Midnight Mysteries

Complete5 parts

The Hollow Shore

Five parts. One winter. One family that should have gone home.

The Marchettis rented the last house on Bellhaven Point because it was cheap and because Anna needed the quiet. What they found instead was a village that keeps a lamp burning on every seaward window, a sandbar that does not sit where any chart puts it, and a parish register with one page written in a hand nobody can account for. Recorded on location over eleven days in Bellhaven.

Listen on

Share this

In order

Episodes

TrailerJanuary 6, 20252 min

The Hollow Shore: Trailer

Six weeks before the Marchetti family left Bellhaven for the last time, the youngest of them started drawing the same figure standing at the tide line. Five parts, beginning January 20.

Part 1January 20, 202542 min

The Hollow Shore, Part One: What the Tide Left

The Marchettis take the last house on Bellhaven Point for the winter, because it is cheap and because Anna needs the quiet to finish her book. On the second morning, Sam finds a line of footprints that begins twenty feet out in the water and ends at their back door. Nobody in the family admits to walking out there. Everybody checks the lock twice.

Part 2January 27, 202538 min

The Hollow Shore, Part Two: The Long Sandbar

Bellhaven's harbourmaster has kept a tide log for thirty-one years, and he is willing to show Anna every page but one. What he will say is that the sandbar has not been where the charts put it since the year the chapel burned.

Part 3February 3, 202544 min

The Hollow Shore, Part Three: A Lamp in the Window

Every house on the Point keeps a lamp burning on the seaward side. Nobody can tell the Marchettis when the custom started, only that you do not let it go out, and that the family who did is not discussed.

Part 4February 10, 202540 min

The Hollow Shore, Part Four: The Salt Register

In the vestry of a chapel that burned in 1911, Anna finds a parish register with forty years of baptisms and one page of names written in a different hand — names of people the village has no other record of.

Part 5February 17, 202552 min

The Hollow Shore, Part Five: Low Water

The lowest tide in nineteen years uncovers what the sandbar has been standing on. The Marchettis have one morning to decide what they are willing to carry home with them.

BonusFebruary 24, 202528 min

The Hollow Shore: The Bellhaven Tapes

Interviews that did not fit the season: the harbourmaster's granddaughter, a retired coastguard, and eleven minutes of a 1978 field recording made on the Point at four in the morning.