THE STRANGER HOUSE

In the course of four days, demons hidden for centuries are unleashed….

This fast-paced and witty six-part drama serial - part The Name Of The Rose

and part Tales of The Unexpected - has the twists and reveals of a thriller,

the magnetic vortex of a dark mystery and at the centre the intimate, human

dimension of a developing relationship between our protagonists, beginning

antagonistically and ending up romantically.

The narrative begins as two young people, apparently unconnected, arrive in the

Cumbrian village of Illthwaite on the same day. One from Australia, one from

Spain. They check into The Stranger House, an inn which has stood here for 500

years. Sam Flood (female) is a flame-haired mathematician and already, at 21 is

worldly-wise. Mig Madero is a historian in flight from a priest’s seminary, and a

virgin. Sam is intent on discovering the truth about the scandal of child migrants

sent to Australia in the 1960s – one of whom was her grandmother who was

shipped out from Illthwaite and then died in childbirth. Mig, who experienced

stigmata at the age of 16, is trying to trace the story of an ancestor from the

16th century, when Catholics in England were hunted as heretics. He knows his

ancestor was saved from the wreck of a ship in the Spanish armada. The village

is clannish and secretive. Now, unwittingly, its ghosts will be stirred by Sam and

Mig as they find their own pasts intersect.

With them, we inescapably return to and relive terrible events in both the 16th

and 20th centuries conjuring forth the undead – who disturbingly resemble their

contemporaries as though forever trapped in the same bodies. There are two

places from which the demons are revealed to Sam and Mig: a “priest hole” that

they discover in the kitchen of The Stranger House, and Woollass Hall a

brooding dynastic mansion that sits above the village housing a trio of vivid

characters representing three generations of the Woollass family who have

their own grim gallery of sins.

Crucifixion, rape, mob violence unholy murder and cover-up engulf the two young

people – who, in the deepening drama, find a common bond and become the

detectives who must, in order to survive, discover and disclose the darkest

secrets. In this powerful and spellbinding drama the intrigues of three centuries

collide in the present. Temporal, religious and family laws are violated, unruly

passions run wild and, from one second to the next, the outcome is never sure.