Vampires, fairies and witches are not classless figures. Class often hides in who owns, who works, who hungers, who is believed, who is blamed, and who gets turned into the monster.

Martha McGill’s British Academy post discusses William Rand’s c.1650 question about angels and demons entering human bodies, frames possession in Britain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as potentially routine rather than only dramatic, and connects early modern supernatural influence to humoral medicine, theology, literature, the evil eye, visionary experience and changing ideas of the self.

The phrase “folklore reimagined” is a hopeful one. But it also raises another question: who gets to reimagine folklore - and whose knowledge remains dismissed as superstition?

Archives do not only live in boxes, catalogues and reading rooms. Sometimes they survive as warnings, rumours, charms, ghost stories and things people keep saying because, for some reason, they still matter.