Before the Story

I am TG Wolff and am here with Jack, my piano player and producer. This is a podcast where we combine storytelling with original music to put you at the heart of mystery, murder, and mayhem. Some episodes will be my own stories, others will be classics that helped shape the mystery genre we know today. These are arrangements, which means instead of word-for-word readings, you get a performance meant to be heard. Jack and I perform these live, front to back, no breaks, no fakes, no retakes (unless it's really bad)

 This is Season 2. This season contains adaptations of stories published in the 1800s. These stories are some of the first considered to be mysteries. For that reason, this season is called The Originators.

 Today’s story is about guilty pleasures, pirates, and things that go knock-knock-knock in the night. This is Human Affect, an adaptation of The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Our story today was published in 1856.

 Episode Materials

 Read the original: There are several places where you can find The Haunted and the Haunters. Gutenberg is one of them. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1831

Cast of Characters:

Our Detective. Unnamed, a gentleman of some means. Definitely not married, no kids

Mr. Johnson. Older gentleman, recently inherited the house. He believes it is haunted.

Sarah. Housekeeper who died in the house. As a young woman, she rented the house as the lady.

Franco. Our Detective’s right hand man. Courageous, capable, an all around good guy.

My Two Cents

Gotta tell you, I did not love this story. It left me with too many questions to have a satisfied ending.

• Who did Sarah kill? Her Brother? Were the letters from her husband?
• What happened to her husband?
• Did Sarah and presumably her husband kill / starve her nephew?
• Did the house make them all crazy and that’s why they killed?
• Did the house cause her financial misfortunes?

In the vision, who was the man who stabbed Sarah? Her brother or her husband?

Or wasn’t that Sarah but the 1759 Pirate’s lover?

The pirate from 1759 cursed the house? He killed his mistress and her other lover, then shimmied down through the trapdoor, set up an elaborate curse, left his clothes and money, climbed out, sealed up the hole, built a floor over it, and left England? Why curse the house if you’ve killed the people you were pissed at? Did he lock some part of him in that house (if so he was an idiot) or did he die and never leave (in which case where are the bones?)

How did the prior owners of the house not notice a whole chunk of the main floor was not accessible? The room had to be above ground level because there was a window, even if it was bricked up.

And the writer kept forgetting about the dog, except when he killed it. The narrator is searching this entire house and the dog is where? I couldn't let that one go, I had to fix it in the adaptation.

 I will tell you what I did like about it. It is an early example of a mystery in the sense that, as I said in the beginning, the narrator is working to solve the mystery. If it were told differently, such as from the POV of documenting the activity, or a fool-hearty dare, it wouldn’t toe over into mystery.

I also liked that it was actually haunted. The story sets up to find some LIVING person in that little room chasing everyone away. Thinking about it, it was one disguise away from being a Scooby Doo mystery.

The narrator uses logic to protect his mind from the supernatural attack. There was a lot of inner monologue reasoning I didn’t work into the story. Basically, the...