Welcome to easy stories in English, the podcast that will take your English from ok to good and from good to great.
I am Ariel Goodbody, your host for this show.
Today's story is for intermediate learners.
The name of the story is the pit and the pendulum.
You can find a transcript of the episode@easystoriesinenglish.com.
pitt that's easystoriesinenglish.com pit p I t this contains the full story as well as my conversation before it today's story is another story by Edgar Allan Poe.
We already had two of his stories, the Black Cat and the heart that told the truth.
Edgar Allan Poe was an american author who wrote in the genre of gothic horror, and I'm really excited for today's story because it's actually one I read while I was at school.
I have really vivid memories of the imagery from this story, but after leaving school I couldn't remember where it was actually from.
So when I was doing research for the podcast and I found the story, I was very happy to be able to read it properly.
I have to say, when I was a kid, so much of the story went over my head.
A lot of the story is about the Spanish Inquisition, which is a historical group, and I knew nothing about them as a child.
So the Spanish Inquisition was a group that worked for the Catholic Church.
Their job was to maintain Catholicism.
Mainly they looked for people who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism or Islam, and they tried to find people in these groups who were not true believers, who didn't really believe in God and the catholic ways.
And they were pretty horrible to these people.
They tortured them and they killed many of them.
Many of the stories of the torture and the murder committed by the Spanish Inquisition are overblown.
They're made up.
They have a lot of unrealistic details added, but there was definitely a truth there that they were a very violent organisation and a dark page in history.