A sneak preview of August on Fireside Ghost Stories...

So the collection is building on Fireside Ghost Stories and our listeners are growing. If you'd like to know what's happening this month - with the Glorious 12th looming  -  have a listen to this sneak preview.

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We think we are the only annual podcast in the world - publishing every Christmas Eve - so thank you for your support and coming back every year. To follow Jon on social media just look for @voiceofsiri or @voiceofsiruk. You can contact him via  http://www.jonbriggs.com

Transcript

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Hello, John here. If you've enjoyed our Christmas ghost stories over the years, you may have wondered why the ghosts should have to wait until December. Well, they don't. Fireside Ghost Stories is our subscription series of original supernatural tales, with a brand new story arriving every month, so there's seven of them now. Strange Houses, Old Secrets, Things in the Darkness that really ought to have stayed there, all written and produced in the tradition of the classic Fireside Ghost Story. And this month we're heading to a Yorkshire Grouse Moor on the glorious 12th of August, 1910. Although, as you're about to hear, there's precious little glorious about it. Here is a taste of a most inglorious 12th. It's a date on which the shooting of red grouse becomes legal in Britain, and it has been observed with considerable ceremony and not inconsiderable self-congratulation since the middle of the 19th century, when the arrival of the breech-loading shotgun made driven shooting not merely possible, but fashionable among those with the land, the leisure, and the willingness to spend a great deal of money on both. On great Moorland estates across Scotland, Yorkshire, and the north of England, wealthy men, and by 1910, a growing number of wealthy women, to the poorly concealed irritation of the wealthy men, would gather each year on this date with expensive guns, borrowed enthusiasm, and the unshakable conviction that standing in a low stone shelter called a hide, while other people drove birds towards you, constituted sport in any meaningful sense of the word. The grouse, for their part, had no say in the matter. They were bred in their thousands, managed and maintained on the moor for precisely this purpose. Their numbers carefully controlled, not out of any conservationist impulse, but so that there would always be enough to shoot. They were, in the language of the estate, stock, in the language of the ledger, product, in the language of the men who stood in the hives with their guns raised and their dogs quivering at their heels, they were sport. This is a story of one particular, glorious twelfth on one particular moor in the summer of 1910. It is also, in a sense, the story of every twelfth that came before it, fifty years of tallying, and what happens when a tally, long enough ignored, finally comes due. It's been described to me as a ghost story. I'm not entirely sure that is the right word for it, but make of that what you will. The tale begins the night before, with a man called Edward Callaway, lying awake in a guest bedroom on the Harrowgate estate in the North Riding of Yorkshire, listening to the moor. So that was a most inglorious 12th, the August edition of my Fireside Ghost Stories. There's a completely new story every month written to be listened to properly. Lights down, headphones on, and preferably with nobody sitting immediately behind you. If you enjoy the Christmas ghost stories, Fireside is where that tradition now continues throughout the year. You can subscribe now and get a most inglorious twelfth, along with the complete collection of Fireside Ghost Stories already waiting for you. So don't wait until Christmas. Because the ghosts certainly aren't