Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about Magic, Culture and the Paranormal, coming to you from Sunny West London.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy.

Today on Roon Soup.

Today on Roon soup we are speaking with writer, anthropologist, editor, PhD candidate, visiting lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester, Jack Hunter.

Jack founded Paraanthropology, Journal of Anthropological Approaches to Magic.

He is the author of Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic, Editor of Talking with the Spirits, Ethnographies Between the Worlds

and the latest damned facts.

Jack, thank you very much for your time.

And you're welcome.

Nice one, nice one.

So I know you have a new addition to the household, a new kid getting around.

So we're going to start with a childhood-based question, as we usually do.

Were you a weird kid? I think probably the answer is yes.

Thinking back to it when I was growing up I have always had a kind of

I had always had a kind of fascination with things like vampires the

paranormal things like that that I think one of my earliest memories is seeing a

Ladybird edition of Dracula at a supermarket when I was probably about four years old and I was just kind of hooked on that kind of gothic imagery for a very long time.

So that's always been kind of a stream running through my thinking, gothic horror. Did your parents let you have that book? I have a similar story

everyone at the same age and I was not allowed to read Dracula at four.

Yeah. I can't remember actually. I haven't got the book now so I'm guessing they probably didn't

The imagery stayed with me so

Cool so I mean did that inform your kind of early experience of of reading and so on? Well yeah kind of I'd always been intrigued by that kind of

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