Something Supernatural Webinar Series

Something Supernatural: Tales from Around the World

This webinar series explores a variety of supernatural phenomena worldwide. Blending academic discussion with story telling, we delve into specific cultural expressions of the supernatural as well as shared elements among various societies. Are such stories evidence of our shared humanity? Do they speak more to cultural specificity? Or are we dealing with something as inexplicable as the supernatural itself? Join us for such probing questions and chilling tales.

2024: The Legend of Mothman

October 30, 2024 at 5:00 pm, EST

First emerging in the mid-1960s in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, the Mothman legend continues to intrigue. While a significant example of American folklore, sightings of similar creatures have increasingly been reported worldwide.  Dr. Eleanor Hasken-Wagner, folklorist and Museum and Historic Sites Supervisor for the city of Frankfort, Kentucky, will discuss the origin of the Mothman as well as the legend’s migration across time and space. Throughout, she will share fascinating tales. Farida Jalalzai will moderate.

Eleanor Hasken-Wagner, Ph.D. is the Museum and Historic Sites Supervisor for the city of Frankfort.  She is a graduate of Indiana University, with a Ph.D. in Folklore & Ethnomusicology and a minor in History. Her dissertation is titled: "The Migration of a Local Legend: The Case of Mothman." In 2016, she graduated WKU's Folk Studies program after defending her MA thesis: "Performing Gender in Bowling, or, 'I Was in Shock Other Girls Could Bowl." Academically, she specializes in the formation and role of narrative in our lives. As the Museum and Historic Sites Supervisor, her primary responsibility is to manage, plan events, and curate exhibits at the Capital City Museum. She is the host of the award-winning Kentucky Deceased: Hauntings of Frankfort Podcast. In her spare time, she can be found tinkering on vintage mopeds and doing fiber-based arts. 

2023: Kuntilanak: Malay Modernity, Patriarchy, and their Traumatizing Horrors

UPDATED - Friday, December 1st, 2023, 10:00 a.m.

Kuntilanak is a well-known and infamous ghost in Indonesia and Malaysia. The vampire with long hair and white clothes is not only infamous for securing men but also preying on newborn babies and feasting on female blood and placentas. Timo Duile, a post doctoral researcher at the University of Bonn will explain the origins of that ghost which points toward a specific mode of modernity that constitutes a realm of Islamic Malay civilization in opposition to the horrors of Kuntilanak. In the founding myth of the city of Pontianak on the island of Borneo, it is said that Kuntilanak had to be banished in order to build the city. This founding myth not only implies a significant shift in human-spirit relations in contrast to local pre-Islamic animism, but also establishes gender norms as well as notions of culture/civilization in opposition to nature/wilderness. Thus, while the concept of Kuntilanak demonizes femininity, it is this very demonization that equips her with features that stand outside the patriarchal social order. She points, therefore, towards the social order’s own impossibility.

Timo Duile is currently a post doctoral researcher at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany. He has studied Political Science, Philosophy, Cultural Anthropology, and Indonesian Language. He obtained his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies and has done extensive fieldwork in Borneo, Sulawesi, and Jakarta and was a guest researcher at Universitas Tanjungpura (Pontianak), Universitas Hasauddin (Makassar), the Indonesian Conference for Religion and Peace as well as Universitas Nasional (both Jakarta).

2022: Tales of the Jinn

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022 at 2 p.m.

Across time and space, there are references to the existence of beings referred to as jinns. Ali A. Olomi, assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University, will discuss the origins of the jinn and different cultural and religious conceptions of these creatures. Throughout he will also share tales featuring jinns and their interactions with humans across the globe. Farida Jalalzai will moderate.

Ali A. Olomi is a historian of the Middle East and Islam researching, writing, and publishing on medieval and modern Muslim thought. He studies how Muslims imagined the “Islamic world” at the intersection of religion, science, and empire. He works on how Muslims in the premodern and modern world deployed the concept of homeland to etch the borders of empire, construct collective identity, and imagine the other.  Olomi's research examines the Muslim imagination of the monstrous through the djinn/jinn, the early history of astronomy and its role in empire-building, and Islamic apocalypticism and cosmology. He has an interest in the deep roots of nationalism, the histories of science and rationality, Islamism, gender and sexuality, and the tension between global religious community and local identity. He has additional research and teaching interests in world history, critical theory, the global south, historiography, folklore, and mysticism.