THE GRIMM NOIR | Episode 002: The Witch of Thane Hollow
In the village of Brackholm, at the western edge of the Nordenfell — where the farmland flattens before climbing into forest that the old people say watches its boundary in winter — a good man named Edrick Thane has just lost his neighbor's meadow.
The writ was in order. The assembly ruled fairly. The old woman who said otherwise was escorted home and did not come back to the village again.
Then the knocking began. Three slow strikes, evenly spaced, from the wall behind his youngest daughter's bed. Deep and measured, the way a person knocks who has learned patience and is prepared to wait.
Sister Esmé of the Order of the Quiet Path is on her circuit through Brackholm when the haunting starts. She is not the kind of woman who frightens easily. She is the kind of woman who keeps notes, and crosses things out, and writes them again, and does not stop asking questions until she understands what she is looking at. What she is looking at here is a village that has decided it knows who the witch is — and a good man who weeps beautifully and fills every cup but his own.
She should have believed the village. She just believed the wrong part of it.
Grimm Noir is a serialized audio fiction podcast set in the kingdom of Aldenmere — a world built on the architecture of fairy tales and the bones of true crime. Each episode blends a documented true event with a piece of folklore or fairy tale to create something that lives in the space between both. Each story is told like a fairy tale. Each story actually happened. The distance between those two things is always smaller than it looks.
THIS EPISODE IS BASED ON:
True Crime — The Bell Witch Haunting (Adams, Tennessee, 1817–1821)Between 1817 and 1821, the family of John Bell on a remote farm in Tennessee was tormented by a presence that knocked in the walls, pulled hair, moved objects, and eventually spoke — conversing with visitors, answering questions, and reserving particular cruelty for John Bell himself. Asked who it was, the entity gave different answers to different people. John Bell died under circumstances no one could explain. The case remains among the most thoroughly documented hauntings in American folklore.
Folklore — "The Witch of Berkeley" (William of Malmesbury, c. 1125)A dying woman of Berkeley begged her children to bind her body in chains, sew it into a stag's hide, and weight it with stones, so what was coming for her could not take her. They did everything she asked. On the third night, it took her anyway. The tale was told as a warning against wickedness. Read now, it is the story of a body bound by someone who understood, in the dark, that the wrong he had done was the kind that does not lie still.
Content note: This series contains depictions of violence, murder, and themes drawn from real criminal cases. Listener discretion is advised.
