The Three Ravens Podcast

For this week's episode of Local Legends Eleanor is chatting with the wonderful author Lucy Rose.

Lucy is known for her instantly bestselling debut novel The Lamb, a deliciously dark folk horror tale set in the isolation of rural Cumbria. However, she's also an award-winning film maker, and a lifelong devotee of haunting tales and the folklore of place.

Lucy's work has often been included in the 'Femgore' subset of horror, which centres the experience of women and girls to respond, often violently, to the horrors of living in the world in a...

For our third original tale this Haunting Season Martin tells us "The Airman" as inspired by this week's theme, Ghosts of War.

Living in Dorset during World War 2, Valerie is a teenage girl helping to manage a house filled with secrets and unspoken things.

One night, a chance encounter with a low-flying fighter plane sets in motion a sequence of life-changing events which impact her brothers, sisters, parents, and herself, echoing forward across decades of time.

A tale of love, loss, conflict and its consequences, this story is a personal...

Keep your weapon drawn, your eyes peeled, your powder dry, and WAIT WHAT'S THAT AND WHY IS IT MOVING?!

For our third week of Haunting Season 2026 we're exploring the theme of Ghosts of the War.

We start with Achilles and the Shade of Patroclus then talk through some major developments in ghost beliefs related to martial conflicts across history, from the 'Great Wonder' following the Battle of Edgehill to the Angels of Mons and more.

Once the front is behind us and we're released on leave we kick back with...

We've thrown in an extra spooky story - it is Haunting Season, after all, and we've been releasing a few fun extras on Sundays.

This story, In Miniature, Eleanor's take on the haunted doll's house, is the only one in our new book Three Ravens Ghost Tales which has never before been recorded for the podcast.

Meet Lou. She's professional and attractive. She's interested in history and crafts. She's single, but open to dating. But be warned - she's got very high standards, and she doesn't like mess.

About Three...

For this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats with one of England's great living horror writers Adam L.G. Nevill.

With 13 novels under his belt, several of them award-winning, and three short story collections too, you might expect Adam to have enjoyed rapid success which started early.

Instead, for years Adam worked every night after work to shape his fiction while receiving little-to-no interest from the industry - all until the whims of the world's fiction publishers shifted back towards the macabre...

In a chat which takes in several...

In our second original tale for Haunting Season 2026 Eleanor tells us "Vade In Pacem" as inspired by this week's Ghosts of Sacred Spaces theme.

Set during the English Renaissance, the tale takes place within the confines of a cloistered, claustrophobic Cistercian monastery in the hours counting down to the arrival of Cromwell's men. Our monks, mortally dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows, live surrounded by marsh fires and Will o' the Wisps.

Perhaps the King's Men will never make it through the fens?

Perhaps being caught in a trap is...

Misty hooded figures flit through moonlit ruins, and a chorus of spectral chanting grows louder...

For the second week of our month of Haunting Season, we've chosen Ghosts of Sacred Spaces as our theme.

We start by exploring theories about why so many of Britain's current and former religious houses are said to be haunted, and talk about some of the notable sites. From a particularly monastic sort of ghost attempting to relieve Purgatorial suffering to Gothic themes of terror and wonder in lofty ruins, we trace the history of holy hauntings.

Recorded on October 1st, for this Live Show we return to our favourite bookshop of all, Treadwell's in London, to discuss Halloween folklore, ghostlore, customs, and our new book Three Ravens Ghost Tales.

Hosted by Treadwell's founder, owner, and historian of Gardnerian Wicca Christina Oakley Harrington, who Martin spoke with on Local Legends episode 66 over the summer, we are joined by a lovely live audience to discuss the 'thinning of the veil' on October 31st and the roots of many superstitions associated with this time of year.

We explore why apples are so...

In this episode of our Local Legends series Eleanor talks with the Queen of African horror, Nuzo Onoh.

In 2022 Nuzo was the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, acknowledging her powerful contributions to the horror genre, which she has made through a terrifying catalogue of books like Where The Dead Brides Gather, The Sleepless, The Reluctant Dead, Futility and many more.

Our conversation ranges from Nuzo's early exposure to traditional Igbo culture and beliefs and her experiences in the Biafran War to hauntings in her home and her inspirations and...

In our first original tale for Haunting Season 2026 Martin tells us "The Grand Circle" as inspired by this week's Ghosts of the Theatre theme.

Rooted in the folklore of one haunted London playhouse in particular, though tying together lots of strange personal anecdotes and dark reflections on the theatre business, it's a contemporary tale threaded through with chilling moments and plenty of other horrors - and hopefully ones you've not encountered in a story before.

It may also feature one or two Easter Eggs for longtime listeners, and is intended to leave you...

The lights dim, the sounds of ghostly strings tuning up shriek from the orchestra pit, and in the wings the props just seem to keep mysteriously vanishing...

Happy Haunting Season! This episode marks the beginning of our four themed weeks, and today we're talking all about Ghosts of the Theatre. We begin by talking about some famous theatre ghosts, along with a brief history of theatrical hauntings. Of course, our show wouldn't be complete without a sprinkle of superstitions.

With an interval ice cream courtesy of a floating head and a programme packed...

Recorded a week ago today and hosted by our favourite local independent bookshop Much Ado Books in Alfriston, we warmly present a live interview to celebrate the launch of our second book Three Ravens Ghost Tales.

Much Ado Books is particularly special to us as we went to the shop on one of our first-ever dates, Eleanor buying Martin a beautiful Folio Society edition of the collected poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though for this recording it was not the Ancient Mariner fixing us with his glittering eye but Much Ado's co-owner Nash Robbins!

For our opening installment of Three Ravens Haunting Season 2026 we're chatting with one of Britain's finest horror writers, Andrew Michael Hurley.

Based in Lancashire in north west England, Andrew's debut novel The Loney was published almost exactly 12 years ago, becoming a best-seller, winning prizes, and securing Andrew a legion of readers extremely keen to know how he might possibly follow it up.

His second book, Devil's Day, secured his reputation as an extraordinary talent, with his third, Starve Acre, also being brilliant, and adapted into an excellent major motion picture.

...

On this month's update episode we have so much to talk about, as it's Three Ravens Haunting Season once again!

Back for our fourth annual month-long celebration of original ghost stories and all things spooky a weird, we run down what's coming from us across October, including a brand new Spenser & Associates Mystery, our amazing guests for Local Legends this month (now including Joanne Harris!), we announce the winners of this year's Ghost Story Writing Competition, and also open up the Three Ravens Pumpkin Carving Competition!

Before all that though, we grab our...

Warning: this story is set in 1909 and portrays historic racist attitudes which in no way reflect our own views. It also makes mention of body-focused repetitive behaviours.

For this week's story, we're getting into the dark origins of one of Maryland's most famous monsters.

The Snallygaster is better known today for giving its name to an ice cream flavour, but it wasn't always so friendly.

Eleanor's story follows a young wife who dreams of a monster, but her sceptical husband carries the idea too far...

This episode...

Get ready to stuff a ham, because this week we're off to Maryland!

We begin with the inspiring life of Harriet Tubman, before discussing Maryland's beginnings as a province, sprinkled with plenty of arguments about religion and different ideas about how to run a colony.

Maryland is packed with folklore, spooky stories and cryptids, and we're on a hunt to find as many as we can, from the enigmatic Dwayyo to the famous Snallygaster, and everything in between. Along the way, we encounter Goatman, Catman, and some creepy little characters Eleanor has become...

Today, as it's Martin's birthday, we thought we would share with you a special little bonus gift recording in his birth county - our two Three Ravens Live Show pop-up performances at 3 Wishes Fairy Festival in Somerset from last month!

Hopefully timed just about perfectly to mark the very end of Summer and start of Autumn, in the first part we discuss Glastonbury's fairy folklore explicitly, addressing Somerset's Celtic mythology relating to King Arthur, the 'Winter King' under the Tor as mentioned in The Mabinogi, and the legend of the Glastonbury Thorn.

In...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats with a celebrated New Hampshire-based folklorist, author, and entrepreneur, who has spent over two decades preserving and sharing the region's mysterious history, Roxie Zwicker.

As a folklorist, Zwicker’s work focuses on documenting the oral histories, legends, and paranormal accounts that define the cultural landscape of the Northeast. She has authored over nine books detailing regional history and hauntings, and her published works include popular titles like Haunted Portsmouth, Ghost Stories of the Piscataqua, and New England's Ghostly Haunts.

Roxie’s tour company New Engl...

For this week's story we're throwing caution to the wind, preparing for societal collapse, and offering you a different kind of folk nightmare.

Written by Martin, Chocorua follows the main story beats of one of New Hampshire's most famous legends, only with the titular Native American chief replaced by a radicalized white nationalist struggling through the Covid-19 pandemic.

It might not make for comforting listening, but if you're up for a nightmarish, paranoid, tech-savvy survivalist thriller then this one is for you - and if you're not, well, we hope you'll give it...

Time to break off your search for the Great Carbuncle and adventure through New Hampshire, the "Granite State!"

We start with the story of Oceanborn Mary and then discuss New Hampshire's rugged terrain and the centuries-long struggles to define its borders. From the "Presidential Range" and the now collapsed iconic 'Great Stone Face' to the state's 18-mile sea coast and northern forests, it's a pretty wild ride.

Speaking of wild rides, we also debunk some of the mythology surrounding Paul Revere, explore how some of New Hampshire's most famous 'Native American' legends are...

Eleanor chats with the Emmy-nominated paranormal researcher, bestselling author, and legendary explorer Jeff Belanger to uncover the spooks, scares, and deep folklore of Massachusetts! 

Jeff joins us around the campfire to share his incredible career tracing the things that go bump in the night. As the host, writer, and producer of the New England Legends series on PBS and Amazon Prime, and the long-time lead writer and researcher for Discovery Network’s Ghost Adventures, Jeff has spent decades documenting the strange and the supernatural.

We dive into Jeff's early inspirations—including his formative inter...

For this week's story, we're exploring one of Massachusetts' most atmospheric abandoned places...

Written by Eleanor, the tale follows a young police detective searching for a missing person in the mysterious and disorientating woodlands of Dogtown Common, as something wants to lead her further and further away from the trailpath.

Drawing on real legends and history of this fascinating place, it's a straight up ghost adventure - a little early for spooky season, maybe, but it's never too early in our book!

About Three Ravens 🔮

Three Ravens is...

It's already time for us to visit the second of the Thirteen Colonies - Massachusetts!

We start by discussing the lives of the Wampanoag peoples who inhabited the North Eastern Woodlands prior to the arrival of European settlers, before returning to the small group of religious dissenters who arrived on the Mayflower to make a home in New England.

Of course, the Salem Witch Trials cast a long shadow, but so too does the bloody legacy of warfare between the colonists and the Native people, including the fascinating, awful history of King Philip's...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats Virginia, folklore, and cultural exchange with Dr Jon Lohman.

For two decades Jon worked as the State Folklorist of Virginia, has a PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, and has enjoyed a distinguished career bridging community activism, arts education, and public media.

In addition to working for many years to document, sustain, and celebrate grassroots cultural traditions in Virginia, in 2002 he launched the state’s highly successful Folklife Apprenticeship Program which supports master artists in passing down essential traditions and aspects of cu...

For this week’s story we have a ghostly legend inundated by real histories, “The Phantom Lovers of Lake Drummond.”

Written by Martin, it’s a dark crater of surging eco-fiction engaging with one of Virginia's most famous folk tales, the early life of George Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe's much maligned follow-up to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the poetry of Irish folk poet and bard Thomas Moore, the teenaged adventures of Edgar Allan Poe, and more.

We very much hope its atmospheric gloom and unusual voice proves to be suitably unsettling, and that you enjoy ou...

Hold onto your preconceptions if you must as we, two English people, open a can of worms in our first full episode of Series 8 to discuss Virginia, the 'Mother of States!'

We begin as colonial America did - in Jamestown - before digging into some of the key differences between life in Virginia in those early days and life in England at the same time, tracking points of comparison forward through into the modern day.

Enriched by extracts from this Saturday's upcoming Local Legends interview with Jon Lohman, who served as Virginia's...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Eleanor chats with historian, curator, author and activist Dr Gabrielle Tayac.

We were thrilled Gabrielle spoke to us at the beginning of Series 8, after this week's background episodes on the history of North America. As Associate Professor of Public History at George Mason University and the inaugural curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, she has a unique insight into the history of America before colonial expansion. 

She’s a member of the Piscataway Indian Nation, a tribe based in southern Maryland, and is...

For this week’s story we have the tale of a particularly unwelcome immigrant called “How The Devil Came to America.”

Written by Eleanor, it’s a piece of arcane folk horror that explores the failure of the infamous Roanoke colony, positing a new theory as to why things went wrong for the residents of ‘The City of Raleigh’ in a tale which travels from the private offices of Queen Elizabeth I’s chief spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham across the sea to America’s eastern seaboard.

For hardcore Three Ravens fans, you may notice connectio...

In this month's update episode we're chatting through Autumn Equinox folklore, the end of harvest, and the Devil doing unspeakable things to blackberries...

Including discussions Britain's traditional Quarter Days and the folklore of Michaelmas, from 'Stubble Goose' divination to Medieval beliefs in "Dragon Days" along with autumnal spider folklore and a slice of apple magic, we also include some of our own news, chat about our upcoming spooky Live Shows surrounding the launch of our second book Three Ravens Ghost Tales and share the opening chunks of August's two Three Ravens Patreon Exclusive episodes.

Before we begin our adventures exploring the history and folklore of the Thirteen Colonies of America, we present our first episode of Series 8: A Brief History of America!

We explore the history of North America from the earliest human migration across the Beringia land bridge, now the Bering Strait.

Looking at the distinct archaeological stages of American pre-history, we talk through the Lithic, the Archaic, the Formative, the Classic and the Post-Classic phases, and the development of distinct societies and cultures. 

It's a fascinating picture of complex early societies with i...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats with Sunday Times bestselling author Marion Gibson!

Regular listeners will recall that Marion last came on Three Ravens during October 2025 to chat about her wonderful book Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, at which time we spoke about Marion’s childhood and career, so we this time we skip all that and jump straight into the 17th century and witch hunt fever!

This is all inspired by Marion's new book Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain as researched in pa...

Our story for "Death Week" is a retelling by Martin of a ghost story, The Callow Inn.

In rural Herefordshire, for over a hundred years people have reported two strange night-time phenomena connected to The Callow Inn, which was demolished at the end of the 19th century.

First there are the ghostly shapes of two people carrying bodies out into Haywood Forest.

Then there's the spectral windows, shining light out into the darkness...

Martin's take on the story is set in the modern day and explores ideas...

The inevitable has occurred, dear listener, so pay up your Eye Money as Death Week has arrived on Three Ravens, riding a pale horse...

The final part of our month-long celebration of the Cycles of Life, on this episode we're chatting through the history and folklore of that undiscovered country where all dreams may come - and from which the ancestors might return if we're not careful!

We start at the end of the last Ice Age, with humankind surviving in cave systems, engaging in ritual cannibalism and secondary burial rites, then move...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Eleanor chats with Sunday Times bestselling author Sarah Clegg.

We first met Sarah last year, when she was one of the guests at our Three Ravens Christmas Feast. Sarah had just published her book The Dead of Winter, all about the origins and changing lore of the dark side of Christmas.

Sarah has a PhD in ancient history from the University of Cambridge, and you'd struggle to find another person with such an encyclopaedic knowledge and clear passion for Medieval Romances. 

In addition to...

Our story for "Marriage Week" is a retelling by Eleanor of a giant legend, Alderman and Alphin.

Set in Saddleworth, which was once a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire but is found in Lancashire today, not far from Oldham and Manchester, it's the tale attached to two particular landscape features, Alderman's Hill and Alphin Pike, two hills overlooking the entrance to the Upper Tame Valley. 

Eleanor's telling of the tale and its frame narrative, set in the early 19th century before the advent of the power loom, certainly takes inspiration from T...

This week we have our second installment of our month long mini series about cycles of life, all about the history and folklore of marriage!

We explore the early beginnings of marriage contracts, legal regulation by the Church and state, and how utterly unromantic most weddings were for much of history!

Discussing superstitions and preparations leading up to the big day, from arrangements between families through to big dramatic gestures of love, we work our way towards walking down the aisle - with all the strange bells and whistles tradition dictates!

On this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats with best-selling author of over 80 books, Sue Bentley!

As Sue explains, her decision to 'become a writer' didn't happen particularly early in her life, though she was ever a reader, inspired by books like Denys Watkins-Pitchford's The Little Grey Men, Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, and C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Only when she was a Mum with children off at school did she decide to put pen to paper, and after ten years of work found herself...

Our story for "Birth Week" is a retelling from Martin of recently rediscovered Northamptonshire legend The Brigstock Fox.

A tale of Medieval changelings, magic, princes and parenthood, it begins as the folktale does, with a strange, seemingly uncatchable creature stalking the forests around Fotheringhay Castle.

Richard of York, away in Ireland, offers a bag of gold to whoever can catch the beast and prevent the savaging of the ducks, geese, hogs and lambs that belong to his vassals.

Only when hunting dogs catch not a monstrous fox but a man...

This week on Three Ravens, as part of our month long exploration of cycles of life, we're talking all about Birth Folklore!

From Ancient Mesopotamian "birth bricks" and fires lit to smoke babies out of the womb to 20th century beliefs in hairy babies prompting their mothers to experience heartburn, human societies have cleaved to a whole load of fairly wild concepts related to reproduction.

Yet, as we explore in this conversation, it's surprising how universal many motifs to do with birth and pregnancy are, from forms of sympathetic magic like the danger...

On this week's episode of Local Legends Martin chats with veteran British broadcaster and host of Folk on Foot Matthew Bannister.

In a conversation that folds in some of Matthew's other wonderful projects including The Song Detectorists and Last Word, while Martin and Matthew don't quite go on a wander together, our main focus is Matthew's multi-award winning podcast Folk on Foot, which combines folk music, outdoor walking, and acoustic on-location performances.

In each episode, Matthew walks with a prominent folk artist through a landscape that has inspired their craft, capturing natural ambient...