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Count Jan Potocki (pron. Yan Pototchkee) was born of an aristocratic Polish family in 1761.

In 1815, shortly after completing his masterwork, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and suffering from a chronic illness he took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a silver bullet blessed by his Castle Chaplain.

It was a strange ending to a strange life which had resulted in an even stranger work of fiction and one that has been compared with such classics as, The Thousand and One Nights and Don Quixote… The book was shot as a black-and-white film, The Saragossa Manuscript, in 1965 and it too is quite justifiably regarded as a classic work.

Both book and film tell the story of a young army officer in the Spanish army who gets caught up in a tale of brigands, ghosts, cabbalist, smugglers, gypsies and haunted gallows…

Utilising the literary technique of ‘episodic nesting’ the story ranges wide over a whole gamut of human, religious and supernatural concerns and experiences but continually returns to the locale of a ‘Phantom Inn’ and its ghostly occupants which seems to serve as the lynch-pin of the hero’s adventures…

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