Posts tagged "horror" - A Podcast to the Curious

Episode 4 – The Ash-tree

In this post-Halloween spook-tacular of an episode, your hosts Mike and Will attempt to answer the following thorny questions:

Is it unlucky to sleep in a room near an ash tree?
Is Mrs Mothersole a MILF?
Are you down with the Castringham Sickness?

If you answered ‘yes’ to one or more of the above then pull your deep leather armchair closer to the roaring fire, refill your glass of port and prepare to join Mike and Will as they delve into dark and devilish goings on in 17th & 18th century rural Suffolk in M.R. James’s The Ash-tree!

Big thanks to Katy Ross (@dreamkitten) who was our reader for this episode.

Links

Great Livermere on GoogleMaps
M.R. James grew up in Great Livermere and it is widely believed to be the inspiration for Castringham, the setting of ‘The Ash-tree’.
Photo of Livermere Hall
Sadly the hall on which Castringham Hall was based was demolished in 1923 but a photo of it can be found at the Lost Heritage website. Note the extensive growth of foliage visible around the sides of the hall!
‘The Ash-tree’ story notes at Ghosts & Scholars
Exemplary M.R. James resource Ghosts & Scholars features an excellent set of story notes on The Ash-tree penned by M.R. James expert Rosemary Pardoe.
James & Great Livermere at SuffolkCoast.co.uk
An interesting article about James’s connection to Great Livermere and stories it inspired.
Sortes Sanctorum & Sortes Biblicae at Wikipedia
The history and origins of using the Bible for divination.
Spiders in ‘The Ash Tree’ by Jacqueline Simpson
An article from the Ghosts & Scholars Newsletter no. 5 on James’s use of spiders in The Ash-tree, with particular reference to a peculiar mini-plague of spiders that hit Bury St. Edmond’s in 1660!
Bible Quotes from The Ash-tree @ Bible.cc
‘Cut it down’ – Luke 13:9
‘It shall never be inhabited’ – Isaiah 13:20
‘Her young ones also suck up blood’ – Job 29:30
‘Thou shall seek me in the morning and I shall not be’ – Job 7:21

Cut from this episode:

A larger than usual amount of bad language.
Will’s un-PC Sir Matthew Fell/ Tupac Shakur joke that would have killed in 1997.
Mrs Bunch, Mrs Mothersole, Ann Clark: Snog, Marry, Avoid?

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Episode 3 – The Mezzotint

Episode 3 sees us tackle ‘The Mezzotint’ by M.R. James and delve into the world of sinister collectable artwork of a kind not often featured on the Antiques Roadshow.

In this episode:

Terror!
Art!
Golf!
Alternative endings!
How NOT to choose a babysitter!
Mike gets all sentimental about his university days.
Will moans a lot and bellows “In your FACE Cambridge!”

Many thanks to our excellent reader Rob Douglas and to Stephen Gray of Thin-Ghost.org for providing the monstrous mezzotint photo above.

Links:

Hauntography: The Mezzotint
Read the excellent commentary on ‘The Mezzotint’ by Tom at Freaky Trigger, including an interesting mezzotint-as-comic-strip interpretation.
Art in Horror Fiction
Interesting exploration of how art has been used as a plot device in horror fiction.
Golf as a Metaphor in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James
An extended essay looking at the role golf plays in various M.R. James stories, namely ‘Oh Whistle…’, ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘The Rose Garden’.
Topographical Drawings at the British Library
The British Library contains a large collection of topographical drawings of the kind Mr. Williams curated.
Canterbury College, Oxford
James refers to the setting as ‘Canterbury College’, which existed up until the disillusion of the monasteries in the 16th Century but not at the time this story is set.
Annesley Hall, Nottinghamshire
Anningley Hall in Essex is not a real place. However there is an Annesley Hall in Nottinghamshire, built in the 13th Century and with a fairly spooky past of its own!

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Stories that inspired M.R. James

Episode 4 – The Ash-tree

Episode 3 – The Mezzotint

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