There are seven hotels. Their names are Crone, Crustacean, Flask, Infection, Miasma, Unbearable and Vagabond. Each is built of cheap and rusty metal and perched on the edge of a precipice. There are seven precipices, over each of which a scientist of note has plunged to a watery death during the past two weeks. In chronological order, those who plummeted were a botanist, a physicist, a phrenologist, an horologist, a laboratory git, a bacteriologist, and an uproariously-moustachioed vivisectionist.
Each had been a paying guest at one of the hotels, though none of them hurtled over the precipice upon which their own hotel teetered. The phrenologist, for example, breakfasted upon porridge in the Hotel Miasma, then threw herself from the pocked and crumbling cliff-face adjacent to the Crone Hotel.
Or was she pushed?
- The origins of the name “Hooting Yard”
- Some Hotels, A Hollyhock, The Ponds
- Hooting Yard Fan Fiction: “Dobson’s Uncanny Time Pod” by Tristan Shuddery
- Swedish Goat News
- A selection of self-help books
- Istvan and Zoltan (on Monday Afternoon)
- Quotations from “New Orleans Superstitions” by Lafcadio Hearn
This episode was first broadcast on 14th December 2005.
