Magic Island Storytelling Theatre: Strange Tales From The Isle Of Arran: Ghost & fairy tales & more.

Marty Ross
  • 5.0 (4)
  • FICTION
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

"It must be admitted that the particular class of stories which turns on the marvellous possesses a stronger influence when told than when committed to print" - Walter Scott, The Tapestried Chamber. Storyteller & audio dramatist Marty Ross (Audible, BBC, Wireless Theatre, Big Finish, Kisses In The Dark) performs magical, mysterious and creepy tales as a spinoff from Ross's regular storytelling shows for ArranSound radio on the Scottish Isle of Arran, where Ross lives. Ross' work has been performed by the likes of Brian Cox, Daniel Kaluuya & Stephen Fry - here Ross performs "unplugged".

  1. FEB 20

    THE MERMAID'S VENGEANCE

    Here's a little blast from the past. A while back, I posted my version of a traditional folktale which I gave the title A Kiss Of Salt. This was well received - and one of my own favourite pieces - but more recently, my hosts for this podcast did some kind of AI sweep looking for plagiarism among material posted. It turned out that someone had written some song which had nothing to do with my story but which made some reference in its title to a kiss being salty. This also happened with another of my stories Wild Hearts, Warm Hearts - again there was no link between my extended folklore-based story and a reference to hearts in someone's three minute love song but AI, as we all know, is anything but intelligent. As a result both pieces were peremptorily removed from the podcast. I was sent an appeal form but only one form, though two stories had been taken down - and apparently the AI could only process one submission per form. Wild Hearts, Warm Hearts was quickly found "Not Guilty" and restored but not A Kiss Of Salt. Because it was not plagiarised - my source was a public domain folk tale which, in the interest of full disclosure, can be found in Volume 1 of Robert Hunt's 19th century collection Popular Romances Of The West of England or The Drolls, Traditions & Superstitions of Old Cornwall (I was working in Cornwall when I first encountered the story, Hunt's book being the Cornish equivalent of the Brothers Grimm) - I here confidently repost it - but, to save confusion, post it not under my preferred title but under the title Hunt's collection gave it: The Mermaid's Vengeance. That maybe gives more of the game away than i'd like, but I'm proud of the story and performance and my very Arran reinvention of it - so here it is, back again. Enjoy!

    43 min

  2. FEB 7

    WILD KATY & THE LIVING DEAD Act 4 (conclusion)

    Well, here it is - after 4 (not the previously mentioned 3) episodes: the dramatic, fantastical conclusion to this wild, improvised reworking of an old European folk tale. A happy ending? Depends how Gothic and ghoulish your sensibility is, I suppose! Katy has retreated with Lorcan, the living dead man, to a magical underworld - but being alive, she can't quite fit into the land of the dead, so she might still have to go "up above" and settle her score with the venomous hordes of the living....

    1 hr

  3. JAN 31

    WILD KATY & THE LIVING DEAD Act 3

    I think I said, in my intro to the first part of this story, that this was going to be a three-parter. Such is the nature of improvised, unscripted performance (as here) that the imagination can run freer than originally intended, with the effect that this is now the penultimate episode of a FOUR part story. There's a lot to get through, after all - our Katy is set to be executed for witchcraft, but unexpected help comes from someone who might previously have been thought a villain in this little saga. Surprises, dramatic escapades and a descent to a very surreal underworld dominate this second-last episode.

    50 min

  4. JAN 22

    WILD KATY & THE LIVING DEAD Act 2

    Here's the latest part of this freely improvised story based on an old European folk tale. Our heroine Wild Katy has come upon a skeletal undead with dangerously bad breath doing sinister things in the night in a small Scottish town. She's stolen his shroud so he can't return to his grave, but the Living Dead Man isn't going to take that lying down!

    38 min

  5. JAN 15

    WILD KATY & THE LIVING DEAD Act 1

    Here's the first part of another of my wild, weyward and very Scottish reinventions of a classic European folk tale, featuring an unapolgetically bold and rebellious heroine, who one night encounters something very strange and unusual rising out of a grave in the kirkyard of a very strait-laced conservative Scottish village....

    40 min

  6. 12/08/2025

    THE CAVE OF EYES

    Sorry it's been a muckle long time since I last posted an episode, but I've had a lot on in both work and life this year. My audio drama for Audible, THE DEAD OF RANNOCH MOOR -- exactly the sort of folk horror tale I perform a lot on the M.I.S.T podcast but done on a far grander scale, with real actors performing it (Chris Reilly & Shirley Henderson) and a wrap-around immersive soundtrack by Joe Richardson and music by my fellow Arranach Electra Perivolaris --was released on the Audible app in October; plus my stage show The Passion Of Tam Shanter was premiered in August, and several other things have been in the works which it's still too early to speak of. But the impulse came to me to put aside momentarily all the grand complications of Big Time Showbiz and record another no-frills, unplugged, improvised performance of a traditional folk tale in the traditional manner. So here we go, with my very Scottish version of what started life as a creepy Bohemian folk tale....

    1h 10m

  7. 05/09/2025

    DANCES SACRED & PROFANE Chapter 1

    I've written a lot of things over the years, many dramas for the BBC and Wireless Theatre Company, a smattering for Big Finish, and now a whole decades' worth of epic productions for Audible, many of them performed by some of the famous people imaginable - no nonsense movie stars, indeed. But still, such is the nature of my career and my body of work, the piece that means most to me is the one that's found least of an audience. This is my novel Dances Sacred & Profane, my most personal work, which I tentatively published on Kindle but never did much to publicize, most of all because it was so personal, a deeper revelation of the person and the artist that I am, and the more of an audience I drew to it, the more I feared some callous online remark, or cluster of such, that would wound me deeply: in many ways DSP is as personal as a diary - of myself at a certain crucial moment in my life, certainly. But that moment is past and so now I feel the confidence to perform the story myself here and see if it doesn't find a wider audience. It's an unusual story, seeking the more unusual listener: though it's a kind of sequel to a classic vampire story (I won't say which at this stage, as it would give too much away), it's essentially sui generis, by no means a fangs-and-coffin blood-and-thunder shocker, having strong elements of historical novel and romance and plays freely back and forth between these generic levels in a non-generic way. Here's chapter one (this is going to take some time), but if you want to read the whole thing in one go, here's a link to the book itself - https://www.amazon.co.uk/DANCES-SACRED-PROFANE-Gothic-Romance-ebook/dp/B00858QERM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=618EPBGMNR0B&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sWZuRZQE4S13Q2JvUdAfhg.T8Q93Ja8uUlMxuz2WAUEHKXAMAIbJsQ-xHantlcPOyc&dib_tag=se&keywords=dances+sacred+and+profane+marty+ross&qid=1746793289&s=digital-text&sprefix=dances+sacred+and+profane+marty+ross%2Cdigital-text%2C67&sr=1-1 Also, make allowances for my voice - the narrating character is female and should ideally be performed by a female actor, but I couldn't ask such an actor to make the kind of long term unpaid commitment this is going to require, so please make imginative allowances.

    18 min

  8. 10/27/2024

    WOLFSKIN Part Ten (of 10)

    And so at last we come to the conclusion of this dramatic, darkly romantic lycanthropic tale inspired by a Swedish follk tale from Upsala, but relocated here to the Isle of Arran. With the curse lifted from Tod and passed instead to Moira, Tod and Fiona seems set for the traditional happy ending. But things are set to be a little more complicated in this unsettling dramatic epilogue, which contains imagery some listeners might find disturbing.

    29 min
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Ratings & Reviews

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4 Ratings

About

"It must be admitted that the particular class of stories which turns on the marvellous possesses a stronger influence when told than when committed to print" - Walter Scott, The Tapestried Chamber. Storyteller & audio dramatist Marty Ross (Audible, BBC, Wireless Theatre, Big Finish, Kisses In The Dark) performs magical, mysterious and creepy tales as a spinoff from Ross's regular storytelling shows for ArranSound radio on the Scottish Isle of Arran, where Ross lives. Ross' work has been performed by the likes of Brian Cox, Daniel Kaluuya & Stephen Fry - here Ross performs "unplugged".

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