It's lurid, ghoulish, and impishly provocative, almost body horror in modern parlance. How else is M.R. James's Lost Hearts different from most of his other short ghost stories? Why was he not happy with it? I'm delighted to discuss M.R. James's Lost Hearts with James aficionado , educator and short story performer, John Carpenter. We'll discuss thematic links with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which is also about the corrupting influence of adults on children. Up for debate is the 1973 adaptation written by Robin Chapman, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and featuring Joseph O' Conor as the sinister Mr. Abney. The snatches of Hurdy Gurdy music featured in this episode are by Guilhem Desq.

The title The Most Haunted House in England was first coined by Harry Price in his 1940 book on Borley Rectory, and it stuck. Spectral nuns, headless horsemen aside, the number of disturbances, windows breaking, shingles thrown down the stairs, wall writing etc etc... informs our very understanding of what a haunted house actually is. It certainly informed fiction from Shirley Jackson's seminal The Haunting of Hill House to Sarah Waters' more recent masterpiece The Little Stranger. But beneath all the ghostly occurrences lies an amazing series of human dramas. We cover them all. There are many finely written and researched books about Borley Rectory, but here we owe a special debt of gratitude to Sean O'Connor's comprehensive 2022 The Haunting of Borley Rectory: The Story of a Ghost Story published by Simon and Schuster.

How do you film an unfilmable horror? The BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas is a wonderful tradition, but is it possible the productions are just a bit too professional for their own good? Does it need a bit more daring, a bit more abandon, to successfully capture that elusive supernatural frisson?

I'll be talking about M.R. James's A Haunted Dolls' House, and one lesser known but truly terrifying adaptation.