Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub

The Hull Werewolf
Deborah Hyde

Was a werewolf really loping around Hull’s Barmston Drain in 2016? Folklorist Deborah Hyde investigates this modern manbeast mystery.
In 2016, a peculiar story hit local headlines – a werewolf was loping around Barmston drain, an eighteenth century canal in Hull. Such tabloid gold couldn’t stay local for long and national newspapers amplified the reports to the point that international publications like the Huffington Post repeated them. Rock star Alice Cooper even commented on social media. But what lay behind the sensational spin? How many eye-witnesses were there and what did they really say? The Hull Werewolf’s context – both folkloric and contemporary – is rewarding to examine, to illuminate the content and transmission of this popular twenty-first century cryptid tale.

A specialist in belief, folklore and the supernatural, Deborah is a writer, broadcaster and producer who explores the strange corners of culture. She has appeared on ‘Strange Evidence’, ‘Mysteries at the Museum’ and the hit BBC podcasts ‘Uncanny’ and ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, and was Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Skeptic’ for a decade.

What we talk about when we talk about AI
Wendy Grossman

We talk about “artificial intelligence” as if it were a single thing, but in reality it’s an umbrella term that can mean anything from a computer program that generates an image from a prompt composed of a few words or automates keeping meetings notes to a non-biological superhuman consciousness to which we seem as dumb as a computer program that prints “Hello, world” seems to us. The issue is exacerbated by a number of factors: the hype “AI” companies’ marketing people sprinkle on everything; the depictions in science fiction books, movies, and TV shows; and, not least, our eternal desire for companions and superhuman guardians and our ability to anthropomorphize absolutely anything. This talk will tease apart some of these threads, and provide some guidelines in deciding how to navigate the difference between the state of the art and fantasy.

Wendy M. Grossman is the founder and former editor of The Skeptic magazine. For 35 years, she has focused on computers, freedom, and privacy in books and for publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Wired. Since 2001 she has published a weekly blog, net.wars. She is also a sometimes folksinger.

Horror Everything: 2016 – Forever
Dr Joe Ondrak

The history of horror is also the history of media, and key in understanding how we use media to play with the boundaries of what is real and what isn’t. In this talk, I explore and explain how horror fiction traditions are useful to understand contemporary conspiracy culture, moving from false documents and found footage to creepypasta and QAnon. Taking a formalist and stylistic approach, I demonstrate how social media platforms shape meaning, blur the boundaries of fact and fiction, and create a shared cognitive environment ripe for conspiracy belief.

Dr. Joe Ondrak is a leading expert in digital horror, both real and fictional. He has published extensively on extreme right-wing terror, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, as well as creepypasta and networked digital horror genres. He currently works as a subject matter expert in hate groups at Resolver and consults on digital extremist behaviours and activities. His chapter for the Routledge Companion to Horror Studies – The (New) Medium is the Monster: Networked Digital Horror – is forthcoming.

The Common Cold: 30,000 Years of the Sniffles
Dr David Miles

Everybody knows what a cold feels like: miserable. The first cold virus was detected in a milk tooth shed over 30,000 years ago and ever since, the common cold has been a bane.

Yet while sore throats and blocked noses are annoyingly familiar, the processes that lead to them are not widely known and often misunderstood. Processes like the misdirected immune response that makes us ill with a cold instead of protecting us from illness. Like the way heating a building enhances cold virus transmission. Like the way that most cold viruses can only exist at all thanks to the society we’ve built over the last few millennia.

And, most importantly, what we can do about them.

David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching immunity to infections and the vaccinations that protect against them in various parts of Africa. He now lives in London and teaches on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s online postgraduate course. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023 and his second, Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold, will be published in March 2026.