Classic Ghost Stories
- Episódios
- 399
- Formato
- Série – ouça desde o começo
- Último episódio
- 13 nov 2026
Sobre o podcast
I read classic literary stories, ghost stories and supernatural fiction in a slow, intimate style, with an emphasis on classic horror literature rather than modern jump‑scare horror. The podcast features uncanny tales by writers such as M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, Henry James, Edith Wharton and other Victorian, Edwardian and early twentieth‑century authors in the weird tradition. Many listeners treat these as cosy ghost stories for evening or bedtime listening, or as quiet company while travelling or working.
Episódios 399
The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore | Classic Ghost Story Narration
Listen to The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore—a atmospheric classic ghost story of haunting memory, psychological horror, and Indian supernatural fiction. In a lonely marble palace above a shrinking river …
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Listen to The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore—a atmospheric classic ghost story of haunting memory, psychological horror, and Indian supernatural fiction.
In a lonely marble palace above a shrinking river, a young tax collector discovers that solitude is never truly empty. Footsteps sound where no one walks. Laughter rings out from an invisible bath of unseen maidens. Music trembles through dry, silent halls. Are these memories of a vanished court, or something far more hungry, feeding on the living through echoes of the dead? As night after night the house presses closer around him, the difference between dream, desire and possession begins to thin—and the stones themselves seem to listen.
About the Story & Author Originally written in Bengali and collected in Rabindranath Tagore’s short fiction of the early 20th century, The Hungry Stones was first published in English translation in The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories (Project Gutenberg eText #2518: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2518/pg2518-images.html).
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, dramatist, and composer, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913). His work ranges from mystical lyric poetry to psychologically acute ghost stories that probe the borderlands between history, memory, and the supernatural.
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The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen: classic ghost stories audio
The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen: classic ghost stories audio This episode of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast brings you a classic ghost story from the weird tradition, told as audio fiction for …
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The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen: classic ghost stories audio
This episode of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast brings you a classic ghost story from the weird tradition, told as audio fiction for the long dark evenings. On a winter night in London, a starving, educated young woman meets a courteous stranger under a gas lamp and finds herself drawn into his private universe. Professor Gregg is an ethnologist by trade, but his true life’s work is hidden in a single drawer: a vanished servant girl, a child lost on the mountains, a few lines of strange red writing on a limestone rock, and a dull black stone carved with characters no scholar can read. In a lonely Welsh valley, under a sky that looks older than history, those fragments begin to arrange themselves into a pattern that is nothing like the playful fairy stories of the fireside. Miss Lally, who began as a rationalist, discovers how thin the crust of ordinary life can be when one man is determined to follow his theory wherever it leads, and how easily the beautiful countryside can take on the aspect of an ancient ritual ground.
The Novel of the Black Seal was first published in 1895 as one of the interlinked tales within Arthur Machen’s episodic horror novel The Three Impostors. It has since been widely reprinted as a standalone classic of weird fiction and classic horror literature, and it sits comfortably among the best classic short stories of its period. Modern critical editions and public-domain texts are readily available, including online via Project Gutenberg Australia.
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a Welsh writer whose strange tales of occult survivals, pagan remnants, and visionary terror helped shape twentieth-century supernatural fiction. His work, admired by M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft, stands at the uneasy border where scholarly curiosity meets the older, darker strata of myth. Listeners who enjoy classic ghost tales and classic horror in audio form will find this one a late-night listen. Anyone who usually prefers cosy ghost stories should know that this one runs much colder than the fireside kind.
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The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft | Halloween 2026
The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft is a classic tale of cosmic horror, first published in Weird Tales in August 1931. One of Lovecraft's great stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, it introduces the …
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The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft is a classic tale of cosmic horror, first published in Weird Tales in August 1931. One of Lovecraft's great stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, it introduces the mysterious Mi-Go and the terrible secrets lurking in the remote hills of Vermont.
When the great Vermont floods of 1927 send strange, swollen shapes down the rivers, the hill folk begin telling old stories again. They speak of winged creatures dwelling among the high peaks, creatures that have haunted the local imagination for generations.
Albert Wilmarth, a scholar of folklore at Miskatonic University, dismisses the rumours as superstition. Then a letter arrives from Henry Akeley, a reclusive farmer living in the hills, who claims to possess evidence that will change Wilmarth's mind.
As their correspondence deepens, Akeley's letters grow increasingly desperate. Strange voices are heard in the woods, mysterious visitors gather around his lonely farmhouse, and Wilmarth finds himself drawn towards the mountains to discover what is really happening.
But some knowledge comes at a terrible price.
The Whisperer in Darkness is Lovecraft at his most atmospheric: a slow-burning supernatural mystery in which the rational world gives way to something vast, alien and profoundly unsettling.
Our Halloween 2026 special continues the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast tradition of settling in with a long and properly disturbing tale on the darkest night of the year.
Turn the lights down low, and keep an ear on the dark.
More classic horror and supernatural fiction
Classic Ghost Stories Podcast, narrated by Tony Walker, brings you Gothic horror, Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, weird fiction and forgotten tales of the supernatural.
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The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel | Classic Ghost Stories | Edwardian Weird Fiction
The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel | Classic Ghost Stories Podcast On a nameless rock in the far northern sea stands a brass house chained against storm and tide. An old friend answers a summons, finding a …
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The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel | Classic Ghost Stories Podcast
On a nameless rock in the far northern sea stands a brass house chained against storm and tide. An old friend answers a summons, finding a family on the brink of extinction and an ocean roar so loud that spoken words become useless.
Join us for M. P. Shiel’s masterwork of Edwardian dread, The House of Sounds. First published in 1911, this story remains an essential highlight of classic horror literature and Edwardian weird fiction. If you prefer deep atmospheric dread over cosy ghost stories, this tale offers the relentless tension loved by fans of Bram Stoker and early 20th-century macabre tales.
In this episode:
- Unabridged audio narration of The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel.
- Literary background on M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) and his contribution to classic horror literature.
Whether you are looking for bedtime ghost stories or classic horror audiobooks, please subscribe, leave a rating, and share the show!
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The Stolen Body by H G Wells
Mr Bessel is a conscientious man, and the experiment he agrees to try with his friend Vincey is undertaken in the spirit of honest enquiry. It takes place on a quiet evening, and it concerns nothing more …
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Mr Bessel is a conscientious man, and the experiment he agrees to try with his friend Vincey is undertaken in the spirit of honest enquiry. It takes place on a quiet evening, and it concerns nothing more alarming than how far one mind might reach toward another. Yet something has noticed what they are doing, and before long Mr Bessel will have found that the self he has always taken for granted is far less secure than he supposed, and that some questions, once asked, are answered.
First published in The Strand Magazine, November 1898.
Collected in Twelve Stories and a Dream (Macmillan, 1903) and reprinted in Weird Tales, November 1925.H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English novelist and journalist, a founder of science fiction best known for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
A student of T. H. Huxley, he brought a biologist's habit of mind to his scientific romances and to his short stories, a number of which edge toward the supernatural.Listen to even more! Sign up for the newsletter for direct access to our full archive, member-only ad-free stories, and literary discussions at https://www.classicghost.com
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The Grey Ones by J B Priestley
A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around …
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A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around him no longer look quite as human as they once did. In his account there are no apparitions, no rattling chains, only the slow, unnerving sense that certain very ordinary people are quietly working to empty life of colour, choice, and meaning. As he talks, the calm, professional office itself begins to feel strangely less reassuring.
The Grey Ones was first published in 1952 and later collected in J. B. Priestley’s The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort (1953). It stands among Priestley’s late uncanny pieces, where post‑war England is haunted less by ghosts than by structures of power.
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was an English novelist, playwright, essayist, and broadcaster, widely read and heard from the 1920s to the 1970s. Best known for works like The Good Companions and An Inspector Calls, he combined sharp social criticism with an abiding fascination with time, conscience, and the hidden pressures of modern life.
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All Souls by Edith Wharton | Supernatural stories and classic horror
Edith Wharton's “All Souls” begins with an empty house on a winter night and a woman waiting as the snow piles up. Written six months before Wharton's death, this final completed work of fiction is something …
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Edith Wharton's “All Souls” begins with an empty house on a winter night and a woman waiting as the snow piles up. Written six months before Wharton's death, this final completed work of fiction is something quieter than a cozy ghost story—and hard to shake.
- Hear Edith Wharton's “All Souls,” her last completed work of fiction, written six months before her death.
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Edith Wharton All Souls All Souls ghost story classic ghost stories literary ghost stories classic horror literary horror ghost story narration classic ghost story audio All Souls Eve story Edith Wharton stories American ghost stories haunted house story winter ghost story classic short stories supernatural literature Ghosts Edith Wharton 1937
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The Residence at Whitminster by M R James
Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode! The prebendal residence at Whitminster stands in the shadow of its great collegiate church, solid, respectable, and comfortable. A young Irish lord came to …
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Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!
The prebendal residence at Whitminster stands in the shadow of its great collegiate church, solid, respectable, and comfortable. A young Irish lord came to lodge there once, in the 1730s, and his guardian noted his odd habits with mild concern. He grew more concerned as time went on. By the time he understood what the boy had been doing in the garden at night, it was already too late.
M. R. James tells this story the way a scholar reconstructs a cold case: from letters, diaries, servant's gossip, and family memory preserved at two removes. The witnesses contradict each other. The documents are partial. The truth, such as it is, arrives a century late. There is a glass that has absorbed what it once witnessed and will show it again, to the right viewer. There is a room that was sealed for reasons only partially explained. There is a press that has not been opened, and a note from a long-dead man advising that it should stay that way.
"The Residence at Whitminster" was first published in 1919 as the lead story of A Thin Ghost and Others, James's third collection, published by Edward Arnold. The collection takes its title from a line within this story.
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval scholar, palaeographer, and Provost first of King's College Cambridge and then of Eton College. He is widely regarded as the finest writer of ghost stories in the English language.
By the way the print edition of my Sherlock Holmes puzzle story: The Cumberland Kidnapping is available now on Payhip
The Case of the Cumberland Kidnapping
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The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E Wilkins Freeman
An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something. Nobody in Ford Village …
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An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.
Nobody in Ford Village will say anything. And then there's the rose-bush that flutters when there is no wind.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, better known for her hard-eyed portraits of small-town New England households, turns that same unsparing eye on a relationship that prizes respectability over truth. What starts as an ordinary of family obligation becomes something closer to a tragedy, and we never see it coming.
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The Mummy's Foot by Theophile Gautier
In a quiet curiosity shop in Paris, a shelf holds a collection of objects from another time. Our protagonist notices a small object that at first appears to be the broken foot of a Greek statue. The antiques …
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In a quiet curiosity shop in Paris, a shelf holds a collection of objects from another time. Our protagonist notices a small object that at first appears to be the broken foot of a Greek statue. The antiques dealer, however, explains that it is the mummified foot of a pharaoh’s daughter. The absurdity of a once royal foot now serving as a paperweight strikes them both. The dealer warns that the old pharaoh will not be pleased.
First published in 1840 as "Le Pied de momie" in Le Chroniqueur de Paris, The Mummy’s Foot is one of the earliest examples of French fantastic fiction.
Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), a poet, novelist, and critic, was a leading figure of French Romanticism. Known for his belief in “art for art’s sake,” he helped define the fantastic and Gothic tale as a lasting literary form.
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Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse by Lousia May Alcot
A young woman sits for a portrait, turning over a small gold box while her fiancé paints. Inside: three scarlet seeds, brought back from a place he'd rather forget. He warns her the story behind them will haunt …
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A young woman sits for a portrait, turning over a small gold box while her fiancé paints. Inside: three scarlet seeds, brought back from a place he'd rather forget. He warns her the story behind them will haunt her. She only laughs — she likes weird tales, and they never trouble her. But something was disturbed in that pyramid, something bound by an old promise to whoever broke her rest. The seeds are waiting. So is the curse.
Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse first appeared in Frank Leslie's *The New World* on 16 January 1869, published under initials rather than a name.
It vanished for over a century before being rediscovered in the 1990s as one of the earliest true "mummy's curse" stories.
Its author was Louisa May Alcott, best known to the world as the creator of *Little Women*.
Behind that respectable reputation, she spent years writing anonymous, blood-soaked thrillers — and this was one of the last.
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Lot 249 by Arthur Conan Doyle
This was a request, but fitted in with my current interest in mummies. Read my full notes on the history of the Egyptian Mummy in Horror here: https://www.classicghost.com/blog/the-egyptian-mummy-in-horror/ Old …
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This was a request, but fitted in with my current interest in mummies.
Read my full notes on the history of the Egyptian Mummy in Horror here:
https://www.classicghost.com/blog/the-egyptian-mummy-in-horror/
Old College, Oxford, in the last years of the nineteenth century. A young medical student named Abercrombie Smith shares a stair with a fellow he barely knows — a brilliant scholar of Eastern languages, whose rooms are crowded with the relics of a dead civilisation, and whose company he has been quietly warned against. Something is wrong with the sound that comes through the wall at night: a low, monotonous muttering, the same words over and over, in no language Smith can place. Enemies begin to suffer, one by one, in ways that leave no mark and no explanation. And in the corner of that cluttered room stands a thing purchased at auction, numbered like an item in a catalogue, upright, ancient, and — Smith is almost certain — not quite as still as it should be.
"Lot No. 249" was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1892.
Doyle is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he wrote extensively in the supernatural and horror genres throughout his career. He died in 1930, having remained a committed spiritualist to the end of his life.
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Lot 249
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The Haunted Dolls House by M R James
Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses... A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and …
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Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses...
A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable block, a drawer of tiny embroidered clothes. He spends a happy evening setting its rooms in order, delighted with his find. There's no clock within earshot — none on the stair, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower.
And yet, at one in the morning, a bell tolls once.
"The Haunted Dolls' House" was first published in the Empire Review in February 1923, and later collected in M. R. James's A Warning to the Curious.
M. R. James (1862–1936) was Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a distinguished medieval scholar — antiquarian interests that shaped his ghost stories as much as his day job.
Go to get the full notes here:
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The Face by E F Benson
London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate. And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores …
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London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate.
And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should — she has never had cause to wish for anything else, and she is grateful for it, in the quiet, unshowy way of someone who has never really been tested.
Until something from very long ago reaches forward and taps her on the shoulder.
Something she had put away so completely she'd almost convinced herself it was never real. A half-remembered thing from childhood, stirring now in the middle of the night.
She stops sleeping. She starts watching the dark corners of rooms.
Her doctor is kind, practical, entirely unworried. Nerves, he tells her — the heat, nothing more. What she needs is rest, and quiet, and a change of scene. A little village on the East Anglian coast, away from London, away for a while even from her husband. Somewhere she can put it all behind her.
She goes because she means to get well.
E.F. Benson's The Face.
*Publication: "The Face" first appeared in Hutchinson's Magazine in February 1924, and was collected four years later in E.F. Benson's Spook Stories* (Hutchinson & Co., 1928).
*About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories — his own term for them was "spook stories" — placed regularly in magazines like Pearson's and The Illustrated London News*.
I now have an archive where you can find stories more easily.
https://www.classicghost.com/the-archive/
Find Stories More Easily
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A Professor of Egyptology by Guy Boothby
Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other — a man treated with strange deference by those who …
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Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other — a man treated with strange deference by those who know him best, a man whose knowledge of the dead seems to run deeper than any book could teach. She will walk beside him through moonlit halls where the pharaohs sleep in glass cases,
"A Professor of Egyptology" first appeared in The Graphic on 10 December 1904, and was collected that same year in Guy Boothby's volume The Lady of the Island.
Boothby was an Australian-born novelist best known for his Dr Nikola thrillers, a writer of ferocious productivity who dictated up to six thousand words a day. He died suddenly in 1905, only months after this story appeared, at the age of thirty-seven.
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The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous
A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go. He goes anyway. There are things in that house that have been seen …
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A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go.
He goes anyway.
There are things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs. Something in the gallery, after dark, when the fire burns low and the talk runs out. Those who see it together are marked by it, in ways that take a year to come due.
This is the story of what a house remembers, and what it does to those who are told to stay away, and don't.
Published anonymously in 1878, later reprinted with the tag "by the author of Freda." Modern editors tentatively attribute it to novelist Elizabeth Anna Hart, though the evidence remains circumstantial.
Elizabeth Anna Hart (1822–1890) was a London-born novelist and poet, cousin to Lewis Carroll, best remembered for her children's classic The Runaway and the novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal.
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The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling
A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over …
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A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed somewhere else, by someone else, for reasons the walls should know nothing about. The question is not what haunts the house. The question is what was done to the dead.
"The House Surgeon" was first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1909 and collected in Actions and Reactions later that year.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and remains one of the most widely read English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball
In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, master of the estate, has …
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In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, master of the estate, has heard enough. He is a rational man. He does not believe in werewolves. He has moulded the silver bullets himself, in the cellar, as a concession to superstition — nothing more. Tonight his sons will go out into the moonlight and put an end to it.
But there is something in the way he says goodbye to Pierre. Something in the way he asks after the crucifix. Something in the reason he will not be going with them.
The Werewolf Howls was first published in Weird Tales, November 1941. It is the final story Clifford Ball published before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps.
Ball was born in New York City in 1908 and wrote just six stories, all for Weird Tales, between 1937 and 1941. He drowned accidentally in Baltimore in January 1947, aged thirty-eight.
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Gabriel Ernest by Saki
Something is wrong in the woods. The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone. It falls to Van …
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Something is wrong in the woods. The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone. It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, is a boy with light brown eyes that hold something tigerish in them, lying in the sun with an ease that belongs to no child he has ever met. The aunt will find him charming. The dog will not stay in the house. Saki understood that the old country — the country before the parishes and the property lines — was never entirely tamed. The animals there talk. "Gabriel-Ernest" was first published in 1909 in the Westminster Gazette, and later collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), a writer of savage wit and supernatural unease. He was killed on the Western Front in the closing months of the Somme campaign. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith
There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of …
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There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil, not sin, not the ordinary darkness of human nature, but evil as a cosmic force, a radiation from a black sun somewhere in the depths of space. And he has come with a purpose. In the old Larcom house, with its history of sorrow and disaster, he has found exactly the conditions he needs. His neighbour, a novelist, finds himself drawn into Averaud's orbit. Clark Ashton Smith's *The Devotee of Evil* is a quiet story. It does not rush. It thinks. And what it thinks about has been troubling philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. *The Devotee of Evil* was first published in Smith's self-produced chapbook *The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies* in 1933, after failing to find a commercial publisher. It reappeared in *Stirring Science Stories* in February 1941. Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a California poet, painter, sculptor and writer of weird fiction, one of the central figures of the *Weird Tales* circle alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with whom he maintained a long correspondence. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost
On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own conclusions. The exception is a story he has …
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On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own conclusions. The exception is a story he has told no one: a woman he met in Cairo, a wrong he did her, and something that has followed him across the water ever since. Not threatening. Not reproachful. Simply there, at the edge of the known world, in a light that has no name in any spectrum the living can account for. Prevost's 1893 story asks, without sentimentality and without resolution, what we leave behind us when we refuse an honest encounter — and whether what we leave behind stays left. A Ghost of the Sea was first published in 1893 in Prevost's collection Rust of Gold, issued by Ward and Lock, London. Francis Prevost was the pen name of Harry Francis Prevost Battersby (1862–1949), soldier, war correspondent, novelist, and lifelong investigator of psychical phenomena. Get the London Fae for $5! https://payhip.com/b/ryqKP The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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Hertford O'Donnells Warning by Charlotte Riddell
Gerard Street, Soho. A winter's night. A surgeon sits alone by his fire, a practical man — a man who has cut through flesh and bone without flinching, who has long since made his peace with whatever comes after …
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Gerard Street, Soho. A winter's night. A surgeon sits alone by his fire, a practical man — a man who has cut through flesh and bone without flinching, who has long since made his peace with whatever comes after death. And then something comes through the darkness. Not a dream. Not imagination. Something older than London, older than reason, that has followed him across the water. Charlotte Riddell's "Hertford O'Donnell's Warning" is a ghost story rooted not in haunted houses or rattling chains, but in the things a man carries with him — across years, across a sea, across a life lived deliberately in the wrong direction. *"Hertford O'Donnell's Warning"* was first published in Charlotte Riddell's 1873 collection *Weird Stories*, alongside five other tales of the uncanny and supernatural. Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906) was an Irish-born novelist who supported herself entirely by her writing for most of her adult life — producing over forty novels as well as some of the finest ghost stories of the Victorian era. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Broughton
There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he …
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There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he has noticed it for four years, and he does not like to say it aloud. What happens inside that house comes to us through letters. Two women writing to each other in the warm, confiding way of close friends — about curtains, about dinner guests, about the peculiar mercy of a low rent in a good street. Something is in that house. It has been seen. And the ones who have seen it cannot say what it was. They cannot say anything at all, after. Rhoda Broughton published this story in 1873. It has barely aged a day. Publication details: "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth" was first published in Belgravia: A London Magazine, Volume 21, 1873, and later collected in Broughton's Tales for Christmas Eve (1873), subsequently reissued as Twilight Stories (1879). Author biography: Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920) was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, witty fiction made her one of the most widely read and controversial writers of the Victorian era. She outlived her own scandalous reputation, remarking late in life that she had begun as Zola and ended as Miss Yonge. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit
A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match …
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A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, the key in her pocket. But the almanack on the mantelpiece read the 21st of October. And it was May. --- *"The Mystery of the Semi-Detached"* was first published in Edith Nesbit's collection *Grim Tales* in 1893. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is best remembered today as the author of *The Railway Children* and *Five Children and It*, but she was also a prolific and accomplished writer of supernatural fiction, whose ghost stories combine suburban ordinariness with genuine dread to unsettling effect. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens
A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page …
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A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count his fellow jurymen, there there should be twelve, he counts thirteen... Dickens wrote this story with a title that is itself a warning. Whether you take that warning as a comment on the narrator, on the law, or on the nature of what follows, is a question the story leaves carefully unanswered. *"To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt"* was first published in the Christmas 1865 edition of *All the Year Round*, Dickens's own literary journal, as part of a collection entitled *Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions*. It was later republished under the titles *The Trial for Murder* and *The Thirteenth Man*. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Portsmouth and is widely regarded as the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era. He was also one of the finest writers of ghost stories in the language, and this story was considered the definitive English ghost story for decades, before M.R. James arrived to claim that title. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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A Walk in the Park by William Bundy
There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window …
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There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the moonlight, patient as stone, returning with every full moon whether it is wanted or not. William Bundy's *A Walk in the Park* is a story about inheritance — the kind you don't choose. *A Walk in the Park* is published on William Bundy's Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, where you'll find more of his writing in the same vein. William Bundy is a UK-based writer of dark and supernatural fiction whose work spans short stories, essays, and film. Find his writing at www.williambundy.com, Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, his film work on Instagram at www.instagram.com/redsaidfilms, and all his links gathered in one place at www.linktr.ee/williambundy. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To. buy my paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan
A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear …
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A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that won't start. He does what anyone would do. He helps. He offers whisky. He thinks nothing of it. But there is something not quite right about her. Something in the way she watches the road behind her. Something in the way she keeps to the shadows. "My Adventure in Norfolk" by A.J. Alan, first collected in Good Evening, Everyone!, published by Hutchinson in 1928. The story was originally broadcast live on the BBC in the mid-1920s. A.J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert, a senior intelligence officer who worked at Bletchley Park and served as Vice-President of the Magic Circle. He broadcast only a handful of stories each year and never revealed his true identity to the public during his lifetime. The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder
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The Moon Bog by H P Lovecraft
There is a bog in County Meath that the old people will not speak of after dark. They know, as old people in such places always know, that certain ground is not waste ground simply because nothing grows on it …
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There is a bog in County Meath that the old people will not speak of after dark. They know, as old people in such places always know, that certain ground is not waste ground simply because nothing grows on it, that still water is not empty water, and that when a man of money and modern confidence arrives to improve what does not wish to be improved, the wisest thing to do is quietly leave.
H. P. Lovecraft wrote "The Moon-Bog" in 1921, and it was first published in Weird Tales magazine in 1926. It was written to be told aloud, after dinner, when the fire was low.
Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890 and died there in 1937, in poverty and near obscurity. He is now regarded as one of the most influential writers of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.
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The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield
This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post. In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss …
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This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post.
In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a long line, watches her companion, Amelia, wither into a gaunt and listless shadow.
Amelia is the sixth companion; three before her never left these walls alive. Amidst the rattle of mountain rain, thin, high screams echo through the stone-vaulted halls. Is it the onset of madness, or is the house reclaiming a brutal, hidden history? As the light fades, the only certainty is the tightening grip of a terror that will have its say.
The Triumph of Death first appeared in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949.
It was later collected in Strayers from Sheol (1961) and The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield (1978).
H. Russell Wakefield (1888--1964) was an English writer best known for his unsettling ghost stories.
Drawing on clerical, military, and publishing-world experience, he brought a sharp psychological edge to the classic British supernatural tale.
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The Death Mask by H D Everett
Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in return. There is nothing unusual in that …
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Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in return. There is nothing unusual in that either. What is unusual is what keeps happening to the white linen.
His first wife Gloriana has been dead for four years. She asked only one thing of him before she died — a small, strange, domestic request — and he honoured it. He made no promises. He is bound by nothing. And yet.
H. D. Everett's "The Death Mask" is a ghost story about what we owe the dead, and about the debts that accumulate, unnoticed, in the ordinary fabric of a marriage. The fabric, in this case, is quite literal.
---
"The Death Mask" was first published in 1920 as the title story of *The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts* (London: Philip Allan, Quality Court, Chancery Lane), issued under the name Mrs. H. D. Everett.
Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was an English writer of supernatural fiction and historical novels who published her first book at the age of forty-four under the male pseudonym Theo Douglas, and whose ghost stories drew admiring notice from both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft.
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