Libraries to host spooky talks on werewolves, witches and spirits

If you’re still searching for your fix of witches, werewolves and other ghouls after Halloween, you may be able to find it, oddly enough, at the library.

The Poetry Collection of the UB Libraries will present two talks on things that go bump in the night: “Monster-Wives and Animal-Paramours: Occult Scrapbooks in the Helen Adam Collection” by Alison Fraser, a UB English doctoral candidate, and “The Library Beyond the Vail: A Brief History of Post-Mortem and Channeled Texts” by Mandi Shepp, a librarian at Marion H. Skidmore Library.

The free event will take place from 3-5 p.m. Nov. 16 in 420 Capen Hall, North Campus. It also will include an exhibit of materials from both collections.

“The Poetry Collection is thrilled to host an event that showcases some of the rich material that Western New York has to offer,” says Elliot McNally, project archivist for the UB Libraries. “We hope that this will be the first of many similar events that bring together the area’s unique, and sometimes eerie, holdings.”

Helen Adam, who poet Robert Duncan once referred to as “the extraordinary nurse of enchantment,” was a 20th-century Scottish poet, collagist and photographer. Her work primarily shares tales of fatal romances, sadistic sexual affairs, jealous lovers and vengeful demons.

In her presentation, Fraser will share how Adam reshaped the Scottish tradition of monster-wife ballads — stories of women who are enchanted into beasts and must be rescued by a man through a sexual encounter. Adam disrupts the tradition by creating female characters who are independent, and by positioning the men as prey rather than liberators.

Shepp will continue the discussion of the paranormal with a presentation on channeled texts — or works created with the help of a spiritual guide — from the Spiritualist Special Collections Library in Lily Dale, the largest center for Spiritualism in the world.

Spiritualism, a religion that involved communication with the spirits of the dead through a medium, was founded near Rochester in 1848, Shepp says.

“These works are unique in terms of how they are created, and are also reflective of greater themes of interest in popular culture at the time,” she says. “Their abundance portrays the popularity of Spiritualism in America during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and provides a window into an aspect of relatively local history that can still be explored today.”

The works on display will vary from a channeled Bible titled “Oahspe” to a book of poetry written after death by a poet through a medium.