Magic Island Storytelling Theatre: Strange Tales From The Isle Of Arran: Ghost & fairy tales & more.

Was on the mainland (or "the big island" as we say here on Arran) last week and picked up yet another book of Scottish folk tales. This one featured a really creepy tale from Shetland - and, as my sister happens to be there this week, I thought I'd do my own distinct, improvised take on it. Huddle close and shiver, folks....

Here's a little blast from the past. A while back, I posted my version of a traditional folktale which I gave the title A Kiss Of Salt. This was well received - and one of my own favourite pieces - but more recently, my hosts for this podcast did some kind of AI sweep looking for plagiarism among material posted. It turned out that someone had written some song which had nothing to do with my story but which made some reference in its title to a kiss being salty. This also happened with another of my stories Wild Hearts, Warm Hearts - again there was no link between my extended folklore-based story and a reference to hearts in someone's three minute love song but AI, as we all know, is anything but intelligent. As a result both pieces were peremptorily removed from the podcast. I was sent an appeal form but only one form, though two stories had been taken down - and apparently the AI could only process one submission per form. Wild Hearts, Warm Hearts was quickly found "Not Guilty" and restored but not A Kiss Of Salt. Because it was not plagiarised - my source was a public domain folk tale which, in the interest of full disclosure, can be found in Volume 1 of Robert Hunt's 19th century collection Popular Romances Of The West of England or The Drolls, Traditions & Superstitions of Old Cornwall (I was working in Cornwall when I first encountered the story, Hunt's book being the Cornish equivalent of the Brothers Grimm) - I here confidently repost it - but, to save confusion, post it not under my preferred title but under the title Hunt's collection gave it: The Mermaid's Vengeance. That maybe gives more of the game away than i'd like, but I'm proud of the story and performance and my very Arran reinvention of it - so here it is, back again. Enjoy!

Well, here it is - after 4 (not the previously mentioned 3) episodes: the dramatic, fantastical conclusion to this wild, improvised reworking of an old European folk tale. A happy ending? Depends how Gothic and ghoulish your sensibility is, I suppose! Katy has retreated with Lorcan, the living dead man, to a magical underworld - but being alive, she can't quite fit into the land of the dead, so she might still have to go "up above" and settle her score with the venomous hordes of the living....

I think I said, in my intro to the first part of this story, that this was going to be a three-parter. Such is the nature of improvised, unscripted performance (as here) that the imagination can run freer than originally intended, with the effect that this is now the penultimate episode of a FOUR part story. There's a lot to get through, after all - our Katy is set to be executed for witchcraft, but unexpected help comes from someone who might previously have been thought a villain in this little saga. Surprises, dramatic escapades and a descent to a very surreal underworld dominate this second-last episode.

Here's the latest part of this freely improvised story based on an old European folk tale. Our heroine Wild Katy has come upon a skeletal undead with dangerously bad breath doing sinister things in the night in a small Scottish town. She's stolen his shroud so he can't return to his grave, but the Living Dead Man isn't going to take that lying down!