s ghost was simply a normal feature of the place.

In their own house, which they insist isn’t especially haunted, they spent a while smelling inexplicable cigarette smoke in one spot on the stairs. Then small toys started appearing in the same place: marbles, bits of Lego. They assumed it was debris working its way out from behind a radiator and kept throwing the things away. Eventually they tried a different approach. They put a little toy soldier on the shelf in view of that corner, spoke to the space, and said whoever was there was very welcome but please stop leaving things that needed tidying up. It stopped. Negotiated, apparently.

Martin would also like it on record that he’s never once encountered the kind of ghost that leads you to hidden treasure, and would welcome applications.

The grain store

The best story of the episode comes from a night at Chiltern Open Air Museum in Buckinghamshire, which collects reconstructed historic buildings across forty acres and let them stay the night alone after a live show.

They’d done their homework and researched which buildings had reported hauntings. They spent ages around an old furniture factory that had been flagged as a hotspot and got absolutely nothing. Then, walking back past the working farm, Martin stopped dead near a grain store and was suddenly certain they shouldn’t be there. Eleanor felt nothing at all and was having a lovely time listening to the sheep. They left anyway.

They spent the night in a reconstructed vicarage hall, in the middle of a heatwave, expecting to boil. Instead the room plunged into a cold so sharp their teeth were chattering, while outside it stayed warm. A member of staff who gave them a tour the next day wouldn’t step through the door of it.

And the spot the staff said they disliked above all others? The grain store by the farm, where a young man had hanged himself, and where staff have reported his face at the windows.

They’ve also recorded a remarkably coherent ghost box conversation in Kent, where they tried planting false answers to catch the thing out and ended up with an obscure name that took real historical digging to trace. Martin’s position is reasonable either way: believe it or don’t, but it led to two days adventuring in beautiful historic places and genuine research into lives that would otherwise have gone unremembered. Net benefit however you look at it.

Thin places and judgmental ghosts

I asked where in the world the veil is thinnest, and the answer surprised me. Not Stonehenge, because modern druids will tell you they’ve worked hard to seal and settle the energies there. The unhealthy places are the ones nobody tends: dilapidated buildings, decaying churches, abandoned towns. England doesn’t have many of those, because we patch things up, but North America has plenty, and Martin has become slightly obsessed with an abandoned place in Massachusetts called Dogtown.

They also make a strong case for hospitals, where people die constantly and nobody has time to cleanse anything, and for the London Underground, where reports from staff are plentiful if you catch them on a quiet shift. Which raises the thought that in a crowd, some of the people coming the other way might not entirely be there. Probably best not to dwell on that one.

We got into forgotten places more generally, including my own long-promised book about forgotten train stations as portals between worlds, which Eleanor and Martin were extremely firm that I must finish. They also pointed to Susan Owens, who wrote their foreword, and her idea of ghosts as markers of historical trauma: all those ruined priories haunted by monks and nuns, which is really a community remembering what was done to the people who lived there.

And then there’s the Edinburgh witch I used to know who got banned from the underground vaults for releasing too many ghosts, on the reasonable grounds that the tours rather need them.

We finished on teenage girls and poltergeists, which is a genuinely uncomfortable corner of ghost lore, and landed on the cheerier theory that a good number of hauntings are just ghosts with opinions about your outfit. Don’t wear that top with those trousers. I’ll rattle the bedstead until you reconsider.

My two spaniels made a late and vocal contribution, having decided it was dinner time roughly twenty minutes before it was. For a moment Eleanor and Martin were convinced the squeaky toy was a poltergeist. Honestly, fair.

Find Three Ravens wherever you get your podcasts, pick up their folk tales collection, and keep an eye out for the ghost stories.

And as Eleanor and Martin said on the way out: please keep fostering that rebellion. We need it now more than ever.