Behind the Couch

Established in 2010, Belfast’s Wireless Mystery Theatre is an audio theatre company devoted to invoking the spirit of vintage radio suspense plays. Comprised of a small troupe of actors, writers and musicians, their productions incorporate live music and imaginative sound effects with players frequently multi-tasking and acting out different roles. Their most recent production, An Evening of Irish Horror , was a suitably spooky double-bill featuring adaptations of Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story ‘Green Tea’ - which tells of a timid clergyman who is hounded by a demonic spectral monkey - and Bram Stoker’s short story, ‘Dracula’s Guest’ - an excised segment from Dracula which documents a creepy encounter between Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula by the grave of the undead Countess Dolingen of Gratz... Head over to Exquisite Terror to read my full review .

'The Father of the English Ghost Story', Dublin-born Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, is best known to admirers of Gothic fiction as the influential author of such chilling tales as Uncle Silas , The House by the Churchyard , The Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter , and, perhaps most famously, the short story collection In A Glass Darkly , which contains Green Tea, The Room in the Dragon Volant, The Familiar, and, of course, Carmilla . Carmilla  (1872) was groundbreaking for its time, not least because of its subtle love affair between the two main female characters. Taking his cue from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Le Fanu’s darkly sensual tale, detailing the delicate yet increasingly sinister courtship of a young woman by a female vampire, further entwined the figure of the vampire with notions of forbidden sexuality. Le Fanu was deeply influenced by the historical figure of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess who reputedly bathed in the blood of young...

While staying in Dublin for a couple of days last week to see Tori Amos in concert at the Olympia Theatre, I took the opportunity to visit Mount Jerome Cemetery in the suburb of Harold’s Cross in the south of the city. With the second highest number of burials of any cemetery in Ireland, Mount Jerome is one of the biggest cemeteries I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. Opened in 1836, the sprawling cemetery features all manner of exquisite Victorian funerary art including ornate memorials, tombs, angels, shrouded urns, vaults and crypts. Due to a population boom, and therefore increase in mortality rate in Dublin in the early 19th century, the British government set up commercial cemetery companies throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland to deal with the need for burial grounds. The land upon which Mount Jerome Cemetery stands was acquired by the General Cemetery Company of Dublin from the Earl of Meath, as their first choice – a section of Phoenix Park – was declined by loca...