The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by M R James, adapted for television by John Bowen, and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark in 1974. In between attempting the exposure of a pair of fake mediums, two scholars of Medieval history pursue the treasure of a disgraced abbot, reading the clues in a stained glass window, ignoring the warnings that the booty has a supernatural guardian. Will these boffins never LEARN?
“Halloa! Below there!” yes, it's the Signal-Man by Charles Dicken, who's spooky credentials are usually referenced in relation to A Christmas Carol but this short story is much darker and spares the reader the sentimentality of his more famous novel. A traveller encounters a railway signal man whose working life is spent in the dank Purgatorial chill of a railway cutting. He tells his visitor he is tortured by visions of a spectre calling and waving to him from the hellish tunnel mouth next to his signal box, and who has foretold disaster twice without giving any chance of averting the tragedies. The horrible irony of the spectre becomes apparent only in the last lines; it’s a thoroughly claustrophobic, oppressive story, leaving you chilled to the bone... An adaptation by Andrew Davies for the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand in 1976 stars Denholm Elliott and is directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.
A View from a Hill by M R James, adapted for television by Peter Harness and directed by Luke Watson. A slightly tweaked version of the original story... a historian researching the archaeological collection of a country squire investigates the ruins of a nearby abbey with a pair of strangely heavy binoculars, which is conveniently placed next to a site called Gallows Hill. No prizes for guessing what went on there. Through the binoculars, which he later discovers were adapted somewhat gruesomely by a local watchmaker called Baxter, he can see the abbey as it was before its ruin, and fascinated, he returns at night to investigate the site of the abbey and gallows with hilarious* consequences.
*horrible
