Come and hear haunting, fantastical ghost stories in the light of flickering candles which, one by one, story by story, are extinguished.

In Edo period Japan, a night-time game of one hundred flickering candles and one hundred supernatural tales became a widespread folk phenomenon – Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai.  After each teller finished their story, a candle would be extinguished, plunging the room, by small degrees, into a darkness filled with ever more hungry ghosts…

Ravenous flying heads; demon masks that possess the wearer; faceless ghosts; goblin-rats, women made of snow; seductive statues; warrior monks; abandoned farmhouses; haunted bridges; mountaintops and lonely roads…

Superlative storytellers Tim Ralphs and Sarah-Liisa Wilkinson call in the sinister and the strange to pay tribute to this unnerving folk custom with a night of haunting tales from around the world. Join them as flickering flames illuminate the Living whilst the encroaching shadows make space for the Dead.

Tim Ralphs is a teller in residence of the Word Smack Cabaret and host of Sheffield’s The Story Forge, Tim’s performances merge the contemporary with the ancient with enviable integrity. He draws on our common narrative inheritance, live adaptations of absurd texts’ wondrous reimagining of classic fairy tale material in evocative urban settings, and his own delightful brand of surrealism.

Sarah-Liisa Wilkinson is half-English and half-Finnish, storyteller Sarah Lisa Wilkinson is one of the brightest new talents to emerge in British storytelling. She has trained as a performer with Philippe Gaulier, and as a storyteller with Nell Phoenix and Ben Haggarty. She has told stories to audiences in clubs, pubs, festivals, churches, front rooms and all-night sleepovers. She is a member of The Embers Collective.

Performance storytelling by Tim Ralphs and Sarah-Liisa Wilkinson. 

Duration: 75mins no interval
Suitable: adults (14+)