Episode 85 - Jo Hickey-Hall - Modern Fairy Sightings

Joining me for this episode is Jo Hickey-Hall. Jo is a folklorist, researcher and social historian with a long-held interest in the relationship between supernatural experience, local landscape and oral tradition. 

In 2015 she gained a Masters in History from the University of Bristol, supervised by Professor Ronald Hutton, with her research focused on the portrayal in Medieval Irish literature of a mythic race of beings known as the Sidhe. 

Later, Jo began the Modern Fairy Sightings Project, which set out to record peoples personal encounters with strange beings whose identity might best be examined through the lens of folklore and legend. This then lead in 2020 to the start of the Modern Fairy Sightings podcast, an excellent show where she talks to people who have had these type of experiences with a wide and weird range of entities. 

In the interview I talk with Jo about the origins of her interest in fairies, how best to understand what that term means and the beings that it is most useful in describing. We discuss the often-found relationship between fairies and nature, and the more playful, trickster like behaviour they exhibit which at times seems akin to poltergeist activity and which we have both experienced recently

For more information on Jo's research into Fairy encounters (including the Modern Fairy Sightings project and podcast), go to https://www.scarlettofthefae.com/

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The podcast theme is from Purple Planet Music - 'Hubbub' by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey.