Millie Hardy-Ashton

Podcaster • Scholar • Witch • Storyteller

Millie Hardy-Ashton is a podcaster, cultural and media scholar, practising witch and lifelong lover of the stories we tell about magic.

She is the creator and host of HEXPOSITION, a podcast exploring the history, folklore and screen representation of witches and witchcraft. Bringing together academic research, film and television analysis, folklore and lived experience, Millie examines how the image of the witch has been created, feared, reinvented and reclaimed — from ancient enchantresses and early-modern witch trials to pointed hats, green skin, magical houses and the witches of contemporary popular culture.

Her fascination with witches exists at the meeting point between scholarship and personal experience. Raised by a practising Wiccan mother, Millie grew up around ideas of magic, energy, manifestation and the natural world, while simultaneously encountering fictional witches through fairy tales, Disney, fantasy films and television. As an adult, she developed her own identity as a practising witch outside of Wicca, giving her a perspective on witchcraft that is simultaneously personal, cultural and academic.

Millie holds a Master’s degree, with research that explored witchcraft and its representations, and is currently undertaking doctoral research in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Lincoln. Her wider academic interests include fantasy, fandom, audience engagement, representation, folklore, adaptation and the ways audiences participate in creating meaning around the stories they love.

Her work is particularly interested in the space where fact, fiction and folklore collide: how historical beliefs become legends, how legends become familiar visual shorthand, and how film and television can reshape our understanding of what a witch is supposed to look, sound and behave like.

Through HEXPOSITION, Millie takes academic ideas beyond the university and makes them accessible without stripping away their complexity. Each episode combines research with storytelling, humour, screen analysis and a little carefully placed magic, asking not simply where have we seen this before? but why do we recognise it in the first place?

HEXPOSITION is produced under Familiar Footsteps Productions, Millie’s independent creative production banner, where scholarship, folklore and storytelling follow the familiar footsteps of the tales that came before.

For Millie, the witch is more than a Halloween silhouette or a familiar cinematic villain.

She is history. She is folklore. She is fiction. She is reclamation.

And there is always another story hidden beneath the pointed hat.