Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad

In this week’s “Ten Thoughts About Doctor Who”, Rich Johnston has this neat tidbit:

Has anyone ever read M. R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To Ye, My Lad? Named after the Burns poem, wherein an elderly professor is terrorised by a creature always just out of the line of sight – or, at one point, hiding under a bedspread. This is where the ghost in the bedsheets trope comes directly from, and this episode seems to go They even adapted it for the screen a couple of times as Whistle And I’ll Come To You.

Oh look who was in it most recently. [Picture of John Hurt]

Always a sucker for poems that inspire books, I’ll of course have to check this out. Here’s the text on Wikisource.. It appears in the collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, available for free on Kindle and iBooks.