Ghostly Countdown -- 1

[Pamela Troy]

For Christmas Eve, we have the combination of a great writer of ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James, with a great actor, Christopher Lee.

M.R. James helped create the modern ghost story. Unlike the exotic times and locations and rarified nobles of earlier supernatural fiction, James’ stories are set in what was then contemporary England and Europe, and his protagonists tended to be ordinary (if erudite) academics. His amazing sense of both imagery and timing makes his fiction disturbingly believable, even almost a century later. “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” kept me awake as a teenager after my first read, and “Casting the Runes” is an effective exercise in paranoia that was adapted into a Tourneur film, Night of the Demon.

“Number 13,” told here by Lee, takes a very traditional story of the supernatural and, by setting it in a prosaic hotel, makes it frighteningly real.

This was apparently aired on BBC as part of a Christmas ghost story series. I know most of you will be busy today, but sometime tonight, perhaps, you can pour yourself glass of good red port, turn out most of the lights, and drink in this bit of Yuletide abracadabra.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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Ghostly Countdown -- 2

Ghostly Countdown -- 3

Ghostly Countdown -- 4

Ghostly Countdown -- 5