Episode 25: 'Brickett Bottom' by Amyas Northcote
Doing the podcast has so far led me down many unexpected pathways. Just when I have my next episode planned, my reading for the show throws up a story or author I have either never heard of or forgotten, and thus I am diverted! And so, for several successive episodes I have read stories from some of the more neglected and overlooked writers in the supernatural tradition. Amyas Northcote, I would say, falls into that category, although Brickett Bottom is almost certainly his most well-known tale, having been widely collected in ghost story anthologies in almost every successive decade since its first publication as part of Northcote's sole volume of supernatural fiction In Ghostly Company. Once again, we have a writer inspired by M.R. James and writing in the Jamesian tradition, and once again, the telling of ghost stories appears to have been little more than a diversion, for Northcote was an aristocrat (seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, in case you were w...