A femur was a production of IHurt Radio.

This is a companion piece to our Halloween special, Canon Albrecht's scrapbook, also available today.

If you haven't listened to that episode already, you may want to start there,

as we'll be delving deeper into the classic M.R. James Ghost Story that is the subject of that adaptation.

While James is best remembered today as a short-form horror author,

in his time, he was a well-respected medievalist scholar,

responsible for cataloging all kinds of esoteric artifacts.

And this connection is apparent in his fiction, which winds detailed descriptions of locations,

buildings, art and ephemera, into tales of the otherworldly.

While some are imagined, others are very real.

The effect is undeniable. the level of detail in his writing,

in parts and almost documentary quality to the work.

The question then becomes,

how does one sort out the fact from the fiction?

It's actually been quite difficult for a long time

for people to separate these things.

It's almost close to meta-fiction in the sense that the real and the fictional are so closely

entwined in some of the stories that you can't really pick them apart.

Author Helen Grant, herself a writer of ghost stories, has turned a lifelong fascination of the author's

work into an interesting project. Whenever she is able, Helen travels to the real places cited

in James's stories to see for herself and share with others what elements in his fiction

are drawn from the life.

...