Plot

"The Tractate Middoth" tells the tale of when a young librarian receives a request for an obscure Hebrew book from a sinister gentleman, unaware of its contents.

On his deathbed vicar Rant makes a secret confession to his niece Mary Simpson. Some twenty years later young librarian William Garrett is asked by elderly John Eldred to locate a book called 'The Tractate Middoth' but a mysterious cloaked figure takes the book from the shelves and Eldred panics and leaves. On a second attempt to find the book Garrett is confronted by the mysterious borrower, a rotting ghost, the encounter causing him to faint. He goes to the seaside to recover and, by coincidence, stays with Mrs Simpson and her daughter. He learns that she is the cousin of Eldred, who cheated her out of an inheritance when Rant died though a will in her favour was actually made and hidden in the pages of the Tractate Middoth . Eldred finally obtains the book but Rant, witnessed by Garrett, exacts vengeance from beyond the grave.—don @ minifie-1

"The Tractate Middoth" is a supernatural television drama produced by the BBC. First broadcast on BBC Two on 25 December 2013 and running at 36 minutes, it was based on "The Tractate Middoth", a short ghost story by the British academic and author M. R. James which was first published in 1911 in his More Ghost Stories, James's second collection of ghost stories.—The Professor