Ghost Stories for the Dark — Part 3: Number 13 · Count Magnus

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Ghost Stories for the Dark — Part 3: Number 13 · Count Magnus | KacheliTV World Classics Part Three of Ghost Stories for the Dark returns to M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) for two more of its tales, read complete and unabridged. Earlier parts of this season told "The Mezzotint", "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book", "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas". James — Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and the master of the antiquarian ghost story — builds his terrors out of archives, inscriptions and quiet provincial places, and both of tonight's tales are among his most famous. In "Number 13", the scholar Anderson takes rooms at the Golden Lion in Viborg while he works through the town's church archives — and finds that his corridor holds one room too many after dark: a room that is never there by day, from which singing, laughing and shuffling feet are heard at night. In "Count Magnus", the travelling antiquary Mr Wraxall visits the manor of Råbäck in Sweden and becomes fascinated by its seventeenth-century owner, Count Magnus de la Gardie — a hard, feared man who once made the Black Pilgrimage to Chorazin and brought something home with him, and whose mausoleum Wraxall cannot leave alone, though the sarcophagus is fastened with three padlocks. Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices. Chapters: 2:01 — Number 13 41:03 — Count Magnus A note on completeness: both tales are told whole and complete, in the order they stand in the book. "Lost Hearts" stands outside this season under its standing rule and is not read here, and "The Ash-tree" is held apart after the season's screen; neither is silently missing. Neither of tonight's tales carries footnotes in the Gutenberg text, so nothing is cut. Period references stand as James wrote them. Music: 'Tabla Horizon' (instrumental) opens and closes the programme and sounds briefly between the tales, and 'Noche de Cempasu Chil' runs as a quiet background bed under the reading. Source: M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), Project Gutenberg #8486 — public domain. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.