about
I am Hannah Walton, a researcher and writer working across working-class British folklore, informal heritage, cultural memory and visual culture.
My research is interested in the forms of knowledge that are easily overlooked: supernatural rumours passed between neighbours, ghost stories repeated through families, local warnings and beliefs, charms and omens, remembered places, everyday objects and stories that continue to circulate because, in some way, they matter.
A central strand of my work explores folklore as an informal archive. I am interested in what supernatural and vernacular sources can reveal about ordinary lives that are difficult to recover through conventional institutional records: experiences of labour, class, danger, care, belonging, loss and remembrance.
Underlying much of this is a question I keep returning to:
whose knowledge counts?
I am particularly interested in whose knowledge becomes evidence - and what happens when community knowledge, oral tradition and supernatural narrative encounter archives, museums, universities and other institutions that determine what is preserved, classified and recognised as authoritative.
current research
I am undertaking an MA in History of Art with Curating at Birkbeck, University of London, supported by a £32,000 Paul Mellon Centre MA/MPhil Studentship.
My project, Everyday Hauntings: British Folkloric Imagery, Working-Class Life and Visual Cultures of Care in Britain, c.1880–present, explores the relationship between folkloric imagery, everyday working-class experience, memory and care.
Alongside this, I am developing a wider body of independent research around supernatural folklore, working-class memory and the informal archive.
This includes Supernatural Rumour, Working-Class Memory and the Informal Archive in England, alongside two forthcoming conference papers:
“Who Gets to Haunt? Class, Voice and the English Ghost Story as Informal Archive”
Things That Go Bump in the Night, 22–24 October 2026
“Haunted Ground: Asylum Burial Grounds, Working-Class Folklore and the Informal Archives of Institutional Death”
The Everyday Heritage and Afterlives of Asylum Burial Grounds in Britain and Ireland, 27 October 2026
Together, these projects examine supernatural narrative not simply as belief or storytelling, but as a means through which communities have recorded, transmitted and made sense of experience beyond formal documentary systems.
My longer-term doctoral interests develop directly from this work. I want to investigate the relationship between working-class supernatural folklore, cultural memory and institutional evidence, particularly what informal sources can reveal about lives that formal archives incompletely record, and what happens to vernacular knowledge when it enters folklore collections, archives, museums and other systems of authority.
how I came to this work
My route into research has not been straightforward.
I grew up in a small working-class family in the Midlands and left school at fourteen during a difficult period in my life. I later returned to education through self-study, community work and a long, winding route through higher education.
That experience has shaped the questions I ask. I know personally that knowledge does not only emerge through conventional educational routes, and my work repeatedly returns to questions of authority, recognition and whose experiences are considered worth recording.
Before focusing more closely on folklore and cultural heritage, I studied and worked across social history, education, science, youth participation and social impact. I have increasingly come to understand those different branches as routes towards the same larger questions: how people understand their lives, how knowledge is preserved, and who gets to decide what counts.
My work has grown in branches, not straight lines.
research, writing and public work
My academic and creative practices frequently overlap. I write both critically and creatively about folklore, haunting, class, place and cultural memory, and I am interested in forms of research that can move between universities, museums, communities and public audiences.
My creative work includes The Hollow Fetch, winner of the 2026 John McGivering Writing Prize and published in The Kipling Journal. My wider work spans academic research, conference papers, creative writing, heritage and public-facing scholarship.
Across these different forms, I keep returning to the same question:
what can we learn when we take informal knowledge seriously?