Inspired by the title story of the April 21, 2026 Weird Darkness #RetroRadio marathon, “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook: The Crucifix Was Just a Warning!” https://weirddarkness.com/wdrr0636/

A scholar pays pocket change for a priceless medieval scrapbook a terrified French sacristan was desperate to sell — and finds out that night what he actually bought.

ABOUT THE SONG: "Two Hundred Fifty Francs" places the bargain and its consequences in the musical language of 1883, the year the story itself unfolds. The arrangement leans into the late-Victorian parlor ballad tradition — piano-driven, minor-key, measured, the kind of gaslit narrative song that might have sat on a music stand in any middle-class drawing room of the period. The form was tailor-made for tragic storytelling with a supernatural edge, and the song treats that form without irony or pastiche. No winks, no modern gloss — a straight gothic parlor ballad carrying a straight gothic parlor story. The chorus pivots on the absurdity of the price and the thing that came bound up with the pages. The tempo stays slow and mournful rather than frantic, letting the horror settle in the same way it would have on the quiet carriage ride away from St. Bertrand.

ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE: An English archaeologist arrives at the cathedral town of St. Bertrand de Comminges in the French Pyrenees in 1883, intending to spend a day photographing and cataloging the ancient church. The sacristan who guides him is a small, wizened man who flinches at every sound, glances constantly over his shoulder, and weeps before a painting of a saint delivering a man from strangulation by the devil. When the tour ends, the sacristan hesitantly offers the scholar a folio he keeps at home — a priceless seventeenth-century scrapbook assembled by one Canon Albrecht de Maulion, full of illuminated manuscript leaves spanning nearly a thousand years of ecclesiastical art. At the very back of the book, two later sheets of paper bear a drawing of King Solomon enthroned, four soldiers frozen in terror, a fifth dead at their feet with his neck wrenched out of shape, and crouched among them a matted, skeletal creature with burning yellow eyes and a hate that is not human. The sacristan names a price that would shame a junk dealer. The scholar pays. The sacristan's daughter presses a silver crucifix into his hand as he leaves. That night, alone in his hotel room with his purchase, the scholar learns exactly what the sacristan was so desperate to be rid of — and why the silver cross around his neck is the only thing standing between him and the creature that has haunted Canon Albrecht's book, and every owner since, for almost two hundred years.

ABOUT THE RADIO SHOW: Ghost Story was a BBC Radio strand devoted to single-voice readings of classic supernatural fiction, drawing heavily from the great British ghost-story tradition — M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, and their literary heirs. Produced in the understated, atmospheric style that became a BBC hallmark, the series favored close-miked narration, spare sound design, and the kind of measured pacing that lets a well-told ghost story breathe. These broadcasts aired on BBC Radio 4 and were later repeated on BBC Radio 7, the network's spoken-word archive channel, where they continued to find new audiences long after their original transmission. The "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" installment referenced here aired on December 29, 1997, in keeping with the longstanding British tradition — championed by M.R. James himself — of saving the very best ghost stories for the Christmas season.

ABOUT STATIC WAX: Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. Each release is paired with the original source episode, discussed on the Weird Darkness RetroRadio podcast, and archived on the WeirdDarkness.com blog so listeners can follow the thread from vintage broadcast to new recording. All Static Wax releases eventually reach streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and most other major services under Weird Darkness Records. Learn more and follow the series at https://weirddarkness.com/staticwax.

STATIC WAX, "Two Hundred Fifty Francs"