Are there magical places? Which comes first, a place, or the folklore associated with it? One example of why such questions are problematic is the area around Silbury Hill, part of the complex of Neolithic sites around Avebury in Wiltshire in southwest England, a complex that includes Avebury Ring and West Kennet Long Barrow. The original purpose of Silbury Hill is still debated. Several other important Neolithic monuments in Wiltshire in the care of English Heritage, including the large henges at Marden and Stonehenge, may be culturally or functionally related to Avebury and Silbury. What is special—or magical—about this part of Wiltshire? Is it simply that it is flat? Or is it the case that decisions made in the past shape future action, in a process called path dependency? There is evidence that the area around Stonehenge had ritual significance even before farming came to Britain, and not long afterwards, the land was redeveloped. Once a site becomes sacred, or magical, it is constantly reused, rethought, and reenchanted.It follows that magical places are layered. It also follows that ownership of them is contested, and interpretations of them may divide rather than unite users. These kinds of divisions and contestations even extend to disciplinary boundaries. The relevance of such sites to twenty-first-century Britain is such that both academia and heritage organizations have been increasingly bedeviled by criticism about retaining past symbolism—in the form, for example, of statues—and for failing in loyalty to a past that they are assumed to be curating.It is possible to say confidently that these anxieties are shared because of the symposium commemorated and also partially preserved in this special issue of Preternature. This issue features selected materials presented in part at a one-day symposium that brought together academics from different disciplines, including archaeology, history, and folklore, along with representatives from heritage bodies.The subject of the symposium was “The Supernatural in Place.” This special issue examines the residue of supernatural sites across the land: their loss, their ruined visibility, and what layered multifarious posterity reads into them and about them through stories. The symposium's goal was to begin the process of reconnecting stories with their landscapes. Contributors also discussed and investigated questions of contested ownership and contested rights, alongside questions of curatorship or lack thereof, local versus national identity, generational engagement, and competing layers of story, some of which directly concerned magic, and others that explained it away.The articles collected here come both from leading academics and from the curatorial staff of England's two premier heritage organizations, English Heritage and the National Trust. The knowledge exchange program was initially organized between the University of Oxford and English Heritage, and afterwards both institutions invited additional experts from their own areas, including independent scholars. The result was a program for a one-day symposium that sought to discover what we had in common both in analyzing and in experiencing anxieties about places and spaces. The symposium was originally scheduled to take place on 23 March 2020, but the timing could not have been worse: that very day, England went into lockdown because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The omens were not auspicious. Yet all of us learned that the value of the virtual is very much better than nothing, and so the symposium was reorganized as a two-afternoon event that took place via Zoom in December 2020.It may be helpful for the academic readers of this journal to have some explanation of what a heritage organization does and what kind of heritage organizations participated in the symposium. English Heritage, for one, is a charitable organization that cares for over four hundred historic buildings, monuments, and sites—from world-famous prehistoric sites to grand medieval castles, from the remains of forts on the edges of the ancient Roman Empire to at least one Cold War bunker. While it inherited these responsibilities from government quangos (quasi-autonomous national government organizations), English Heritage has for several decades now been caring for and researching the properties for which it is responsible. The main goals are preservation and education. Like other organizations of its kind, English Heritage was hit hard by the pandemic and the loss of the revenue stream from visitors to its various properties.The National Trust (properly National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) is the older of the two heritage organizations connected with the symposium. Although established in 1895, since 1937 it has been most closely associated with the acquisition of country houses as the expense of upkeep became unsustainable for their private owners. One of the largest landowners in the United Kingdom, the Trust owns almost 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres or 970 square miles) of land and 780 miles of coast. Its properties include over five hundred historic houses, castles, archaeological and industrial monuments, gardens, parks, and nature reserves. The Trust owns some entire villages, including the village in which I live. To carry out the full scope of its responsibilities, the Trust maintains its own roster of curators, archaeologists, and historians.One of the issues important to both English Heritage and the National Trust is the age profile of their members and visitors: the majority are elderly. The volunteers and staff for both organizations are also from older generations. Both are therefore thinking very seriously about how they might appeal to younger generations, and one reason for their interest in the subject matter of the symposium was that it ties in quite nicely with that aspiration. It is well understood that the concept of “magical places” is more interesting to younger visitors than Chippendale furniture might be.The organizations collectively protect an internationally important collection of historic sites and artifacts that spans six millennia, from the ancient past to the present day. Both entities have been responsive to the problem of inclusion and exclusion of individual identities in heritage sites; both have been criticized for being too “woke.” Yet these recent debates simply bring to the fore longstanding issues about ownership, engagement, and rights. The papers in our symposium, presented here, address these various issues.Michael Carter is Senior Properties Historian at English Heritage, and his sensitive and scholarly article on Byland Abbey and its ghosts, “Byland Abbey: Using the Dead to Bring a Medieval Monastery to Life,” illustrates the way an apparently straightforward site can come to appear problematic. Should an abbey be presented simply as a trace in the landscape of a vanished medieval way of life, or should an organization that curates it be alert to the way in which that very vanishing can come to be represented or even misrepresented as a haunting?A similar spirit animates Sally Anne Huxtable's essay, “Tangible and Intangible Heritage: Charles Paget Wade and the Creation of Snowshill Manor as a Magical Space.” At the symposium itself, Huxtable spoke of the National Trust's reframing of Snowshill Manor as the home of Wade, an eccentric collector of occult objects from around the world—an aspect that makes it distinct from other country houses in the Trust's collection. Huxtable thus tackles the problem of what appears obvious and central to heritage curation versus what is occluded or ineffable. Her essay uncovers a fascinating and partially hidden history that brings to the fore some of the colonialist problematics that have recently engaged the attention of both the National Trust and English Heritage. Such attentiveness shines a spotlight on new aspects of heritage and history. Like Huxtable, Lisa Mari Tallis addresses supernatural presences, in this case across a range of Welsh places associated with the supernatural in the past but neglected and in some cases abandoned and tumbledown today. In “Welsh Witchcraft Revelations and Ruins: The Example of Mari Berllan Biter,” a haunting and haunted ambivalent supernatural heritage puts in place the stereotyping and in some respects colonizing images used to stigmatize the Welsh, and Tallis's work retrieves a half-buried and coherent tradition from the shadows.Approaching the supernatural from a different angle, Ronald Hutton's “When Is an Ancient Site a Sacred Site (and Who Makes It One)?” tackles issues of ownership, rights, and usage of magical places, bringing such issues very much to the fore. Hutton's essay explores conflicts over ownership and use of Britain's extraordinary and rich place-based evidence for pre-Christian religion. On the one hand, such sites are typically presided over by curatorial teams of archaeologists and historians, but on the other, the British Isles are also the birthplace of “a revived Paganism, consisting of a complex of modern religions inspired by the pre-Christian past, which has spread across much of the Western world” (63). Thinking of the relationship between these two groups of stakeholders—modern Pagans and curatorial agents—Hutton emphasizes the mutual benefits, while also considering the more fraught contestations and asking what can be learned from them as both Pagans and scholars move forward in the twenty-first century.In “Telling Tales: Inspiring Creativity through the Myths, Legends, and Folklore of England,” Kate Armstrong, Senior Learning Manager at English Heritage, and Hannah Keddie, Learning Manager, record their work on an English Heritage educational program entitled “Telling Tales.” This program sought to discover and reestablish links between English Heritage sites and the place-specific traditional tales of England. The competition organized by the program for young children and early teens was surprisingly and delightfully fruitful in rediscovering and reframing folklore traditions and beliefs and in combining those with stories from popular culture. Andrew Sneddon, an academic historian, offers an equally engaged account of the problematics of witchcraft memorialization, microhistories, and stories in the context of the sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland in his article “‘Creative’ Micro-Histories, Difficult Heritage, and ‘Dark’ Public History: The Islandmagee Witches (1711) Project.” Taken together, both essays illuminate the difficulty of interpreting a traditional story and its transmission, even when that transmission is tied to a place.For Brian Hoggard, in his essay “Supernatural Defenses Activated through Death,” the place is the story. An independent scholar who runs the website http://www.apotropaios.co.uk/, he explores supernatural defenses employed mostly in domestic settings, the relics of which can be found in many different parts of England. All of these relics involve the creation of a safe and sealed place in which the soul of a malefactor might be imprisoned or in which good people might be safe from evil incursion. Nicky Garland's “Magical Places: An Archaeological Exploration of Magic and Time at Stanway, Essex,” a deeply scholarly reading of the traces of Roman magic left in British Roman burial sites, offers surprising connections with Hoggard's essay.What might we learn from these reflections? One lesson might be that magical places are a treasure, a resource that keeps on giving over the centuries even though the gifts it offers can metamorphose in surprising ways. Another lesson might be that a sort of circular reasoning exists regarding such sites: a place is magic because it's a magic place. Once a site such as the Neolithic barrow tomb known as Wayland's Smithy, on the Ridgeway above the Vale of the White Horse, acquires a magical reputation, it attracts visitors who seek that magic—and not all of them want to live peaceably. The Smithy has been visited by people who abused it by carving swastikas into the trees, an act of violent appropriation, and perhaps also an apotropaic act intended to drive others away or frighten them off. By contrast, the authors of these articles want to include readers, to invite readers to reflect, to question, and above all to learn.