Explore every episode of the podcast The Ghost & Quill Podcast
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghosts, Grain Stores and George the Skull: Three Ravens Ghost Tales | 25 Sep 2026 | 01:01:25 | |
This week we're joined by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, the award-winning writers behind Three Ravens, the independent folklore podcast. We're talking about their new book, Three Ravens Ghost Tales. We didn't get far before the laughs started. I got Martin's surname wrong straight away (it's Vaux, with a hard X). Martin says he's still "in recovery" from being French and has to resist the urge to invade places and make people build him cathedrals. We also meet George, a skull wine cup Eleanor gave Martin in honour of Lord Byron, and get Martin's firm views on "false Martyns" who spell it with a Y. Eleanor's historical drama underwear rants get a mention too. And we came up with a tagline I might have to steal for the shop: "Where rebels come to be better read." We also get into the stories behind the book and the podcast:
Along the way there's an Edinburgh witch banned for releasing too many ghosts, and ghosts who might just be judging teenagers' outfits. My two spaniels also make a guest appearance, and for a moment Eleanor and Martin were sure the squeaky toy was a poltergeist. Find Three Ravens wherever you get your podcasts. Pick up their first book, Three Ravens Folk Tales, and look out for Three Ravens Ghost Tales when it comes out. | |||
| Scotsferatu: Where Did Scotland's Vampires Go? | 22 Sep 2026 | 00:34:33 | |
We've left the video calls behind for our very first in-person recording, and it shows. Marlene can't work out how to start, so Dee Lawlor jumps in with her best morning-TV welcome. There's a Stepford Wife smile, talk of Sally Jessy Raphael-sized glasses, and the idea of a game-show-host run-in. Dee's drinking decaf on purpose, because otherwise her adrenaline would make her impossible to understand. We invent a few words ("vampiric lorist", anyone?), and by the end we're asking someone to run round the room doing the clapping. In between the giggles, it's a proper deep dive into Scotsferatu, Dee's new book on vampire folklore in Scotland. We get into:
A huge thank you to SugarBird Wines on the Terrace for hosting us, and to our first ever live audience. You'll find our new book club there from next month. It's the first of many. Scotsferatu is out on 24 September. | |||
| "It's Quiet in Here, But It Isn't": Vincent Cotroneo on Bookkeepers, Haunted Bookshops and the New Age of Horror | 18 Sep 2026 | 00:44:07 | |
A bookshop is one of the quietest rooms you'll ever stand in. It's also full of thousands of voices. That's the idea that became Bookkeepers. This week Marlene sits down with Vincent Cotroneo, a 28-year-old indie author whose debut horror novel follows Robert — a writer surrounded by other people's published work, trying to live up to the expectations of an eleven-year-old critic who happens to be his daughter. When his wife dies unexplained in the family bookshop, the words start vanishing off the page for his daughter. And then the books start talking back. It turns into a proper horror education. Vincent traces his obsession from The Ring through The Exorcist, The Conjuring and Hereditary, and makes the case that found footage works because it hands the scariest job to your own imagination. Marlene confesses to owning The Exorcist, Frankenstein and Dracula and reading none of them — and gets a reading order. There is a side quest about the release date of The Blair Witch Project. There is a Stephen King quote about a man banging his head against a wall. There is a strong opinion about what Nicolas Cage is doing in Renfield. Also covered: why Obsession rattled every man who watched it, whether Backrooms lived up to the hype, Robert Eggers' Werewolf, and the endings that physically hurt. Chapters | |||
| "The Fourth Wall Disappears": Benjamin Stimpson on Welsh Witch Lore, Cunning Folk and Growing Up in a Haunted House | 11 Sep 2026 | 00:43:47 | |
"It is not the old witch in the woods. It is the old witch in the Black Forest. And if you go there, the fourth wall disappears and you're in the story." Benjamin Stimpson is a Wales-based writer of folklore and the occult, a psychotherapist, and the author of Ancestral Whispers and Of Doves and Ravens: The Witches and Wise Folk of Wales and the Borders. He grew up in a 500-year-old cottage in North Wales, emigrated to Canada at eight, spent thirty years there — much of it in a haunted fieldstone brewery — and came home last year. This conversation goes everywhere. The linguistic thread that ties South Scotland to Wales. Why psychotherapy and the occult are the same discipline if you accept that both are really about relationship. The overlap between queerness, neurodivergence and witchcraft, and why othered people find each other in othered spaces. The individualism eating modern paganism alive. And the fake lore proliferating online — where did the purple door thing come from? — and why Benjamin went into medieval archives to build a proper encyclopaedia of Britain's cunning folk instead. Plus: hag attacks, a great-great-grandmother who turns out to have been a herbalist, a dynasty of cunning men in South Wales whose descendants still live there, and a pirate ship in the Aberdeen haar that may or may not exist. Chapters | |||
| "Something Old and Strange" — C.N. Vair on Fawn, Appalachian Folk Horror and the Jezebel Spirit | 04 Sep 2026 | 00:48:25 | |
"I've always had too much sympathy for the devil, because he really just feels so human to me." C.N. Vair wrote her debut novel Fawn around a single image she couldn't shake: a romance between a witch and the devil. What grew around it is a folk horror novel about Tess, a small town, an old religion, and a question the book asks without ever answering — can you live alongside people whose values you don't share? In this episode she and Marlene talk about place as a character, and why the Appalachia of Fawn is the southern tier of New York rather than the West Virginia most people picture. About stumbling sideways into horror from a childhood of Tolkien, Narnia and Redwall. About finding your people when you're not sure how many horror readers live in your village. And about being told, at sixteen, that she had a Jezebel spirit — which was not intended as a compliment, and which she has worn as a badge of honour ever since. Plus: what actually changes when your book goes out into the world (less than you'd think, and more than you'd hope), why the villain had to be a pastor rather than a data centre, and a first look at book two — The Walking Tree, out autumn 2027, about a six-foot-one arborist and a tree haunted by the girl sacrificed to it a thousand years ago. Chapters | |||
| Kat Dunn on Haunted Houses, Hamlet and Writing in the Dark | 04 Aug 2026 | 00:50:48 | |
Good Grieving, Spooky Readers. For the very first episode of the Ghost & Quill podcast, Marlene summons the brilliant Kat Dunn — author of Bitterthorn, Hungerstone, and her spellbinding new gothic novel Rottenheart, a gender-swapped reimagining of Hamlet.Together they wander through Kat's earliest stories (a girl, a land of chocolate, a beginning, a middle and an end), how a part-time goth found her way to horror, and the long battle to silence the inner critic and write the haunted house books she was desperate to read. Along the way: teenage Hamlet and who is allowed to suffer, why writing villains means looking your own worst self in the eye, the emotional toll of living inside two very different narrators, Victorian ghost stories churned out to pay the rent, lucid dreams, a showdown with Jigsaw, and the eternal mystery of why nobody ever gives up their secondhand horror books.Whether you believe in ghosts or simply suspect your brain is a badly organised machine, pull up a chair by the fire. The nightlight stays on for this one.Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is available now from Ghost & Quill — Scotland's first horror-themed bookshop. www.ghostandquill.co.ukStay Spooky,Marlene | |||