Episode 20: 'Pargiton and Harby' by Desmond MacCarthy
One of the delights in curating a podcast like EnCrypted is that, from time to time, you get to shine a light on a forgotten gem. I mined this one from a battered paperback copy of the Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , although it actually dates back to the Lady Cynthia Asquith-edited Ghost Book of 1926. That means that not one, but two of horror's pre-eminent anthologists (the Fontana collection was edited by Robert Aickman) thought this story worthy of inclusion, and it's not hard to see why. In 1926 the premise and action of Pargiton and Harby might have been quite radical (this is a psychological story as much as it is a ghost story). It may have seemed less so by 1972 (when the fourth Fontana collection was issued) but one can see why it might have appealed to Aickman; there is a strangeness in the telling, even if the nature of Pargiton's "haunting" is readily apparent from early on. That strangeness, and the suggestion of a kind of cosmic link b...