The Three Ravens Podcast

Eleanor talks to the wonderful storyteller Deborah Winter about her home county of Pembrokeshire, a land of mermaids, pirates and the cry of the raven... Deborah has gained a widespread reputation as an oral storyteller, and performs at festivals and arts events across the UK, including Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival, End of the Road Festival, On Land’s Edge, Swansea Fringe, Llangwm Literary Fe...

For this month's Forgotten Melodies bonus episode we're singing and talking about Witch Songs! As ever, the episode features new arrangements of three traditional folk songs: Witches Reel , Broomfield Hill and Hare Spell , and Martin, Ben and Eleanor chat about the history and context of each. With Witch Trials continuing in Scotland long after they had ended in England and Wales, it's perhaps uns...

This week, the good ship Three Ravens is pulling into port in the south-westerly Welsh county of Pembrokeshire! Populated in days of yore by 'The Demetae' - the Mead Drinkers - Pembrokeshire was, for a time, known as 'Little England Beyond The Border' as once it was claimed by the Normans, it stayed under their control. With a long legacy in naval trade, piracy and smuggling, the county is hardly...

For our 50th Local Legends interview episode, we've rustled up author and award-winning storyteller Michael Harvey, and made him talk about the extremely dreamy Welsh county of Radnorshire.  Michael is a Welsh storyteller and author with more than 25 years of experience. Gongs include a Major Creative Wales Award and a British Award for Storytelling Excellence. He is known for telling traditi...

This month's episode of the Three Ravens Bestiary is all about one of our favourite topics - Wargs and Werewolves! We start with J.R.R. Tolkien, exploring how the species of intelligent wolf he invented - the Warg - combined Old English and Old Norse words and ideas, bringing different traditions of werewolf belief crashing into the public consciousness. It is this, brought into monster movies ove...

On this week's episode we're off to the least populated historic county of Wales, Radnorshire on the Welsh Marches! As for why Radnorshire has been so depopulated and wild for quite so long, it has a lot to do with war, and plenty to do with the Black Death. We discuss how these traumas, combined with the destruction of castles, have left the county speckled with desolate empty hillforts and ghost...

The Three Ravens is a Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux. Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on a historic county, exploring the heritage, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns t...

Eleanor is joined around the campfire by storyteller priestess Christine Watkins to talk all about her home county of Monmouthshire. Christine was born in Monmouthshire, where her family has deep roots. She has been crafting words for speaking live or in broadcast since 1980 - stories of belonging and apartness, discovery and creation.  She's the author of Gwent Folk Tales and the host of the...

For this month's Magic and Medicines Bonus Episode, we're talking all about Reiki! We have a bit more direct experience with this one than some of our past topics, as we completed our First Degree Reiki qualification this summer over the Solstice. Our conversation digs into the theory and history behind Reiki, its development by Mikao Usui and subsequent spread to the West, along with the establis...

After the madness of Haunting Season, we're returning to Series 7 and the history and folklore of Monmouthshire in south east Wales! We discuss the county's history of invasion, by the Romans, the Normans, the English, and of course by heavy industry, and its many changing names - Caerwent, Gwent, Wentland and Monmouthshire. We couldn't fail to mention our favourite son of Monmouthshire, Geoffrey,...

Haunting Season 2025 is over, so in this month's Update Episode we're looking ahead to the continuation of Series 7! As usual, the episode offers the main Three Ravens news from the last month, the plan for the month ahead, and the opening chunks of last month's Patreon Exclusive episodes. First comes the initial 25 minutes or so of Eleanor's conversation with historian and demonologist Fiona Dodw...

For our final Local Legends interview of Haunting Season 2025, Eleanor speaks with Tony Walker, author and host of the Classic Ghost Stories podcast.  We are huge fans of Tony's work, from his narrations of well-known ghost stories and lesser read hidden gems to his own original fiction. Though as we discuss during this conversation, Tony's interests in the uncanny and peculiar started in chi...

To wish everyone a very happy Halloween, we warmly present a reading of Oscar Wilde's classic ghost story, The Canterville Ghost . After a month of celebrating more sincere ghost stories and quite dense, spooky topics, we thought it might be time for a little levity - and this story is an important one: written in 1887, it called time on the Victorian ghost story, masterfully blending satire, soci...

On this month's Haunting Season-themed episode of Magus we're digging into the gory life story of "The Beast" himself, Aleister Crowley! One of the most infamous occult figures of the 20th century, we explore how Crowley's singular life unfolded - his religious childhood, early penchant for sadism, his academic failures, and his interests in the arcane; his poetry, quest for knowledge, and the bou...

It's already the final week of Haunting Season 2025, so we proudly present our last 'Trilogy of Terror' for this year! The episode features our two last winning short stories in this year's Ghost Story Writing Competition, along with another diverse selection of things which terrify our listeners. 'Up At The Cross Roads By Tants Farm' by Holly Barratt tells the tale of a time-skip with a deadly re...

For our third Local Legends interview of Haunting Season 2025, Martin chats about spooky stuff with the author of Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials , Dr Marion Gibson.  Marion is currently Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, and if you are unfamiliar with her work then she is the author of books including The Witches of St Osyth , Reading Witchcraft:...

It's Haunting Season, so for this month's Forgotten Melodies bonus episode we're exploring the bloody broadsides of Murder Ballads. As ever, the episode features new arrangements of three traditional Murder Ballads: Edward, The Bonny Bows and The Cruel Ship's Carpenter, and Martin, Ben and Eleanor talk about the history of the murder ballad and of the songs. From its medieval roots in Northern Eur...

We enter the third week of Three Ravens Haunting Season 2025 with our third 'Trilogy of Terror'! Our two winning entries for this week, both submitted for our annual Three Ravens Ghost Story Writing Competition, are quite different in tone. "Forgotten" by Felix Woidtke is a dark tale of America's abandoned places with a real bite, while Alexa Harding's "Like Father; Like..." explores a dead father...

For our second Local Legends interview of Haunting Season 2025, Eleanor chats to author, paranormal historian, ghost-hunter and the host of the outstanding How Haunted? podcast, Rob Kirkup! Rob’s from the north east of England, and has been leading paranormal investigations for over twenty years, which has involved him spending many nights in total darkness at some of the most haunted places in th...

For this week's Haunting Season-themed Bonus Episode we're chatting all about the mythology of Zombies and Revenants! To start off with, which is which? Because one dates from Medieval times, and the other comes from a word invented by an English poet in 1819. And if we look further back, to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and Scythia, what root creatures and legends can we find t...

Three Ravens Haunting Season continues today with the second of our four 'Trilogies of Terror' across the month of October! We begin, in tried and tested style, with two winning tales from our annual Three Ravens Ghost Story Writing Competition. The first of these, "The Old Way Stone" by Alex Effinger, feels almost like a late Victorian classic, set in Scotland, while the second, "The Descendant"...

Roll on another month and another Three Ravens Live Show release - and of not just one but two performances recorded at Gloucester History Festival at the end of September 2025! As we explain in the episode, first comes our Forgotten Melodies Live show, performed on Sunday 21st September in the Great Hall at Gloucester's Blackfriars as part of Witch Night, followed by a retelling of Martin's Glouc...

For our Local Legends interview this week, the first of Haunting Season 2025, we've spoken to the celebrated author of 'The Ghost: A Cultural History' Susan Owens! Recorded at Susan's home in Suffolk, this ranging chat includes discussions of the ghost that haunted the old V&A Museum's stores of paintings, Susan's all-time favourite ghost story, and plenty of discussion of the way England's pa...

This month's Magic and Medicines Bonus Episode definitely has Haunting Season associations, as we're talking all about Voodoo! Although, being up front, "Voodoo" is but a tiny subset of a vast number of syncretic religious and cultural practices dating back to Africa 6,000 years ago - 'syncretic' meaning something which merges different beliefs into a unified whole. Sharing lots of ideas with form...

Three Ravens Haunting Season is now officially risen from the grave, hungry for coziness and chilling tales of terror! As in previous years we begin this Monday episode with two winning tales from our annual Three Ravens Ghost Story Writing Competition. The first of these, "Cold" by Susanne Okulitch, offers up a cool bit of class discussion set against a backdrop of an ice cold Alpine blizzard, wh...