Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Seven — The Stone Tape

It is day seven of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Seven is considered to be a lucky number. Let’s hope that bit of folklore holds firm for us today. We’re gonna need it. Why? Well, because we are joining a group of engineers who are in search of brand new recording medium. Wouldn’t it be lucky for us if we were to get in on the ground floor of such a technological development? Sure, it would! And you know what that would mean...

On the other hand, Lady Luck can be a fickle mistress. We may discover that our brand new recording medium is not so brand new as we think it is. It may be something that’s been around for a long, long time, and it may have recorded some events that we wouldn’t want to revisit.

Intrigued? Well then it is time to hit “play” on...The Stone Tape.

The research team for Ryan Electric Products has moved into an old Victorian mansion in hopes that they can discover a new recording medium that will give the company an edge over their competitors. The real estate agent in charge of the house has told team lead Peter Brock (Michael Bryant) that everything at Taskerlands has been refurbished for his company’s needs — all except one room. This stone room is believed to be from the Saxon period. It is a remnant of the original building, with the rest of the house having been added to it over the centuries. Work was halted in this room because the builders refused to go inside. They claimed it was haunted.

Being curious at such a story, the research team investigates and in the midst of their explorations they hear the scream of a woman. Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), a computer programmer for the company, sees an image of a woman running up the stone stairs then falling to her death. Jill seems to be the most sensitive of the research team, as not everyone in the group witnessed the event.

After discovering records that tell of a maid falling to her death in the room in 1890, Brock thinks that the stone walls of the room acted as a sort of tape — the very thing the team is looking for. Jill, however, believes that whatever has been recorded in the stone of the room can only interact with  the nervous systems of certain, highly sensitive viewers. She believes that it is a form of telepathy.

Brock and his team try and try again to trigger the images in the stone, but to no avail. Jill believes that the stone tape has been erased. Having failed at developing the recording medium that Ryan Electric Products wanted, Brock is told to make room for a new team at Taskerlands — one that is coming up with a new washing machine.

Meanwhile, the local vicar has unearthed evidence of an exorcism that took place not in the 1890s when the maid died, but in the 1760s, before the house was constructed. Jill thinks that the stone walls of the room have been recording events much longer than just the 1890s. The stones act like magnetic tape — recording new events over older ones. The recording of the death of the maid, then, was masking a much, much older event — one even older than the 1760s. One that Jill believes may be thousands of years old.

What does Jill find when she returns to the stone room one last time? What is the recording beneath the maid’s death? What does Jill find recorded on. . .The Stone Tape?

The Stone Tape was originally broadcast on 25 December 1972 on BBC2 as their annual Christmas ghost story. Christopher Morahan (Head of Plays at BBC Television from 1972-1976) asked his old friend Kneale if he would be interested in doing a Christmas ghost story, but, “Only if we could do a ghost story which had an altogether different twist — such as going at a ghost with science.”

Could he have asked a more perfect person for such a story?

This was an assignment right up Kneale’s alley. As we’ve seen in the previous stories of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, our hero seems to be most at home in the space where science fiction and horror overlap. (And we shall see even more examples of this coming up!) The Stone Tape is a perfect blend of these two genres, and it’s always fun to watch these two worlds collide.

The Stone Tape is on DVD, so perhaps your friendly neighborhood public library has a copy you can check out. It may even be on one of the streaming platforms that your local library is associated with (Hoopla or Kanopy, for instance). For those of who can’t wait to see what it is that Jill experiences in that ancient room, you can watch the film here:

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an audio drama version the The Stone Tape on 31 October 2015. Directed by Peter Strickland, it is quite different from the filmed version, but just as creepy. You can find it here at the Internet Archive.

Let’s hit the stop button for today, Blog-o-weeners. Remember to be kind and rewind. We only have two days left in this year’s celebration, but I think they may be the best yet. Tomorrow, for day eight of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, we will be looking at Kneale’s most famous creation: Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group. Although the good professor’s adventures spawned four series over nearly thirty years, we will be looking at one in particular. Set in London, workers have unearthed something strange, something not of this world, something that carries with it the lost history of the human race. Come back tomorrow to find out what is buried in...Quatermass and the Pit.

As always, Blog-o-weeners, watch where you are going, watch the skies, and...