The Night Visiting

The award-winning folk musician Tim van Eyken has travelled the world performing traditional songs. He also works in the theatre and was the Song Man in the National Theatre's production of 'War Horse'. One of the first songs he ever heard, from his mother, was 'The Bay of Biscay'. In this a woman is visited in the night by her lover, returned after seven years at sea. It turns out that he was drowned, the visitor is his ghost... and he cannot stay.

There are many varieties of night visiting song: tales of seduction; stories of deception, when the visitor turns out not to be the expected lover; and songs of ghostly visitation.

Tim sets out to probe the history, meaning and significance of these songs. He talks to the singer Martin Carthy about their power. Dr Vic Gammon sets them in their international context - there are in Europe dawn songs. He hears from Bella Hardy; the first song she ever wrote was a new night visiting song.

Tim believes that the night visiting songs are more than old yarns; that they speak to us today of desire, love and loss - and sexual and class politics. He tests his ideas with the Jungian psychotherapist, Warren Colman. Professor Chris French, who researches the paranormal, and film-maker Carla MacKinnon, who have both been working on sleep paralysis, consider the psychology of the songs, what might actually be happening to the people in them.

Tim considers, too, how the night visiting is a trope in our literature. Isn't the balcony scene in 'Romeo and Juliet' a night visit? What of Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights'? Throughout, we hear beautiful, haunting, night visiting songs, performed by the people Tim speaks to, and taken from archive recordings.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2013.

Tim van Eyken investigates songs of seduction and ghosts - the Night Visiting Songs.