Hoboken Library Staff Picks

BBC’s Christmas Ghost Stories on Kanopy are ‘snuggle into your armchair,’ oral folklores that let the ghosts come through the quiet, not the loud. We’re in a cozy inn or country home, under the lamplight of a study, in the official capacity of authority and tenured procedure, or in the storytelling intimacy of public radio. These stories present fright as if they’re a three part/pint story told against a pub’s fire. 

(You can watch these stories any time. Christmas, in fact, has very little do with them, and in most cases none).

Each episode begins with a tea-time beginning that introduces us to the characters and establishes the whispers of their confusion or animosity in piecing their current situation together – the job they have, the move their making, their qualms with society, or the injustice on them no one in their rationality believes

There are seven 30-minute episodes available on Kanopy. These are the four I enjoyed the most:   

Woman of Stone – A woman recounts the chilling tale of newlyweds settling into a small cottage in a quiet village and how the couple soon finds themselves overshadowed by superstitious warnings of the legend of two marble tomb effigies who are said to rise each year and walk. The husband dismisses this as mere folklore. The wife does not, and one night she is all alone…

The Dead Room – The tale of a long-running radio horror series where a veteran presenter of the series and renowned celebrity of sorts for his voice and oratory skills finds he must adapt to changing times and tastes of radio listeners and digesters of horror stories. He asks, “Whatever happened to the classic ghost stories and the good old days?” 

Be careful how much of the past you want to revisit.  

The Mezzotint (A very intensive process where a picture’s lines are intended to hold ink) – A curator of a small university museum who specializes in topography of the British Isles is baffled when an art dealer sends him details of an interesting engraving of an old country house. It’s ordinary though…at first, until the curator sees a figure where there was none before. With every viewing, it has moved, getting closer and closer to the house. Rationality falls to the impossible drawing closer in the picture and eventually until it knocks. 

Martin’s Close – An adaptation of a ghost story by MR James. 1684. Someone is on trial for his life and he’s facing the infamous ‘hanging judge’. However, this is not a cut-and-dried murder case and the unexplainable cannot be explained (or at least believed by judge and jury).

The Mezzotint and The Dead Room were my favorite because both presented the supernatural and strange as an inconvenience and a break from reality that logic just couldn’t define. The fear is quiet and suspicious, presented in a way that you believe the character is challenging his own rationality, and even when others challenge them. Dread pushes through – the tap, tap, tapping, if you will – and slowly drives them mad until their psyche is too mushed to defend against the horror revealing itself in form before their eyes.  

The terrifying and supernatural find their voice through the quiet and uncertainty and not the characters giving it to them, which is something wonderfully distinctive to the British way of telling ghost stories. There is a deep questioning quality to the investigation of what exactly is happening that drags us along as if we were standing right beside the actor or actress. They ramble through their broken logic and spin a yo-yo of logic while desperately grasping pieces together. 

Additional episodes include:

• Count Magnus
• Lot 249
• The Tractate Middoth

Kanopy can be accessed with your Hoboken Library Card and episodes streamed with your complimentary tickets (you get 60 per month-each of these individual episodes is between 1-2 tickets).

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

Tags: BBC, ghost stories, horror