Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Spectrophilia: The Ghost Fetish

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

If you happen to be a Spectrophiliac, then October must be a particularly exciting time for you.What is a spectrophiliac? Well, it's a fetish for ghosts (as well as mirrors), so being turned on by anything lurking in the non-physical realm. After all, as the old adage goes, the most important sex organ is the brain.What are the historic origins of this fetish and phenomenon? And what real life stories can be told of it?Today features an interview Kate did with Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney on our sister podcast, After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal.Head to their feed here to find brand new episodes already out on such mysterious and unsettling topics such as HMS Terror, the origins of Halloween and Murder in Ancient Rome.This podcast was edited by Siobhan Dale and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Ked Lister. I am here. You are here, which is the really important thing. But before you and I can go any further with this podcast, I need to give you the fair do's warning. Here it is.

This is an adult podcast, spoken about adults to other adults about adulty things in an adultery way, and there's a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now that we've got that little lot out of the way, You have been forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Fair do.

You can't say fairer than that. On with the show. Don't mind me, betwixters. I'm just in the ceramic studio in the basement of the history hits building. I didn't know there was one there either, but here I am sitting at my pottery wheel throwing a pot.

The lights are dimmed. The mass between my hands is bulging. What are you sniggering at? This is just how I do my best work. While I'm at it, maybe I could summon a sexy spirit from the other realm to see if they can help me. You know, shape this gorgeous vase that I'm now creating. Because if Hollywood has taught us anything,

it's that ghosts make for fantastic ceramicists. I mean, if it's good enough for Demi Moore in Ghost, it's got to be good enough for me too. Now, where was I? What do you look on him at? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs

by just turning a knot and pushing it. Yeah, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Sexy spirits have always been a part of our folklore, dating back to one of, actually, if not the first woman,

if that's your belief system, Lilith, the so-called she-demon, who was banished from the Garden of Eden for not obeying our. Adam sounds like a girl I could get behind. Poor woman! But we're supposed to feel terribly sorry for her, or perhaps scared of her. And sure enough, the demonisation of sexually empowered, disobedient women begins.

Adam aside, there are many people who love she demons. In today's episode, we are talking about spectrophilia, fitting for this time of year, don't you think? As it's both a fetish and a phenomenon of people who are sexually attracted to ghost. hosts and spirits, and mirrors, apparently. But that's a whole other thing. Yep, you heard that right. And I chatted about all of this to Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney

for their brand new podcast called After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, which is now part of the history hit family, who create this podcast too. After Dark has just launched, and there are already episodes out on the HMS Terror, the origins of Halloween, murder in ancient Rome, and grave robbing. go and listen if you like a bit of gore and spookiness. But also everything that they talk about is historical fact. Right. I am ready to cross over to the spooky, sexy realm if you are. So welcome everybody to this week's episode of After Dark and we are delighted to have the brilliant Dr Kate Lister. Our neighbour from Betwixt the Sheets on the History Hits Network with us for this episode

and we are talking about something that I never thought I would ever utter in my entire life and that is spectrophilia. So Kate, first of all, hello and welcome. Hello. It's brilliant to have you on. And when we saw this topic come through, we went, I'm sorry, what does this mean? What is this? So tell us a little bit about what spectrophilia means if you haven't heard the term before.

It's a strange term. It's an even stranger phenomenon. So spectrophilia is sexual attraction to ghosts or spirits or some kind of sexual interaction with ghosts and spirit. It can also mean sexual attraction to mirrors. So you have to be very careful how you're using it in conversation because two very, very different things there. And tell me this, in terms of the mirrors, is it a sexual attraction to the mirrors or a sexual attraction to what's being reflected in the mirrors? That is a very good question. I don't think that it is the mirror itself so much. Yeah. As like the idea that you're being reflected in it, that it is the image that you are looking

at it. I don't think there is any. out there like running around in Oxfam just trying to sexually assault mirrors. But I could be wrong. Kate, you never know. You never know. You should never ever dismiss just how bizarre people's kinks can actually be. No, I think that it is the being turned on by mirrors. But also, you know, it sounds mad, but there are kind of much more mild versions of it of, you know,

people like watching themselves having sex in a mirror. You've picked someone up on Tinder, you've gone there and they've got mirrors on the ceiling. and that's that, oh right, that's your thing. Okay. I don't have mirrors on the ceiling, but I do have a gold flake ceiling. That doesn't qualify, doesn't it? That's very bougie. That is very decadent.

It is a little bit decadent. You mentioned before that this is duly referred to as a phenomenon and a fetish. Tell us a little bit about that. Is there a conflict there? Is there a crossover? I think it's because we're trying to find words to define a whole broad range of things. So the fetish itself, that is that we're, when you're actually turned on by something.

So you're turned on by the idea of ghosts and spirits. I'm not entirely sure how that manifests itself. I've not spent a lot of time in the spectrophilia community to really get to grips with this. And we should probably have someone with spectrophilia on to describe it. But that's when ghosts and goolies and things like that, they turn you on. And again, it sounds bonkers, but I don't think you have to look too far into it to sort of get a handle on it. I mean, vampires are quite sexy.

That's a whole thing, right? That's like a kind of a mild, more socially acceptable version of spectrophilia, like when people find monsters, goblins, gooplies, ghosts, quite erratic. And then there's spectrophilia where you're not actually seeking it out, you're not turned on by it, but you've had some kind of sexual encounter normally with a ghost or a spirit. It's really a person, because I'm not sure that people really know what it is quite that's going on here. I think it's so interesting that there's so many different sort of interpretations of this. and I think what is maybe real to someone else,

maybe not real to another person. It's that thing of sort of personal experience, being the evidence and trumping other things. It's interesting. And I think as well we're going to get into the history of this because I think there's really obvious origins, I would say, of some of these ideas in the Gothic at the end of the 18th century, into the 19th century,

and these sort of breaking down of boundaries between the living and the dead in sexual encounters. You know, I'm thinking about, I don't know whether it actually happened, but the famous anecdote about Mary Shelley having sex for Percy on her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft's grave. And whilst that's not having sex with a spirit or a gould, there's something there about the thinning of the veil between the worlds when it comes to sex, I think, which is, yeah, so interesting. I can't remember if it was Freud who said it. It probably was pointed out how close sex and death are linked in the human consciousness.

When someone says that to you, you just think, well, that sounds bonkers. How the hell could death be an aphrodisiac? But it is an aphrodisiac. In many ways, it's the most powerful Aphrodisiac. There is nothing like impending doom to make you reassess who you fancy shagging, quite frankly. So, like, you know, when there's times of war or like times of national disaster,

sex is very much in the mix, isn't it? So I can't properly defend Mary Shelley from her little cook there, apparently, losing a virginity on her mother's tombstone. That's out there. But did they find that horny? Or is this just a convenient place to actually have sex, I don't know the answer to that.

The earlier iterations of this could be traced back as far as Lilith, I guess. Like these references, allusions to kind of otherworldly demonic crossover with sexual acts have been around for an awfully long time. So do you see some of that trope in the Lilith stories? Lilith is a fascinating character. She sort of stalks, even the oldest manuscripts that we've got, she crops up in Babylonian mythology and Samaritan mythology and June. Jewish mythology, and she's always quite naughty, like, depending on who you're talking to.

But by the time you get to the Jewish mythology, she is very much taken on this appearance of someone that has sex with men and kind of drains them of their energy. She's become this sort of succubus, naughty, demon scaliwag of a creature. And that is very, very old, that trope of demons having sex with humans. Like, when you say that, you know, it's ghosts, so people have sex with ghosts, that sounds mad, but if you kind of reframe that and go, people have sex with demons, that's a really common trope. It's still quite present in horror movies. It's quite present in Gothic stories. If it's not a demon, it's a vampire. This idea that you're having sex with this demonic other force, that's really, really old. And that crops up in all kinds of mythologies

all around the world. There's something there about sex being not exactly transactional, but exhaustive in some way, that it's a draining act. Depends on the sex, Maddie. And here we're are. Well, absolutely. But thinking about, you know, you mentioned vampires earlier, Kate, and thinking about Dracula going to his victims at night and appearing to them in whatever form to have some kind of sexual encounter with them. And that there's something there, yeah, about sort of it being, I guess, predatory as well. And, you know, thinking about issues of consent and obviously the story of Dracula, but this idea more generally, it's a little bit complex here, this idea of consent and spectrophilia? You've got two things going on really. One, you've got this issue of consent,

which it's all nicely done away with in these kind of stories, because normally they're in a hypnotic state, or they couldn't possibly resist, or they've been seduced by the demon, or there's some otherworldly force that's compelled you to have sex with this demon. So the issue of consent is kind of quite nicely taken out of the equation. And I imagine that that is, in some ways what makes these stories even more appealing is the idea that you could be seduced, have the best sex of your life, but like it wasn't even your fault. It wasn't something you wanted to do, obviously. But then that idea of draining, that is a really interesting one as far as sex and spirits go. This idea of the succubus that linked to Lilith, the idea that there is

this demonic, normally a female demon that is going to suck the life force out of men by having sex with them. That's really old as well. And yeah, it is the idea, it's almost like a sexual enslavement. You give up to this highly erotically charged power, and it's going to drain you of absolutely everything you've got and then some. It's interesting that you talk about the succubus. And if I'm gendering this correctly, succubus is female and incubus is male, right? I always get them mixed up.

I think that that's right. Yeah. My education system was through Catholic schools in growing up in Ireland. Oh, you'd know all about it. I would. And actually, it reminded me of one of the things we had somehow come across, Don't ask me who taught us this. I don't know, but maybe they should be investigated.

Go on. There was the story of kind of female mysticism, which is, you know, pretty common in history. I had to kind of look this up when I knew we were doing this episode. And it was Agnes Blambican, I think I'm saying that surname correctly. A 1314th century female mystic, Christian mystic. Now, her revelations were published in 1731, which is kind of familiar territory for Maddie and I, kind of 18th century. So that's interesting, first of all, that it took that long for them to come out. But they were all destroyed, bar two copies.

one was then destroyed in 1870. So this legacy, Agnes's legacy, is going on quite a long time. But the other survives. And in that, we find out that by the time she turned like 10 or 11, Agnes was craving the meat of Christ. And so when we're talking about these kind of male incubus figures, Agnes is having these cravings around 10 or 11. So there's this eroticism coming in there too.

She got herself a bit of a reputation for being obscene in her own lifetime back in the 13th and 14th. And she had this apparently, and you can tell me more about this, potentially. she had this particular phenomenon slash fetish where she would taste the sweet foreskin of Christ. Yes. I mean, it's a bold move, isn't it, on Agnes' part, that one, to brand yourself as the person is giving Christ a blowjob possibly. She didn't say that, to be really fair to her. What she said was that she was in a religious sort of state. She'd worked herself up into this kind of like, almost like a religious ecstasy. and that when that happened, she became aware of Christ's foreskin in her mouth. I think I tweeted about this a while ago. And then immediately everyone goes, he didn't have a foreskin, he was Jewish.

Like, that's what we're going to fact-checked this particular story on. That is the bottom line in this story, Kate. Yeah, exactly. That's the bit where it all falls apart. But the issue of Christ's foreskin is actually a really interesting and controversial one in Christian law because Christ was Jewish, so he would have been circumcised. The question is, is what happens to the foreskin after he's been circumcised. size. And it became like a holy relic. At one point there was something like 14, all different

fourskins doing the rounds of different churches of Europe all at the same time. So she's not completely bonkers for focusing in on this because it was a religious relic. She said that she could feel it and taste it in her mouth, which is wow, isn't it? It's like, imagine Agnes just telling you this particular story. But she was absolutely convinced by it and she had a reputation for being mad, but also being a mystic. She also, as crazy as that sounds, I don't want to say that didn't happen. Maybe it did. I want to do Agnes down. But she wasn't on her own because there's lots of accounts of nuns and mystics recounting these very erotically charged meetings with Christ. Who is their husband, by the way? Don't forget that. They've married the Big Jay,

haven't they? And they kind of describe these very erotically charged encounters with him. Agnes has kind of gone down in history because hers is the most graphic. I think. Like, she really stood out. She didn't just say that, you know, Christ came to me and he touched me and he loved me and he entered my body. She went the full. He put his foreskin in my mouth.

The bit that we never quite get the details on is, is it still attached to Jesus's penis, Agnes? Or is this like a free floating foreskin that is happening? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what's worse. She didn't give us all the revelations. Well, the thing I suppose, like, with someone like Agnes is,

suppose it's worth pointing out that she didn't actually write this herself. she dictated this to somebody else. So there's also that... She had a mouth phone. She had other things going on. That's such a child. I'm sorry. We have this account and in it she kind of describes a sort of climax, I suppose,

where she has this burning sensation and it's just like it's not external, it's internal, and all of this is happening. And it doesn't sound like it's acid reflux, to be fair to her, but it's like she's very much consumed being kissed by the Lamb of God. I mean, a historian, we do do that from time to time. We try and go, no, I think you're just misreading this. She's just very good friends with the Lamb of God. of God or whatever it is through.

But it's definitely sex. It's definitely erotically charged. And she is describing it sounds very much like an orgasm, this heat burning thing that comes up from inside. This is an erotically charged experience. And it's very difficult with something that's this old and it's been translated and re-translated and it wasn't in her words.

Someone else dictated it of exactly what's going on here. But I always feel that I kind of believe that this thing happened to her. I don't genuinely believe that it was the free floating foreskin of our Lord and Savior. You don't? I have questions. But I believe that something happened to her that she believed she experienced this because it's so back crap crazy to come out with that in the 14th century.

Like, why would you, unless that really happens, if you were absolutely convinced? I at least believe that. I don't think she was just making stuff up. I think she really did experience this. I'll be back with Marie and Anthony after this short break. So we've got, you know, women experiencing this phenomenon as a sort of worshipful act in some way, it's LinkedIn.

Their own spiritual belief, their own sort of spiritual realm they occupy. But then at the other end of the spectrum, we've got women in other mythologies, other folklore, who are the spirits themselves and they're vengeful. They're not worshipful. So I'm thinking about the 16th century Hispanic law around the Lorona, the Crying Woman. So can you tell us a little bit about that, Kate? That's a very different vibe. Will you get that kind of vengeful creature monster cropping up?

So yeah, there's a spectral creature in Javanese mythology, and I'm going to pronounce this hideously wrong. Correct me on my awful pronunciation. But it's spelled W-E-W-E, so We-We-We-W-E, and then G-O-M-B-E-L, we-we-Gomble. And she is a ghost in Javanese folklore who married the man of her life. She absolutely loved him, but she couldn't have children. and then the guy became really resentful

and started shagging someone else. And then Wee Wee Gomble caught him in bed with another woman and was so amazed she murdered him. But then the villagers were so shocked by what she'd done. They chased her, they cornered her, and then she took her own life rather than face the justice. And it said that she still stalks the land, but she's not looking for men, she's looking for children.

And in pictures of her, she has these massive, like, long, pendulous breasts that actually like snakes that go right down to the floor. And she, like, wraps them around her neck, like a feather boa. And it said that, like, she hides children. under these massive pendulous breasts. And there are different accounts. In some, she takes the children away to be really nice to them. She takes the children away from bad parents.

And then in other versions, she's like you kind of like your typical buggy man nasty. She's going to be horrible to you. But apparently even today in Java, they'll say, you know, you've got to get home quickly. Otherwise, we-wee-gomble will come and get you to the kids. I mean, if you did have pendulous breasts, what else would you put under them except children? That you could just, that at least she's being practical. But it also says something about womanhood, motherhood, expectations, conversations around failure to produce airs, all that kind of thing.

And it's kind of insidious in that sense, right? The message is sending. You get female ghosts, they tend to be heartbroken, or at least the trope of the heartbroken female ghost, seems to be much more common. I can't think of any heartbroken male ghost. Men ghosts seem to sort of wander around, being pissed off at stuff and wanting vengeance for this, that and the other. Whereas, I can think of loads of ghosts off the top of my head that are just, oh, it's

supposed to be haunted by a woman. and it killed herself because, you know, a husband ditched her and all of this stuff. So, yeah, I think that they are quite gendered. I would like just a woman ghost who's just pissed off. Yeah. She's like a menopausal ghost who's just, you know, bollocks to all of this.

I'm just going to wreak a terrible curse on everybody. She's like, I forgot to put the washing out. Now I'm really annoyed. You're getting haunted. Perfect. Yeah, zero motivation at all other than just... Yeah, nothing got to do with men either. We're talking about these things in kind of very past dances,

is part of our kind of our parlance. But there are more kind of contemporary examples, right? There are things in film and TV that would qualify as spectrophilic. There are, I mean, it must happen all the time. I don't even know what you do if you have this kind of experience.

I suppose most of the time you just don't tell anybody, but on the few occasions that anyone does tell anyone and the stories end up in the press, the press love it of like, you know, woman had sex with ghost 10 times a night, or woman married her ghost lover. And you even get some famous people talk about that they have actually had an erotic encounter with a ghost.

Lucy Lou said that she did. Anna Nicole Smith said that she'd had amazing sex with a ghost. I think even Dan Aykroyd, he didn't have sex with a ghost, but he said that he was cuddled, spooned by a ghost. Oh, but she's kind of sweet. It's a pretty nice. Yeah, right? Just, oh, give us a cuddle.

But that has quite a long history as well. What is happening there? I am not entirely sure. because unless Lucy Lou is going to chip in and explain to us what happened. Because when I read these stories, it does tend to be that they wake up in the middle of the night and somebody's having sex with them, this unseen force. And that for me is the first red flag. You're having a wet dream.

Like that's what this is. You know, like we've all had those dreams where you wake up orgasming. I hope. That's not just me, right? It speaks to things like sleep paralysis as well, right? And that kind of, again, that boundary between not life and death this time, but sleeping and wakefulness. And, you know, we are the after-dark podcast.

We like to think about the nighttime. You know, when we were looking up spectrophilia in sort of preparation for this conversation, I kept thinking about Henry Fusley's famous painting the nightmare, you know, the woman who's obviously in some kind of erotic state asleep. And there's the, I guess it's an incubus. It's a sort of male gendered goblin-y thing. It's like a sort of a squat goblin thing, in it?

Yeah, that's sat on her chest. And, you know, that, again, that fits with this. idea of the Gothic. You know, I think it's painted in 1880, 1781 and it's this idea of, yeah, the sort of moment before wakefulness as being somehow erotically charged, I think is tied to the Gothic,

and you see it in films in the 20th century, like Ghost, for example. Yeah. The great masterpiece that is. Ghost? I can't remember. Have they, did they have sex? The ghost does sex with the pottery lady? I mean, do they have sex once he's died? I mean, they're in love with each other. He's hanging around. And they definitely

cuddle. The pottery thing is quite erotically charged, isn't it? It's quite a phallic thing, you know, the hands. I think he's still alive in that scene. He is still alive? He's alive. Okay, that's not quite as weird. Oh, I thought he was dead in that one.

Oh, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, not only is sleep often eroticised, but hypnosis, especially when you get to the 19th century, that was, you get that turning up in all kinds of, like, petty dreadfuls and little sci-fi things, and like, Dracula, you were saying, he was really good at that, hypnotise these women,

and then, oh, my God, my clothes are falling off, I've just got to help myself. And again, it's very, very eroticised. But I'm endlessly fascinated by sleep and what happens in our sleep. Because, like, I do crazy shit in my sleep. I am one of those people that does weird, weird stuff. You wake up, like, half a mile down the road, do you, Kate? Yeah, I do.

Okay, so things that I've done in my sleep. So I phoned people in my sleep. Stop it. Wow. Yeah, like, imagine how scary that is, getting a phone call at 5 in the morning from me burbling absolutely crap about, like, you know, we need to get to the canal, the squirrels. of man the controls and then I'll wake up. I wake up on the phone and like realize what I'm doing

and then have to like try and talk to this person who thinks I'm having some kind of episode. When I go back and stay with my mum and my dad, I'm sharing way too much now. My mom puts bells on the bedroom door so when I break out, she could hear me doing it. This is amazing. That's so dramatic as well. I love it. You just a bell her. Yeah, we'll just put bells on it. Like she's a leper. I wreck things as well, which is kind of sad. Like I woke up in my old flat, which was a ground floor flat, and I'd thrown all of my books out of the window, or at least somebody had. Like, that could be a point to go, might have been a ghost. It probably was me, though, being asleep. That could be a ghost, except I'm destructive, so it was me.

Except I would put money on me doing it. Actually, you know, that's a really interesting point. It's a really interesting point for After Dark generally, and Betwixt the Sheets, because I'm sure you've probably covered this already, Kate, but the vulnerability of sleep. Yeah, it's horrible. It's like going to sleep and not knowing what I'm actually going to do, There's this other Kate that wakes up in the middle of the night and goes, right. Let's phone people and wreck shit. And I've got no control over it. I have to like put that.

I mean, it can be really bad. There's a stand-up comic and I can't remember the name for the life for me. And he does a whole thing about how bad his sleepwalking was that he actually jumped out of the hotel window asleep and broke legs. Oh, my gosh. So I've never been that bad. But it's strange that you've got no control over it. And you have to do things like, I can never go to sleep in a hotel naked because I want sleepwalked out of. of a hotel room and I was completely nude and I locked myself out.

I mean, that is a nightmare. That's people's nightmares. It is and you literally become awake and you're like, I am now in the hotel room and I've got no clothes on at all. This is awful. Luckily, there was somebody in the room that I could knock and say, please let me back in. I've wandered out of the room.

I am normal. I am normal. I'm naked, but I'm normal. Please see me again. There's kind of two levels, right? There's the physical stuff that people are doing unawares. But there's also then what your mind is capable of doing or, what it wants to do, even if you never roam or do anything physically,

but what you are, the worlds you are creating for yourself as you sleep. Exactly. And they can be, like, I mean, you probably don't do the silly things that I did, but, like, dreams can be so vivid. Like, you must have done a thing like, where you wake up and you think you're inside the dream. And it takes you a while to reorientate yourself and be like, oh, okay, okay, I'm dreaming.

I've never had sleep paralysis, but I've spoken to people that doing that, sounds terrifying. Oh, yeah. It doesn't surprise me in the least that people believed in possessions and devils, and you know that there's this thing sat on you and that you can't move and that your brain does all kinds of crazy stuff. And it's weird because you think that you're in control of your own brain. But when stuff like that happens, no, you're not.

There's like a whole other bit that's just going to kick in, just going to do whatever it likes. And that is quite scary. Maybe that's why sleep is eroticised, isn't it? Is this space of you're not fully in control of yourself? Where do things like astral projection fit into this then? So we've got this idea of your subconscious, giving you scenarios,

making you do things physically. But astral projection is something quite different. It's something that you're tapping into consciously and it's, I guess, maybe a way of having sexual encounters in the spirit world on purpose. The astral production is fascinating because it's really difficult to quantify scientifically, isn't it? Like I could sit here right now and be like, oh my God, I've left my body.

I'm having an out of body experience. And you've got no way of knowing if that is actually true. But your brain can do incredibly weird things. Like you could call it astral projection, but I've also heard, like people are really into yoga and tantra. And they talk about like, you know, kundalini energy sort of like going through their body, that they're having out of body experiences because of that. And again, it's your brain doing all kinds of mad stuff. I think that if you focus enough, you can take yourself to other spaces, to other, you know,

I don't want to take other realms because I don't believe in other realms, but I certainly think that you can convince yourself that you have. Yeah, other states of consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if only I had that level of concentration, which I absolutely don't. I do not have that level of concentration. No, it's not something I've been gifted with. Well, listen, Kate, I will never pass by a mirror in the same way again.

Me looking in a mirror changed forever. How brilliant to have a little After Dark Betwixt the Sheets crossover. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure. If you enjoyed what you heard here today, then obviously follow Betwixt the Sheets on History Hit. And find us too, After Dark, follow us, and we shall have more spooky, creepy, but fun histories on both platforms.

Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Madden Anthony for having me on After Dark. Do go and check it out. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just fancied saying hello, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the history of asexuality to the history of the witch, all coming your way.

This podcast was edited by Chavonne Dale and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by history hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.