He finds papers about the pilgrimage in the family archive, visits the count’s mausoleum in the local church grounds (a padlock from one of the chains round his tomb has fallen off! No matter.

Overinquisitive is as overinquisitive does, and this news only sends Wraxhall off on further investigations. “He is not kindly remembered,” says Nielsen, from which I gather him to be a master of understatement.Īll that was before he visited the Holy Land on the Black Pilgrimage and rumours began to swirl about him having brought back something quite unholy. Wraxhall’s hostess offers him lodgings – “The house has been so silent, so sad” – but he declines and goes to stay at the local inn, so we can get more input about the mysterious count from the innkeeper Herr Nielsen (Max Bremer).Įven as heavily moustachioed local landowners go, Count Magnus really does seem to have been a bad sort: flogging and branding any peasants late with their rent and burning some of them inside their houses as a warning to others. It was built by heavily moustachioed local landowner and legend Count Magnus and is now occupied by spectrally pale widow Froken de la Gardie (MyAnna Buring), her remaining servant Gustav (Jamal Ajala) and a variety of unsettling ancestral portraits (that’s how I know about the heavy moustachioing). He has come to a small, snowy village to investigate the correspondence kept in the archives of an ancient manor house. Travelogue writer and researcher Mr Wraxhall (described as “overinquisitive” by the narrator Krister Henriksson and perfectly played by Jason Watkins to inspire a blend of affection and irritation) is visiting Sweden.

This year it is the turn of Count Magnus, whose very slight and un-visual of plots struggles to fill a fraction of that time or in the same engaging manner.

Ghost story for christmas the mezzotint