Lesser of 2 Weevils Productions

24/12/2023

https://fb.watch/he7OuYXxwi/

24/12/2023

https://fb.watch/he8p--6eDZ/

24/12/2023

https://fb.watch/he8oIVj7SK/

03/11/2023

Interested to know what listeners to "Shattered" think of this.

Decoding the hidden emotional upheaval that makes it impossible to forget.

31/10/2023

To say that this story is very reminiscent of OTR dramas and Nightfall episodes is in no way to diminish it. Published in Weird Tales in 1939, I suspect many a delighted reader came across it and unconsciously absorbed it into their imaginations. Some elements of this story are similar to “A Night at a Cottage,” but overall they take very different tacks. For one, this story is set in Arkansas, and stranded motorist Marvin Phelps engages in very detailed and civilized conversation with his ghosts—I mean, hosts.

Original art in manip by Unknown author - Transportation Photographs Collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98381845
and Tomasz Sienicki, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13380

31/10/2023

A frightening, claustrophobic story about a witch and a new mother, with shades of “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Original art in manip by Auckland Museum, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65590000

31/10/2023

“The Storm”! Where have you been all my life? And to think, it was first published in Good Housekeeping! It seems to me, based on this story, that (Mary) McKnight Malmar should be as famous as Shirley Jackson, but I can find very little about her. In some senses, it’s very of its time—1944—with its anxieties about gender roles. On the other hand, it’s timeless and very, very scary. Are Janet’s experiences in the house in Fairport, Connecticut, strictly speaking, a haunting? Maybe not, but the story is very effective. It was one of Boris Karloff’s favorites.

Art by The International Magazine Company - https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015024014477, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111988993
and Unknown photographer - Shrimpton, Louise (January 1910). "An Art Potter and Her Home". Good Housekeeping 50: 57-63., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81447003

31/10/2023

I’ve discussed Hugh Walpole before, and in this story I think again a great deal of subtext can be imputed, particularly in terms of a q***r reading. Like “The Snow,” this story is set in December, but that story is frightening and this one is merely uncanny. Actually, there’s no “merely” about it, because the story is wistful and lovely. In the first decade of the 20th century, a (happily married) journalist loses a close (male) friend. To get over the loss, he goes to Cornwall, staying with a very rambunctious family over the Christmas holidays. He is aware and comforted by the presence of the ghost of a young girl, who in turn needs comforting. Like all of Walpole’s works that I’ve read, this story is elegant, perceptive, and has a veneer of sadness.

Original art by John Downman - This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60860409
and Michael D Beckwith - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80324912
and Tomwsulcer - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25280933

29/10/2023

"There is something very horrible about this house, that Miss Ankardyne is dimly aware of. Something connected with pain and fire and a bird, and something that was human too."

It would be hard to find a ghost story that provides a better sense of “Englishness,” even in the back catalogue of M.R. James. The characters themselves even reference Pride and Prejudice, The Vicar of Wakefield and the novels of Anthony Trollope. It’s told in epistolary and diary form, with the new vicar Prendergast at Ankardyne writing to his wife as he stays in the manor house and waits for the renovations to be finished at the vicarage. It’s set in February which, as in the story, can be an oppressive time weather-wise in the British isles. There are many interesting details in this story that make it unique. (After all that, the church and parsonage in the image are Welsh!)

Original art in manip by Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5507626
By Henry Seargeant - This image is available from the National Library of WalesYou can view this image in its original context on the NLW Catalogue, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48260521

28/10/2023

Another evil aunt story. I despair. Mary Eleanor Freeman was known for her New England-set stories that combined domesticity with the supernatural. Middle-aged Amanda and her sister Sophia live in a New England mansion at the turn of the 20th century. They also live in denial at the continued presence of their estranged aunt, who lived there into her eighties. The sisters share the house with four other people, paying boarders and their niece, and it’s the advent of the fifth that gets the events of the story going. I really appreciate the way the characters in this story try very hard to rationalize the inexplicable (accounting for it by forgetfulness, for example) as this seems very true to life.

Original art in manip by Carol M. Highsmith - Library of CongressCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011635244Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/highsm/17000/17051a.tifOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.17051, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52196591

27/10/2023

Robert Bloch is famous enough that he needs no introduction. This story, over 80 years old, wouldn’t be out of place today as a variation on the true crime podcast obsession. Quarrelling couple Daisy and the unnamed narrator stop, at her insistence, at a California highway murder house with a “genuine” haunting. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? Interestingly, this story has a long section entirely composed of dialogue that makes me think Bloch was honing some radio drama for Suspense or similar—which is possible, since the story was published in 1941 and has a little aside about Orson Welles. It could, of course, have been intended for the movies.

Original art by N. Lakey - N. Lakey, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93989038

26/10/2023

Another extraordinary find. A truly horrifying story by such a consummately virtuosic author like F. Scott Fitzgerald is a rare treat indeed. Published in 1927 and set in December, it concerns the sorts of characters you would expect from Fitzgerald: affluent Jazz Age college undergraduates coming home to their families in St Paul, Minnesota, for the Christmas holidays. The narrator realizes his love for Ellen Baker at the same time she seems to be strangely possessed. Another in a large group of ghost stories set very evocatively in winter.

Original art in manip by Billie Grace Ward from New York, USA - Art Deco Lamp, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74145994

25/10/2023

Mrs Amery is a widow with a young son, Roger, to raise. It’s the late 1930s, and without a trade or independent means, Mrs Amery works as a housekeeper at St Aubyn’s School, which Roger is allowed to attend. Coming into a bit of financial hardship through no fault of her own, Mrs Amery accepts an invitation to housesit for a wealthy woman in Buckinghamshire over the summer holidays. This is the super-creepy story of what is haunting the house in Buckinghamshire and what Mrs Amery and Roger do about it.

Original art by House, Denham, Buckinghamshire by Christine Matthews, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117877018
and Henry Bunbury - Yale Center for British Art, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105311499

24/10/2023

Facebook hates the dimensions of my art.

In The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories, one of my favorite collections of ghost stories (and I’ve read hundreds of ghost stories), editor Peter Haining comes up with the wonderful device at the end of the book of printing seven stories that were favorites of horror stars. It delights me to no end that one of Lon Chaney’s favorite stories was by Gaston Leroux (given that one of Chaney’s most famous roles was as the Phantom of the Opera in the 1925 Universal Pictures adaptation). Leroux’s short stories translated into English are hard to come by. This story was published just a few years before Phantom was serialized in Le Gaulois. “In Letters of Fire” displays some elements that you might expect from Leroux: his curious use of italicized phrases, Faustian themes, autobiographical themes, and stories mediated through storytellers to audiences. Unlike the vast majority of his novels, however, there is no rational explanation here for the terrible curse of a card-playing recluse.

Original art in manip by Koreller - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114361016
and !KrzysiekBu! - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36293346

23/10/2023

We are working our way through Marjorie Bowen’s outstanding oeuvre. This is another of her stories set in the 18th century. The Bishop of Hell is Hector Greatrix, a rakehell who seduces his cousin’s innocent wife and receives devilish payback.

Original art in manip by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80618438
and Pearson Scott Foresman - This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78714587

22/10/2023

Every year, it takes me approx. 10 hours to write reviews and make these art pieces (not including the time to search for and read the stories). It took a few seconds for Craiyon AI art generator to make this image when I fed it some text from this short story. Sort of think it missed the point, but I was just curious what it would do with it.

As for the story itself, it’s one of James’ most well-known. For me, it has always been an outlier in James’ oeuvre as it’s got rather a cinematic quality and is the story that, in my opinion, best lends itself to dramatization. Instead of a literal warning to the curious, which so many of James’ stories are at heart, this is a thriller, where the scholar Mr Dunning has to endure a curse at the hands of Mr Karswell, a fellow scholar who seems more than a little insulted by a bad review. For another project, I’ve been listening to the many radio drama adaptations that exist of this story, and for the record, my favorite is actually the one that takes the most liberties, CBS Radio Mystery Theater’s “This Will Kill You” (1978).

21/10/2023

The rather commonplace title of this story masks its wonderfully terrifying quality which leaves the reader guessing to the end about whether the narrator has seen a ghost or not. Also, anyone who has travelled on a train with their solitude disrupted by a weird other passenger will sympathize. Dinah Castle was mainly known for her children’s poems and lived to the age of 104.

Original art in manip by Cornell University Library - https://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary/3738999444/, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53431484

19/10/2023

For some reason, Facebook doesn't like the dimensions of the image so has cut off the bottom where the title is. The story is "The Chillingham Chair" by Laura Purcell.

This is a delightfully Gothic tale that would not be out of place with Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Tale.” Evelyn suffers a freak accident while staying at Chillingham Grange. She has refused Victor Chillingham’s hand; her younger sister Susan has accepted, and they are to be married on Twelfth Night. Evelyn becomes the discarded invalid, but is Victor as chivalrous as he seems? What was the fate of his father and uncle?

Original art by The Albertype Co. (Brooklyn) - UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95257089
and Pearson Scott Foresman - Archives of Pearson Scott Foresman, donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2568032

18/10/2023

Peter Cushing was a big fan of Edmee Monica Delafield’s writing and singled out this story for its style and fascinating characters (though presumably he was not a fan of the stereotyping that Delafield resorts to again and again when describing French people!). This story is set in France in the 1880s, the 1920s, and the 1930s and deals with murder and the banality of evil.

Original art in manip by Luca Nebuloni - https://www.flickr.com/photos/nebulux/4934589576/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57456696

16/10/2023

“Richard Dehan” is the pseudonym of Clotilde Mary Graves, an Irish writer who lived in the Channel Islands, where this story is set. The narrator and her husband Vavasour are on honeymoon on Guernsey in April, when she discovers that there are three in her marriage—Katie, a spirit whom her husband summoned in a séance many years previously, can now be seen by her as well. In this deliciously humorous story, the narrator comes upon quite a novel solution so that she doesn’t have to endure Katie’s presence.

Original art in manip by Andrew Milligan sumo - Richmond, Guernsey, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105451560

15/10/2023

As I’ve observed before, many serial ghost story writers can’t help using certain tropes. William Croft Dickinson, in the spirit of M.R. James, wrote ghost stories that didn’t stray too far from his day job: he was an eminent scholar of Scottish history. An academic don tells the story of his friend Alexander Lindsay, a university librarian, and his collegiate digs, the Monal, where he lives with his wife. As suggested by the name, the property used to be a nunnery. The story seems to be going down a well-worn path but takes some interesting diversions, particularly as regards the use of a telephone.

Original art in manip by Infrogmation of New Orleans - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79723273
and AgainErick - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117618207

14/10/2023

This story is unusual in that it was originally a television drama for BBC Bristol, broadcast in 1980, and was re-worked as a short story published the following year. It’s a really original and interesting interpretation of haunted houses (rather than a reference to Alan Partridge, though that would make an interesting crossover). It’s not exactly a frightening story but very melancholy and critical of selfish patriarchal society.

Original art in manip by Ivanhercaz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62390258 and This file was contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Boston Public Library as part of a cooperation project. The donation was facilitated by the Digital Public Library of America, via its partner Digital Commonwealth.Record in source catalogDPLA identifier: 21756d83f21ac8fe8cd0d63c2f2a39d3Boston Public Library identifier: Local accession: 08_01_A_002975, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98770097

13/10/2023

Those who are familiar with OTR (Old Time Radio) classic horror from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s are certain to know an excellent Suspense drama by this same title. I was much surprised to find out it was an adaptation of this (also excellent) short story. H. Russell Wakefield is apparently quite a famous ghost story writer, though I only became familiar with him in the last few years (last year’s terrifying “Lucky’s Grove”). A stay at a period house in Richmond, England, in 1917 inspired not only this story but another called “The Red Lodge.” “Ghost Hunt” is enjoyable both as a short story (set in Richmond, England) or a radio drama, set in the US.

Original art in manip by George Tsiagalakis - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29478770

12/10/2023

Although I’ve shared stories about transport before, you may have noticed an occasionally surfacing theme this time around, which is due to my dipping into another of the British Library Tales of the Weird collections, The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways, edited by Mike Ashley. While numerous tales exist of haunted railways, I personally think the London Underground (or any subway system) is inherently riper for terror due to it being, well, underground. This story, published in 1985, feels very fresh and modern and defies expectations at every turn. To me, it feels a little like Lucky Jim meets the radio mystery series Julie Enfield Investigates (starring Imelda Staunton) meets BBC Sounds’ Murmurs. If none of that resonates with you, don’t worry: you will be intrigued and chilled by the story of Laura Munro and the ghost she discovers while commuting from Charing Cross Station. If you read many ghost stories, you are bound to come across the prolific Ronald Chetwynd-Haynes, though for me personally this is the first story of his that I read that I could recommend unreservedly.

Original art in manip by Ron Hann, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9128257
and Thomas Quine - Scribbles, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67034876

11/10/2023

“But thoughts are things, my friend. When you imagine a thing you make a thing.”

There are quite a few stories from this period (the first 25 years of the 20th century, give or take) that use séances as their subjects. Some of them use the scenario to expose a fraud. Some of them ask us to take spiritualism seriously. This story is from the latter category, written by a writer who, like one of the characters, was a level-headed, logical man who would seemingly be immune to swindlers but at the same time also extremely susceptible to belief in the supernatural. The usual questions are asked of a medium while under a trance, but then something happens that the spiritual circle doesn’t expect.

Original art in manip by User:Yamavu, User:Hashar & User:Kalki - File:Visible_Green_Unicorn.svg, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39290606
and Lamiot - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52430783

10/10/2023

A very funny story from Penelope Lively about a group of annoying ghosts that tax the patience of youngsters Marian and Simon Brown until the children come up with a way to shift their burdens onto someone else.

Original art in manip by This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58662695

09/10/2023

Occasionally you find stories that are so extraordinarily original, you wonder why it took you so long to run across them. This story, first published in 1950 (!), is one such tale. Armin J. Deutsch was a respected American astronomer, joining the ranks of many weird tale authors who are academics of one kind or another. This is the only piece of fiction he ever wrote, and it feels wonderfully fresh and contemporary more than 70 years after it was published. Not, strictly speaking, a ghost story, it is predicated on the idea that three-dimensional things can become two-dimensional.

Original art in manip by Schvaxet - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129490521
and Masato OTA, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52150301

08/10/2023

This story is modern (as in written/published in the 21st century), yet is told in a restrained and admirably old-fashioned style. Morton glimpses a black-and-white Tudor building with topiary shaped like a chess set and decides to move in. The atmosphere is very creepy as things escalate.

Original art in manip by Wtendo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76577425

08/10/2023

Here's the second documentary:

The Recording Angel: The History of Sound Recording in Shattered is introduced by David Sillars (Phil Donan) and provides a social, cultural, and technological history of sound recording. It's also narrated by Ivy Alvarez.

https://youtu.be/y9HlBc-B5TA

08/10/2023

Here's the second documentary:

The Recording Angel: The History of Sound Recording in Shattered is introduced by David Sillars (Phil Donan) and provides a social, cultural, and technological history of sound recording. It's also narrated by Ivy Alvarez.

*** Please tell us what you thought about the podcast and this documentary! A very short questionnaire (THE RECORDING ANGEL- THE HISTORY OF SOUND RECORDING ...