by Deborah Hyde

When: Thursday, July 21st, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

Deborah Hyde will tell us about cultural aspects of the religious and superstitious experience. This evening we will discuss and answer such questions as:

• Why do the dead chew in their graves?
• Why do vampires strike in autumn?
• Why do ghosts live in electric clocks?

A gory talk full of the unexpected, it’s a round-up of the folklore of the macabre.

About Deborah

Deborah has been writing about the supernatural for nearly two decades. She blogs on ‘Superstition, Religion and Being Human’ as ‘Jourdemayne’ but often suffers from mission creep.

She’s also one of the organisers of Westminster Skeptics and is Editor-in-Chief of the Skeptic Magazine. Her daytime, grown-up job is a makeup effects coordinator in the film industry – more vampires and zombies, then.

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It’s been a busy weekend most of my time having been taken up attending extended meetings with a litany of scoundrels – Jim Beam and Jose Cuervo to name but the two worst offenders – and so I have had very little time for blogging.

And now that I do have a little more time, my laptop is broken.

So, posts from myself, the bleary-eyed-and-sore-headed Reverend Colonel Molerat, will have to be short, quick and vacuous until I once again have the technology at my disposal to spend long evenings reading, researching and writing (I hear cries of relief from those who have suffered through my longer ramblings!).

The first of these posts is, of course, this one, and it is already becoming much longer than expected. So, to try and produce more content for less work, I am going to pose a question to you, O Anonymous Reader, a question I have long pondered and the answer to which I do not know:

How much evidence of God would a ‘real’ western-style vampire be?

If there were a true ‘I vant to suck your blood!’-style vampire, who ticked every ‘vampire’ box (turning into a bat, sleeping in a coffin, hating garlic, etc), how would you interpret their aversion to the Christian Cross? Evidence of a deity, or evidence of vampiric phobia of certain geometric shapes?

How would you investigate? Vampires of different cultural backgrounds? Crosses vs crucifixes? Placebo holy water?

So! Throw off the shackles of anonymity! Embrace the comforting hug of a nym, be it pseudonym or, erm, real nym, and comment below the fold!

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Colonel Molerat never drinks wine…