Christmas Campfire Episode 2019

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2019

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone! Thank you so much for all your support over the previous year! This years Christmas Campfire is a bumper one, full of diverse and fantastic stories. I thought it was a really great snapshot as to how weird and wonderful the world is and how diverse a range of people listen to the show. Putting it together was an absolute pleasure as always! I start the whole thing off with a short story from M.R James, titled "A School Story" from his 1911 compendium, "More Ghost Stories from Antiquity". If you enjoyed it, I definitely recommend giving his other work a shot, one of my favourites is a story called "Number 13", but it's considerably longer than the one in this episode. Then we're on to the listener stores. Thank you everyone who sent stuff in to be included, it was a great deal of fun reading them this year! I wish you all the best for the New Year, health and happiness for you and your loved ones, thank you as always for joining me in making Dark Histories, Ben x

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Oh, Hello and welcome to what is now the annual Darkest Juice Christmas Campfire episode.
0:37.0	This is the third, which is pretty cool,
0:40.0	and it's definitely going to be the longest and that's all thanks to you guys
0:45.3	for sending in your awesome stories and I thought today before I get to the reader
0:49.6	stories we'd open with a short story by Emma James, who really was kind of the master of this or one of the masters, and he wrote these short stories, many of them precisely for this reason.
1:03.4	He would write short stories at school when he was boarding at Cambridge and tell his friends
1:09.2	them at Christmas over candlelight.
1:11.8	And then he obviously went on later to publish them in books.
1:14.6	This one was published in 1911 in a compendium of his ghost stories called
1:21.1	more ghost stories of Antiquary and fittingly I guess it's called a
1:25.9	school story. So yeah I thought we'd open with this and then afterwards we get into the reader's
1:31.0	stories so let's pretty much just crack on because we've got plenty of stories.
1:40.0	Two men in a smoking room were talking of their private school days.
1:44.0	At our school, said A, we had a ghost footmark on the staircase.
1:49.0	What was it like? Oh, you know, very unconvincing, just a shape of a shoe with a square toe if I remember right?
1:56.9	The staircase was a stone one.
1:59.0	I never heard any story about the thing.
2:01.3	That seems odd when you come to think of it why didn't someone
2:04.4	invent one I wonder you never can tell with little boys they had a mythology of
2:10.0	their own there's a subject for you by the way, the folklore of private schools.
2:15.7	Yes, the crop is rather scanty though. I imagine if you were to investigate the cycle of
2:20.9	ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools
	...

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