The Land That Listens – Ghost Stories From Leicester And The East Midlands

What might a place remember after the people who knew it have gone? Radio Lear’s Halloween storytelling turns that question towards Leicester and the East Midlands, where rivers, hills, forests and old streets become openings into another kind of listening.

Prepared for the Sound Assembly workshop on Wednesday 28th October 2026, The Land That Listens brings together original ghost stories inspired by regional folklore. This podcast accompanies material broadcast during Radio Lear’s Halloween programme on Saturday 31st October.

Familiar Places, Unfamiliar Presences

The collection draws on Black Annis and the Dane Hills, the spectral coach associated with Bradgate, the giant Bel and the imagined relationship between King Leir and Leicester. Its wider landscape reaches towards Sherwood Forest and the wetlands and legends of Lincolnshire.

These are newly invented stories. Traditional figures and recognisable places provide their starting points, while the encounters, narrators and supernatural events belong to fiction.

That distinction leaves room for a particular kind of imaginative freedom. A familiar river can carry an unanswered question. A road can conceal an unfinished journey. An ordinary household sound can become an invitation to remember somebody whose voice has disappeared.

Making Room For The Unheard

Across the writing, haunting becomes a way of approaching memory, belonging and the things a place struggles to acknowledge. The dead ask to be heard. Forgotten lives press against the surfaces of the present.

There is unease here, but also tenderness. The scripts repeatedly return to listening as an act of recognition: staying with a troubling account, making space for an absence, or allowing a silence to remain unresolved.

The final story, The Last Frequency of Leicester, brings that enquiry back to radio itself. An imagined receiver encounters different versions of the city, asking whether anybody is still listening. Leicester appears as an unfinished conversation between those who have lived here and those making their lives here now.

A Story Continues In The Listener

The workshop brief brought storytelling together with sound making. The scripts invite measured speech, quiet effects and pauses, giving the listener room to imagine what lies beyond the voice.

Returning to this material as a podcast offers another encounter with that space. Away from Halloween’s appointed hour, the stories can enter a familiar room and alter its atmosphere.

Listen for what a place might be asking you to remember. Sometimes the ghost is a voice. Sometimes it is the silence somebody has left behind.

The Land That Listens – Ghost Stories From Leicester And The East Midlands