Inside Room 623
First up, why 623? As a child whenever we stayed in a big hotel, it always seemed to be room 623. I remember my father giving a room number at meal-times, the waiter repeating '623, 623' repeating as he walked away. So the number has just lodged in my brain as an inevitable kind of room number.
The podcast 'The Unexplained Universe of Roger Unthank' is, of course, entirely fictitious and you should not draw any parallels between that and a real podcast that featured a story about strange goings on in a university hall of residence tower block. The similarity is, I will admit, slightly uncanny, though.
The name 'University of Lowlands' is lifted directly from Andrew Davies' A Very Peculiar Practice. I meant to write some nuns in at so.e point, but may have forgotten. Or decided nuns would be too on the nose. Nuns on the Nose,
Yes, Professor Strangely-Wyrd is a terrible name, but it was revealed to me in a dream so we all have to go along with it I'm afraid. Did you notice one key thing about the professor though? Their gender is not mentioned once in the story. Did you assume they were male? Hmmm. Interesting.
Podcast researcher Fiona Scott is named after someone I was at primary school with. After one summer holiday (Plymouth, I think) it turned out totally coincidentally she'd been staying in the same hotel - in room 523. My family had been, of course, in room 623.
The dead student's housemates were inspired by real second year university housemates, as was the cassette letter incident. Look, if I can't have some fun with trauma 40 years after the fact, when can I? The intended recipient of the cassette letter in real life was of course the author of these notes and plot summaries of episodes of The Waltons that I cannot quite bring myself to throw away 40 years later. And I was pretty ruthless, every letter from any exes went in the bin. But The Rachel Papers persist.
