I interpreted the red flickering light in the room as the fires of hell. Red or "scarlet" is also the colour associated with the whore of Babylon which is what the Catholic Church has been likened to in some Protestant Christian writings, and given the ambiguity the narrator felt about the dancer in room 13, it could be symbolic. When it came to the disappearance of the portmanteau, I took that as "showing" that there was a change in the size of the room because the portmanteau was placed at the end of the room that was nearest room 14.
44:00 -> every strange aspect of room 13 I think could be explained by the room existing as a sort of pocket dimension that makes it come and go without damaging rooms 12 and 14 when it does. As for the unknown entity, I'm narrowing it down to either some demon creature living in previously mentionned pocket dimension....or a human that either created room 13 by witchcraft or tragically got stuck in the room at some point. The mysterious box found in the wall at the end of the story makes me lean more towards the entity being human. On a different topic, I really love M. R. James' tendency to stay mysterious about various elements in his stories. That was a big part of H.P. Lovecraft's works as well. Many elements often remain unrevealed or unexplained and I think this adds a lot to the eerie atmosphere of his stories.
I imagined how room 13 was a real room once but after some unfortunate business it became unrentable. Ergo eliminate room 13 by removing the door and dividing its space between rooms 12 and 14. The problem is that you can’t eliminate the footprint of horror. Evil spirit is residing in the new wall between 12 and 14 and sometimes the old walls Re materialize or the new wall splits and expands. The portmanteau on the trestle never moves but is hidden by the old ghost wall.
I believe the point about the missing luggage is that during the apparition of Room 13 the luggage is hidden behind the ghostly wall of the apparition. It is placed during the day in the section of Room 12 which used to be part of Room 13. The dancing man mystery eludes me at the moment. Excellent work. Thank you so much.
Also the third right hand window disappears. They got swallowed up by room 13 during the night. The dancing man might represent the a dancing sorcerer of Satan, like witches dances around a bon-fire during the un-holy night of Halloween. Or could be the dance of the souls in land of the dead like in the Opera by Offenbach about Orpheus.
Tony, thank you for this great story and for your comments afterward. These are so fascinating and informative that I truly look forward to listening to all that you you say. It certainly adds not only to the story but to the entire genre. Thanks again and God bless.
A favorite of mine! Listened on my tv. Rushing here for thumbs up. Masterful in what you do. Viborg is my absolute favorite town here in Denmark! Thank you!!!
Ditto 2X around- first on my tv for the sound, then here on my pc to give thumbs up . Masterful presentation and amusing, informative commentary. Thank you, Tony
They once asked Stephen King what or if anything scared him and his reply was, opening a door into a pitch black room and feeling around on the wall for the light switch and not finding it then something grabs his hand and places it on the switch.. lol
Good reading. I always had assumed the dancing was a reference to the sorcerer hanging himself. I put in some effort once to find the document that "scholars would be familiar with," but it came to nothing.
@@janetcw9808 thanks Janet! That’s really nice of you! 💕It’s day three and it’s mostly now a cough, a sore back and a drippy burning nose and throat, but I can’t wait to just get better as it’s so boring being sick!!!!!! The ghost stories really do help! Love Tony’s channel👻
I have saved this for tonight and my intuition tells me that you prefer the comment after it’s been listened to, so as tempted as I was to leave a comment first to express my delight at this story, to be read by you..... some people do get irritated when they see a second comment so even though you don’t mind, I thought I’d wait till afterwards and I am so impressed! I have been listening to someone today with that kind of cockney accent that you were talking about and I always take on an accent of whomever I’ve been with! So I almost said well impressed! (Ha ha and don’t worry about the original cockney accent dying out, some area’s of London are determined not to let it!) Is that a correct way to say whom?!? I know that it can be said in the wrong way, so..... anyway! Who cares or whom cares!?! Lol sorry, sorry I always get tempted to make annoying jokes and puns, the latter of which often don’t get noticed! Oh I am rambling again- you see, we have you in our homes for long and regular periods of time so we feel like we know you but you don’t feel the same! It’s like with celebrities. You ARE a celebrity for God’s sake! I’m not very with it today! As I was saying, I really really loved it and your accents that you did, you are really very good at all accents that you have done. You are a good judge of your own capabilities and talents! And a great judge of a good story too. Your not just swayed by the fame of the writer like some channels, none I’m subscribed to though. So thank you so very much for a really wonderful experience! Was looking forward to it and it didn’t disappoint! Take care Tony! And tell your mrs I said namaste and Angel blessings! The same to you! 💛🌟✨⭐️✨🌟💛
Thanks Maria. I don't mind if you comment twice at all as you know. Its interesting because i like to do a variety of authors but it is true that the big names pull the most views. I'm not a celebrity im just me who likes to read stories
Enjoy the creepy vibe on this story, and as always, enjoy your performance of the text and ramble for context. I'd bet there's enough folklore around the number 13 to pack a thesis at this point... Of course, classic literature invented the tropes, so some of the creepiness of 13 seems a little passe now. Weirdly, one of my favorite horror short stories of the last few years was "Room 733," (on reddit, believe it or not) which seemed to have chosen its deadly number at random... maybe even MacGuffin-style?
@@ClassicGhost Yeah, though I prefer it in text. Writing through 'rules' can be fun and lead to interesting work at times, and seeing the repeated tropes from those constraints can be really enlightening as well. I don't tend to go for most of the scraped-from-reddit YT content pages, unless I'm positive they ask permission, etc, just because I know what it's like to have my work pirated. Predictably, it feels really bad, heh.
It took many readings (and listenings not to forget) before I realised, that this is really two stories in one. There's the events at the Golden Lion, and then there's the controversy during the Reformation, but interestingly, the two stories are never connected by anything substantial. For a long time, I just assumed they were connected, but all that might connect the two are circumstantial. We are told that the Golden Lion survived a fire in the 1700s, and that we don't know which buildings Jørgen Friis used to own. But there's nothing there that actually proves a connection. And all the while, he keeps hinting at it, when he suggests that we'd suppose the skeleton of Nicholas Franken is to be found under the floor boards. Yet, at the end, he almost directly tells us, not to go seeing connections where there are none, when Mr. Andersson refuses to draw any inferences. Interestingly, the adaptations of Number 13, that I know of, always makes it sure that Nicholas Franken is in fact connected to the haunting of The Golden Lion. I've also noticed, that some adaptations and most readings assume that Anders Jensen - the advocate - is a German. I do not believe so, firstly his title 'sagfører' is given in Danish, secondly his name is about as Danish as they come. It could only be more Danish if his name was 'Jens Jensen'. Finally, when Mr. Andersson rallies the men trying to break into room number 13, Andersen reacts strongly at the jab at the Danish courage. A Dane would. A German wouldn't. The only weak point in this absolute banger of a story, is that herr Jensen, bypasses the door to room number 13, on his way to Mr. Anderssons room. If he knew the sound to be comming from the nearby room, surely, he would have gone to the door next to his, without thought. The only way this would make sense, would be if the door to room number 13 could appear and disappear at will during the night.
I am curious if you've heard the story, "A Different Morecambe" by Simon Kurt Unsworth. That story builds and affects me very much like "Crouch End"...it's almost unbearably tense. If you get the time to listen to it I think you might agree. I'd love to hear you read it...
Curious I was just listening to sleepy hallow and then this followed bringing to mind Irving's tale of a number 13. Nothing supernatural there but it makes one think how many there might be.
I just learned where that first soundbite comes from in the opening, I think. I have returned one day.. the soundbite in the opening (everybody dies... don't they?) is from a folk horror ? movie titled Psychomania, from a documentary titled (something) Nights & Days Bewitched. I cannot recall the first word in the title, my apologies; its about the history of folk horror films, like The Wickerman which _still_ freaks me out decades after I'd watched it. An awesome film, nonetheless.. starring the late, great Christopher Lee, greatest headbanger _ev.. er._ 🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻
I loved this story! Couldn’t help laughing at the description of the dancing man and the singing - also the poem!
Your stories have the BEST intro sounds and old clips!! It really sets the mood! And sometimes old classic stuff is the best! Hahaha
Thank you Terry. I generally just use the same Heartwood Institute track 'Some Come
back'. But i like it
I interpreted the red flickering light in the room as the fires of hell. Red or "scarlet" is also the colour associated with the whore of Babylon which is what the Catholic Church has been likened to in some Protestant Christian writings, and given the ambiguity the narrator felt about the dancer in room 13, it could be symbolic. When it came to the disappearance of the portmanteau, I took that as "showing" that there was a change in the size of the room because the portmanteau was placed at the end of the room that was nearest room 14.
44:00 -> every strange aspect of room 13 I think could be explained by the room existing as a sort of pocket dimension that makes it come and go without damaging rooms 12 and 14 when it does. As for the unknown entity, I'm narrowing it down to either some demon creature living in previously mentionned pocket dimension....or a human that either created room 13 by witchcraft or tragically got stuck in the room at some point. The mysterious box found in the wall at the end of the story makes me lean more towards the entity being human.
On a different topic, I really love M. R. James' tendency to stay mysterious about various elements in his stories. That was a big part of H.P. Lovecraft's works as well. Many elements often remain unrevealed or unexplained and I think this adds a lot to the eerie atmosphere of his stories.
I agree about the lack of explanation really helping the horror
Always love hearing your narrative talents flexing on the traditional ghostly classics penned by THE M. R. James. Best of both worlds, we all win!
+Terry I. Thanks Terry
I imagined how room 13 was a real room once but after some unfortunate business it became unrentable. Ergo eliminate room 13 by removing the door and dividing its space between rooms 12 and 14. The problem is that you can’t eliminate the footprint of horror. Evil spirit is residing in the new wall between 12 and 14 and sometimes the old walls Re materialize or the new wall splits and expands. The portmanteau on the trestle never moves but is hidden by the old ghost wall.
This is one of my favorite MR James stories. Oh please do The Diary of Mr. Poynter!
+Dani Bissonnette glad you liked it. If time allows i will
I think I'll save this for bedtime 😴💜
Clearly one of my favorites, thank you so much! And a huge thank you to you, Mr. Critchley, for providing us this pleasure!
+Ricky glad you liked it
Whatever you do, don’t stop!!!
+Don Rottinghaus there's a good one coming tomorrow
I believe the point about the missing luggage is that during the apparition of Room 13 the luggage is hidden behind the ghostly wall of the apparition. It is placed during the day in the section of Room 12 which used to be part of Room 13. The dancing man mystery eludes me at the moment. Excellent work. Thank you so much.
That was my understanding of the disappearing and reappearing luggage too.
Also the third right hand window disappears. They got swallowed up by room 13 during the night.
The dancing man might represent the a dancing sorcerer of Satan, like witches dances around a bon-fire during the un-holy night of Halloween. Or could be the dance of the souls in land of the dead like in the Opera by Offenbach about Orpheus.
Good comments!!
Tony, thank you for this great story and for your comments afterward. These are so fascinating and informative that I truly look forward to listening to all that you you say. It certainly adds not only to the story but to the entire genre. Thanks again and God bless.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thank you, Don.
A favorite of mine! Listened on my tv. Rushing here for thumbs up. Masterful in what you do. Viborg is my absolute favorite town here in Denmark! Thank you!!!
+Marti Williams i thought you would like the Danish connection
@@ClassicGhost Thank you!!!
Love it!
So I'm not the only 1 who does that
Great story and narration!
Thanks!
Another M R James story I hadn’t heard before?
Many ,many thanks for another story from this famous & fine ghost story author✊♥️
+Julie Levinge glad to read it for you Julie
Perfect timing. Stuck inside due to another nasty storm. Tucked under the covers with the cat on my chest, listening with pleasure.
Thank you for the reading. I greatly enjoyed it.
Ditto 2X around- first on my tv for the sound, then here on my pc to give thumbs up . Masterful presentation and amusing, informative commentary. Thank you, Tony
Enjoy! How many times have you listened now?
@@ClassicGhost Lost countLove that rooms eat windows after dark. Really funny and WIERD
Another great reading, as always thank you 😁
You are so welcome
The best voice on you tube, Tony!
Thank you very much!
Love this! Thank you!
I won't be very popular if I say James isn't my favorite writer. But Tony, you have quite the knack at making him creepier...💜
+Violet Femme ta
I love how fluid you are with accents. Very good.
+amandine512 better with some than others
@@ClassicGhost well I’d say you’re better than most. I gauge quality by whether I find an accent distracting from the narration and yours is seamless.
They once asked Stephen King what or if anything scared him and his reply was, opening a door into a pitch black room and feeling around on the wall for the light switch and not finding it then something grabs his hand and places it on the switch.. lol
I know someone called Doody who knew a lot about birds... You're not him?
The portmanteau was probably stashed on the part of the room that was reclaimed by 13.
Good reading. I always had assumed the dancing was a reference to the sorcerer hanging himself. I put in some effort once to find the document that "scholars would be familiar with," but it came to nothing.
Thank you for uploading this. It's Tuesday the 15th of March 2022 from Ireland @10.58 am.
great voice,great accent, great story !
+Woody Marx thank you
Most enjoyable 👏🏻👏🏻🤝
I’ve got Covid and this is really helping my thudding head, thank goodness for Classic Ghost Stories ❤️
Poor you. Get well soon!
Hope you are feeling better 🙏🏻❤️🍀
@@janetcw9808 thanks Janet! That’s really nice of you! 💕It’s day three and it’s mostly now a cough, a sore back and a drippy burning nose and throat, but I can’t wait to just get better as it’s so boring being sick!!!!!! The ghost stories really do help! Love Tony’s channel👻
I have saved this for tonight and my intuition tells me that you prefer the comment after it’s been listened to, so as tempted as I was to leave a comment first to express my delight at this story, to be read by you..... some people do get irritated when they see a second comment so even though you don’t mind, I thought I’d wait till afterwards and I am so impressed! I have been listening to someone today with that kind of cockney accent that you were talking about and I always take on an accent of whomever I’ve been with! So I almost said well impressed! (Ha ha and don’t worry about the original cockney accent dying out, some area’s of London are determined not to let it!) Is that a correct way to say whom?!? I know that it can be said in the wrong way, so..... anyway! Who cares or whom cares!?! Lol sorry, sorry I always get tempted to make annoying jokes and puns, the latter of which often don’t get noticed!
Oh I am rambling again- you see, we have you in our homes for long and regular periods of time so we feel like we know you but you don’t feel the same! It’s like with celebrities. You ARE a celebrity for God’s sake! I’m not very with it today! As I was saying, I really really loved it and your accents that you did, you are really very good at all accents that you have done. You are a good judge of your own capabilities and talents! And a great judge of a good story too. Your not just swayed by the fame of the writer like some channels, none I’m subscribed to though. So thank you so very much for a really wonderful experience! Was looking forward to it and it didn’t disappoint! Take care Tony! And tell your mrs I said namaste and Angel blessings! The same to you!
💛🌟✨⭐️✨🌟💛
Thanks Maria. I don't mind if you comment twice at all as you know.
Its interesting because i like to do a variety of authors but it is true that the big names pull the most views. I'm not a celebrity im just me who likes to read stories
Thank you, Gavin C.
+Ramey Zamora thanks to Gavin!
Oh yum -- this'll be my bedtime story in a few hours.
Hope you liked it. Another one today!
@@ClassicGhost Yes, I loved it, and I eagerly await the next one, thank you!
Enjoy the creepy vibe on this story, and as always, enjoy your performance of the text and ramble for context. I'd bet there's enough folklore around the number 13 to pack a thesis at this point... Of course, classic literature invented the tropes, so some of the creepiness of 13 seems a little passe now. Weirdly, one of my favorite horror short stories of the last few years was "Room 733," (on reddit, believe it or not) which seemed to have chosen its deadly number at random... maybe even MacGuffin-style?
Is it an original story on Reddit? I know some channels do nothing but creepy 'true' stories they get from reddit
@@ClassicGhost Yeah, though I prefer it in text. Writing through 'rules' can be fun and lead to interesting work at times, and seeing the repeated tropes from those constraints can be really enlightening as well. I don't tend to go for most of the scraped-from-reddit YT content pages, unless I'm positive they ask permission, etc, just because I know what it's like to have my work pirated. Predictably, it feels really bad, heh.
In American-" Dine and Dash".
Love your narrations, thanks as always !
I've never done a dine and dash. They'd catch me now anyway
It took many readings (and listenings not to forget) before I realised, that this is really two stories in one. There's the events at the Golden Lion, and then there's the controversy during the Reformation, but interestingly, the two stories are never connected by anything substantial. For a long time, I just assumed they were connected, but all that might connect the two are circumstantial. We are told that the Golden Lion survived a fire in the 1700s, and that we don't know which buildings Jørgen Friis used to own. But there's nothing there that actually proves a connection. And all the while, he keeps hinting at it, when he suggests that we'd suppose the skeleton of Nicholas Franken is to be found under the floor boards. Yet, at the end, he almost directly tells us, not to go seeing connections where there are none, when Mr. Andersson refuses to draw any inferences.
Interestingly, the adaptations of Number 13, that I know of, always makes it sure that Nicholas Franken is in fact connected to the haunting of The Golden Lion.
I've also noticed, that some adaptations and most readings assume that Anders Jensen - the advocate - is a German. I do not believe so, firstly his title 'sagfører' is given in Danish, secondly his name is about as Danish as they come. It could only be more Danish if his name was 'Jens Jensen'. Finally, when Mr. Andersson rallies the men trying to break into room number 13, Andersen reacts strongly at the jab at the Danish courage. A Dane would. A German wouldn't.
The only weak point in this absolute banger of a story, is that herr Jensen, bypasses the door to room number 13, on his way to Mr. Anderssons room. If he knew the sound to be comming from the nearby room, surely, he would have gone to the door next to his, without thought. The only way this would make sense, would be if the door to room number 13 could appear and disappear at will during the night.
I am curious if you've heard the story, "A Different Morecambe" by Simon Kurt Unsworth. That story builds and affects me very much like "Crouch End"...it's almost unbearably tense. If you get the time to listen to it I think you might agree. I'd love to hear you read it...
+Violet Femme I actually don't know these. I will look them up
Oh yes, A Diiferent Morecambe is very good!
@@ClassicGhost Crouch End is Stephen King...short story from one of the collections.
Nicely done
I joined your list :)
+Missy thank you. I don't send much out. Only when i remember
Thanks
Curious I was just listening to sleepy hallow and then this followed bringing to mind Irving's tale of a number 13. Nothing supernatural there but it makes one think how many there might be.
One or two. I even wrote one.
Eat and Park. Pittsburgh, PA 😊
I just learned where that first soundbite comes from in the opening, I think.
I have returned one day.. the soundbite in the opening (everybody dies... don't they?) is from a folk horror ? movie titled Psychomania, from a documentary titled (something) Nights & Days Bewitched. I cannot recall the first word in the title, my apologies; its about the history of folk horror films, like The Wickerman which _still_ freaks me out decades after I'd watched it.
An awesome film, nonetheless.. starring the late, great Christopher Lee, greatest headbanger _ev.. er._ 🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻🤟🏻
:)
Beautiful
Thank you
Time for sleep. It's the English accent. Something about it.
+Sir Loin of Beef hope you slept well
ha! This uploaded 13 minutes ago----spooooky!
No it uploaded 31 minutes ago 🙃
+Star Dust hope you enjoyed
Dislexia
Interrupting the story is a horrible idea, IMO.
I like your reading, but didn't like the story.
Very nice sir
Thanks