Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. This week we are speaking with Dr.

Francis Young. Dr. Young is an historian, author and translator hailing from and

with a particular interest in East Anglia. He joins us today to speak principally about the history of exorcism.

Dr Young, welcome aboard.

Thank you for having me. All right, well, let's see how question the first goes, Francis, were you a weird kid?

Yes, well I know you ask all your contributors this question.

Yes, I think I probably was a rather weird kid.

Yeah, I was, I suppose, yes, lived in my head and had a rich imaginative life. I became very preoccupied, I suppose, when I was about 10 or 11 years old with folklore and fairy tales and I used to collect volumes of

folklore stories from any country really around the world that I was fascinated by and I did yes I did have a

lot of interest in the unseen world I suppose. Were you living in the, did you grow up in a

particularly folkloric area to use it as a sort of geographic descriptor? Yes well I

grew up in Suffolk in East Anglia in the far east of England and that's an area that does have a very

rich folklore.

Perhaps what it's best known for is the great witch hunts that were conducted in the 17th century

by Matthew Hopkins, the Witch Finder General.

So there was, yes, always that sort of dark looming background.

And of course the ghost stories of MR James.

In fact, where I went to school was only about a mile away from where James was brought up at

Great Livermere, and so I was always very much aware of those stories. in a weird kind of way I suppose my life

as somewhat mirrored James is in that we were both brought up in the same sort of area

had a similar kind of academic background similar academic

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