IMPETUS THEATRE Co presents

Jonathan Collings

Storyteller    Playwright

jon@jumble.freeserve.co.uk     01902 425587

John Birkbeck Hill is an historian, an academic, a sceptic.  He’s not interested in the supernatural. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural.  But there are strange stories he’s heard from friends and relations, experiences he’s had himself, and there are the nightmares...

“a frozen finger tracing out my spine...” is a powerful and chilling solo performance, drawing on classic ghost stories by Dickens, M. R. James and others.  With minimal technical requirements, it has been performed to great acclaim in venues ranging from theatres and historic houses to churches and village halls.

The show can be booked for a fee of £225, or a box office split can be negotiated.  To make a booking, or find out more details, contact Jonathan by phone or email - details at the head of the page.

To give you a taste of what’s in the stories, here are two extracts.

THURNLEY ABBEY

A man wakes up in the middle of the night. He switches on his bedside lamp, to read for a while...

I could never really tell you what happened next.  I don’t know if I could find words to describe how I felt.  I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat shut automatically. In one movement, instinctively, I crouched back against the headboard of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my heart going again, and sweat dripped from every pore. I am convinced that, at that moment, both my life and my reason rocked unsteadily on their seats.

Leaning over the foot of the bed, looking at me, was a figure, swathed in a tattered and rotten veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes, and the right side of the face bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The face was not entirely that of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the cheek were totally gone. There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand.  One wisp of hair crossed the forehead.  It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and my brains turned hot and dry in my head.  I still had the pear of the electric light in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in hideous terror the same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it evaporated.  Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in the wall.

 COUNT MAGNUS

A landlord relates a story told by his grandfather...

“In my grandfather’s time - that is, ninety-two years ago - there were two men, Hans Neilson and Peter Andersen, and they said, ‘The Count is dead, we do not care for him.  We will go tonight, and have a free hunt in the wood.”  They mean the wood on the hill, behind the manor house.  My grandfather heard them talking, and he said, “No, you must not go. You are sure to meet with persons walking who should not be walking. They should be resting, not walking.”

But the men went.

And my grandfather, with two or three others, he sat in this very room - it was summer, and the window was open. He could see the wood. And hear.  They sat; and they looked; and they listened. And they heard - you see how far away the wood is, but they heard someone scream, as if the inside part of his soul had been twisted out of him.

All of them in the room caught hold of each other, and they sat there, so, for three quarters of an hour. Then they hear someone laugh. It is not one of those two men - indeed, they say it is not a man at all. After that, they hear a great door shut.

Next morning, they go to the priest, and they say, “Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come and bury these two men, Hans Nielsen, and Peter Andersen.”  You understand that they were sure these men were dead. They went into the wood like dead men themselves - the priest, too, was in a white fear.

They found the men on the edge of the wood. Hans Nielsen, he was standing with his back to a tree, and he was pushing with his hands, pushing away from him something that was not there. And he was not dead. They took him to the house at Finderup, and he died before the winter. And always he was pushing, pushing with his hands. Peter Andersen, he was dead. And he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones. They put him on a bier, and covered his head with a cloth, to carry him back to Viborg.  And they sang the psalm for the dead. But in the middle of the first verse, one who was carrying the bier fell down, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Peter Andersen were staring up, because there was nothing to close over them.  And this they could not bear. Therefore, the priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they buried him there, beside the road.

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