Classic Ghost Stories
Classic Ghost Stories is a weekly podcast that reads aloud ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales, drawing mainly from classic authors of the Victorian, Edwardian, and 20th-century weird fiction eras. Episodes feature works by writers such as M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton-Smith, ranging from cosy supernatural tales to darker, Gothic and literary oddities. After each story, host Tony Walker offers his own commentary on the tale, its author, and its literary context, making the show potentially useful for students or enthusiasts of classic horror literature.
Episodes
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 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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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 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 g
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 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
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 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 ol
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 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
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 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 Easter
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 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, delig
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, 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 real
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 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 Pr
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 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
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 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 wha
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 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
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 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 t
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 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 blac
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 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
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 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 Ridde
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 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 c
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.
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.
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. 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
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. 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 in
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 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 i
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, 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.
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 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 a
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 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, stran
Lost Hearts by M R James
Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936)
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There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable.
M. R. Jame
Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes
On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade p
A Bottle of Perrier by Edith Wharton
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A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on in ways that are difficult to explain.
Edith Wharton set this story not in her usual territory of N
For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford
The moon lifts off the water and climbs the sky over Calabria.
Two men sit on the stones of an old tower above the coast, sipping the local wine, basking in the warm dark. Below them, where the rock runs down toward the sea, there is a mound in the earth.
One of them notices something in the gorge far below. He descends to look. The other sits, and watches, and says nothing.
When the first man
The Thing Invisible by W H Hodgson
In an old private chapel attached to a country house, a trusted servant keeps night watch beside the ancient altar, alone behind a locked door. By morning he is found dead, a dagger from the chapel’s peculiar mechanism driven clean through his heart—though no human hand should have been able to strike the blow. No tracks, no witnesses, only the oppressive sense that something in that dim, little s
A Recluse by Walter de la Mare
There is a house at the end of a lane. You have seen it before — or something like it. Palladian, still, its pale stone holding the last of the May light as if reluctant to let the evening come. The chestnut trees stand tall around it. The air is warm and gold and very quiet.
Charles Dash stops his car. He is trespassing, he knows, but the house is empty, surely? And it is such a beautiful house.
The Bat by Bela Lugosi
Link to Audio version
“The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural world and half in something older and less defined. The piece is more mood than story: a sequence of
The Bat by Bela Lugosi
Link to Audio version
“The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural world and half in something older and less defined. The piece is more mood than story: a sequence of
The Terror of Blue John Gap by Arthur Conan Doyle
A young doctor, recovering from illness, is sent to the Derbyshire hills for his health. He takes lodgings at a remote farm, where he notices the family's reluctance to discuss the valley below. There's a Roman mine nearby that no one acknowledges, and a particular opening in the earth that unsettles him.
His diary records what starts as mild interest in local folklore. But as he explores the min
And No Bird Sings by E F Benson
A man takes a sunlit shortcut through an English wood and finds that something is missing. There is no thrush, and no blackbird, and no rustle of wings – only a strange dimming of the light, and a silence that feels willed, and watchful, and almost hungry. At his friend's house the dogs will not cross the tree-line, and they bare their teeth at empty air. In the evenings, that grey band of trees s
Mezengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe
Two noble houses. Centuries of hatred. A prophecy that may mean nothing—or everything.
In medieval Hungary, the young Baron Metzengerstein encounters a horse—gigantic, fiery-colored, unlike any creature in his stables.
He rides it obsessively. Dawn and midnight. Sickness and health. Riveted to the saddle as if becoming one with the creature.
It performs impossible feats. The servants whisper of
An Encounter in the Mist by A N L Munby
A solitary man, lost in the Welsh hills, stumbles through thick mist—his only companion a mounting sense of unease. The landscape is indifferent; the path vanishes; every familiar landmark dissolves into obscurity. Rescue appears in the form of an enigmatic stranger, whose kindness feels both matter-of-fact and unsettling. A map changes hands, but the mist has a memory longer than any traveller’s,
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by M R James
A mediaeval abbot leaves behind a cipher—not in his will, but scratched into the glass of his own church. The treasure it guards has lain undisturbed for centuries. Mr. Somerton, a scholar with a taste for puzzles, believes he can solve what others have missed. The Latin is difficult, the clues are scattered, but gold is gold, and curiosity has its own momentum. What waits beneath the stone was pu
The Occupant of the Room by Algernon Blackwood
A schoolmaster arrives late at night in a remote Alpine village. The inn has no rooms. Then suddenly—there is one. A room that's occupied, yet empty. A room whose previous tenant, an Englishwoman, left two days before and hasn't returned.
As he unpacks his few belongings, the atmosphere begins to press in. Something lingers here—in the faded flowers by the washstand, in the air itself. And when
Cwm Garon by L T C Rolt
Sponsored by the generosity of Gavin Critchley. Thanks, Gavin!
The valley of Cwm Garon is a place of ancient ruins and emerald meadows, tucked deep within the Welsh Borderland. When John Carfax first arrives, it seems a sanctuary, far from the grime of the city. But the stillness here is deceptive; it is a silence that watches. As the mountain shadows lengthen, the beauty of the landscape begins
The Playfellow by Lady Cynthia Asquith
Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the fire that claimed a child's life twelve years ago. For Claude Halyard, it is an earthly paradise reclaimed. For his wife Laura, it is a home that seems to cast a spell—lovely, peaceful, and somehow waiting.
Their daughter Hyacinth finds the old d
The Skeleton Count or The Vampire Mistress by Elizabeth Grey
Let's go Gothick. Get your pitchfork. Get your burning brand. We're off to the castle to see the count.
The Skeleton Count; or, The Vampire Mistress
In the shadowed corridors of a remote castle, Count Rodolph has made a bargain that no mortal should contemplate. The price of eternal life is high, and the methods by which it is secured are terrible beyond imagining.
When the corpse of the beauti
A Message for Julia by R A Sunter
Jean-Pierre Ducharme and Ms. Esmeralda Spinoza are experts in the delicate architecture of the séance.
Inside the stillness of Julia Silverman’s game room, they prepare to reach across the divide for a daughter lost four months prior. It is a space of flickering candles, soft whispers, and the heavy weight of a mother’s grief.
But as the circle joins hands, the atmosphere begins to curdle. The
The Frost Fair by Tony Walker
One of my own stories. The River Thames freezes and a Frost Fair is held for the first time since 1814. Two friends meet for a pint of Dark Ale in the ancient London riverside pub, the Water Witch. What could go wrong?
If you've never listened to one of my stories, give this one a try. Many people find them splendid.
The Demon King by J B Priestley
It's Boxing Night in Bruddersford and the pantomime's a disaster waiting to happen. The company's second-rate, the theatre's half empty, and the actor playing the Demon King hasn't turned up. Then he does—and suddenly everything changes. The performance takes on an authority it never had in rehearsal. The comedy gets sharper, the villain more convincing, and by the end something has happened that
Boxing Night by E F Benson
On Christmas Day, two sisters in a remote farmhouse in the middle of the Romney Marshes, have a dream. The snow begins to fall heavily and they are isolated miles away from any help. But a dream is just a dream, isn't it?
Written by E F Benson
Why not try my cost free, ad free new Ghost Stories Radio? Listen to it here: www.gravenheim.com
Lucky's Grove by H Russell Wakefield
Teaser Script
Christmas at Abingdale Hall. The great house decked in festive greenery, servants bustling, family gathering from across the country. And in the entrance hall, a magnificent Scots Pine—ten feet of perfect symmetry, branches heavy with the promise of celebration.
But the tree came from Lucky's Grove.
The estate manager is new. He doesn't know the local warnings. He doesn't know tha
The Man Who Came Back by Margery Lawrence
Christmas at Colonel and Lady Garrison’s house is all warmth, laughter, and parlour games, until the evening’s “entertainment” arrives: a small, shabby medium with disconcertingly sharp eyes.
The guests settle round the table for an amusing bit of spiritualism. As the lights dim and the control takes over, the party games curdle into something closer to an inquest, and the most unwelcome of visit
The Four-Fifteen Express by Amelia B. Edwards
The Four-Fifteen Express, a Christmas Ghost Story by Amelia B. Edwards
A fantastic story by the very competent Victorian writer, Amelia B. Edwards. This story was published in the 1866 Christmas number of Charles Dickens's magazine All The Year Round. It's set against the railway investment bubble of the 1860s and has a ghost, a mystery, a crime and a cigar case. What more could you want?
I need
The Doll's Ghost by F. Marion Crawford
A dollmaker works late into the evening to repair a broken doll. Outside, London's fog presses against the windows. Inside, in the dim workshop light, something moves among the shelves—something that shouldn't move at all.
"The Doll's Ghost" first appeared in The Undesired Princess collection (1897), later included in Wandering Ghosts (1911).
F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909): American novelist re
The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson
In Ireland, a newly purchased castle unsettles its American owner. He is wealthy, engaged to a local woman, and certain that jealous countrymen mean him harm. What truly threatens the household is a particular room that fills at night with a dangerous, sustained whistling that rises and falls like breath. Doors quiver; servants keep away. Carnacki is summoned with his lamps, his electric scepticis
A Haunted House by Charles Dickens
A neglected Georgian house, shutters still, poplars trees surround it, whispering. Downstairs is a row of servant bells to call servants. One has a mysterious name and is reputed to ring when no one is there. Rumour speaks of a hooded figure and an owl; the corridors mutter with sounds of pipes, disconnected wires, and something harder to dismiss. By night, faces seem to change in the mirror; but
Hawley Bank Foundry by L T C Rolt
Beneath the soot and iron of England’s industrial heart, a foundry lies silent. Its furnaces once roared for empire, but the men are gone, the machinery rusted, the sand floor undisturbed. When war comes and the living return to wake it, something else stirs too—something that remembers.In the stillness of metal and dust, the past is waiting to be poured once more.
“Hawley Bank Foundry” was first
The Dunwich Horror by H P Lovecraft
A remote New England village. Dark rumours swirl among its lonely hills. Whispers of strange rites, of a family line touched by shadows, haunt the woods and starlit nights. Something stirs where the old stones lie, and the boundary between the known and the unseen begins to thin. In my Halloween tradition, the tale chosen is “The Dunwich Horror”—a story rich in mystery, and alive with Lovecraft’s
Twilight by Marjorie Bowen
Twilight opens in a garden where beauty wears a mask to protect it from the years, and twilight brings regrets and confessions. A young courtier stumbles upon a Duchess at dusk—painted, jewelled, and demanding. She wants him to be her father confessor, but what does Lucrezia Borgia want to confess and why does he run away?
My first video podcast on Spotify...
Publication: First published in Go
Halloween Dark Ale by Tony Walker
A northern lad takes a cheap room above a Wapping pub in ’87, where the Thames presses at the windows like weather. He wants to be a journalist not a barman, but he needs the money... He learns. that the cellar has secrets and that the beer is popular. Especially the Thames Halloween Dark Ale.
I've made this members only story for November available to everbody as it's the Halloween one. Hope m
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
A man stands on a railway bridge. Orders pass along the line; the river says nothing. A watch ticks, a breath stalls, and time begins to misbehave. Memory intrudes, desire bargains, and the world narrows to rope, water, distance. No fanfare; only procedure—and a mind trying to outrun it. Follow the story to its far edge.
First published in 1890; collected in *Tales of Soldiers and Civilians* (1
Phantom Silhouette by Joy Burnett
A lonely farmhouse stands in a hollow of the hills—its windows dark, its doors long locked, and a story clinging to it that no one in the valley will tell aloud. When a sceptical visitor decides to spend the night within, he discovers that silence itself can harbour memory, and that the past, once woken, does not easily return to sleep. Phantom Silhouette is a tale of curiosity meeting what endure
Bad Company be Walter de la Mare
In a dim Underground carriage, a weary traveller meets a stranger whose silent presence unsettles more deeply than words can tell. Walter de la Mare’s Bad Company is a tale where dread arises not from what happens, but from what might.
Bad Company was first published in Walter de la Mare’s final collection, A Beginning and Other Stories (1955).
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet,
Cushi by Christopher Woodforde
# Cushi - Teaser Script
In the chalk hills of Hertfordshire lies Rooksgate Green, where tradition runs deeper than any rector's authority. Here, the sexton Cushi Holloway has his own peculiar ways—with hymn numbers, with cats, with the rituals of the churchyard.
When the Reverend David Evans arrives from Cardiff, he sees only quaint village customs that need reforming. But some traditions ha
Hand in Glove by Elizabeth Bowen
In a fading Irish house, two sisters live with their reclusive aunt. Outwardly clever, even charming, they are burdened by secrecy, shabby finery, and a restless need to keep appearances intact. What follows is a tale of genteel decay, of objects that carry more weight than they should, and of a past that refuses to stay silent.
“Hand in Glove” first appeared in 1952 and has since been recognis
Et Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams
Et in Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams
Lord Arglay, retired Chief Justice and seeker of forgotten knowledge, sets out for a quiet scholarly errand in the English countryside—only to find the landscape subtly warped, time grown strangely dense, and a chimney smoking where no fire burns. Drawn by a narrow path to a door that seems to wait for him alone, he enters a place where memory thick
The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke
A man walks the London streets, thin as a shadow, his eyes open but unseeing. He has no destination, yet something leads him — as if by an unseen hand — to a quiet room where the ordinary will no longer hold. What follows is not terror in the usual sense, but a slow unravelling, as if the familiar fabric of life has been touched by something that should have remained at rest.
The Hollow Man by Th
A Visitor from Down Under by L. P. Hartley
On a wet and foggy evening in post-war London, a man arrives at a modest hotel carrying the calm assurance of wealth and distance. But something else arrives that night too—quietly, without fuss, with a newspaper clipping and a request for a room. In the lounge, the sounds of unseen children drift through the walls. In his sleep, the man dreams of trees and dead branches. And outside, the fog thic
Old Man's Beard by H. Russell Wakefield
At Brinton-on-Sea, the summer passed in gentle rhythms. Mariella and her young fiancé read side by side on the beach, swam together in the quiet sea, while her parents looked on from their chairs. Nothing seemed amiss. But something was. She said nothing, yet her smiles grew thinner, her sleep unsettled. Her eyes lingered too long on nothing at all. And in the evenings, the air inside the house fe
The Little Ghost by Hugh Walpole
In an old house by the Glebeshire coast, silence lingers more heavily than the sound of the sea. Its walls hold an atmosphere of watchfulness, as though the house itself remembers lives once lived within it. To a grieving visitor, it offers not terror but something stranger, something that cannot easily be explained.
“The Little Ghost” by Hugh Walpole was first published in When Churchyards Yawn
The Victim by May Sinclair
Steven Acroyd is a jealous man—jealous, and prone to sudden, violent anger. He works in a remote country house under the quiet rule of an elderly master, brooding, watching, waiting. One night, he listens at a window and hears something about his fiancée that pushes him too far. He does something terrible, then tries to get away with it. Some ghosts come bearing messages, but this one brings a str
The Monolith by Tony Walker
A narrowboat moors in Eastwick, a village cut off by time and road. Among its postcards and memories stands an ancient stone — and in every image, a shadow that should not be there. When George Middleton takes his own photograph, the shadow moves closer.
This is one of my own stories — and this time, I’m out to scare you. Let’s see if I manage to.
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The True Story of Anthony Ffryar by Arthur Gray
A scholar remains behind as pestilence silences the college. The gates are locked, the chapel dim, and a single window glows with the light of something unfinished. In the stillness of old stone, a man pursues his solitary work—methodical, precise, and unknowable. What follows is not a tale of horror in the usual sense, but something quieter, older, and threaded with the weight of ritual. Memory l
How Pan Came to Little Ingleton by Margery Lawrence
One summer Sunday in a quiet English village, something is missing—though no one can quite say what. The air hangs thick with heat, the hedgerows whisper, and down by the river, a tune drifts faintly on the breeze. As the hours pass, unease gathers like storm-clouds, though the sky remains clear. By evening, everything will be just as it was. Almost.
“How Pan Came to Little Ingleton” was first pu
Rose Rose by Barry Pain
She was flawless. A model of grace and stillness, prized by every artist who worked with her. But beneath the surface of the painter’s studio—amid the heat, the charcoal dust, and the careful posing—something else lingered.
“Rose Rose” by Barry Pain was first published in Stories in Grey (T. Werner Laurie, 1911). It is now in the public domain.
Barry Eric Odell Pain (1864–1928) was a British hum
The Clock by W F Harvey
A letter arrives—calm in tone, almost conversational. But beneath its surface, something unsettles. A favour once done, a house long locked, a memory that won’t quite settle. There are impressions that can’t be explained, and a sense—quiet, persistent—that something was not as it should have been.
The Clock first appeared in W. F. Harvey’s 1928 collection The Beast with Five Fingers, published by
The Lost Ghost (1903) by Mary E Wilkins
A quiet conversation between two women over tea. A rented house. A memory long buried. In *The Lost Ghost*, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers no gothic castles or howling winds—only the hush of a parlour, the rustle of a child’s dress, and a voice repeating the same, simple question. It is not horror that lingers here, but something colder, something closer. A presence that never left.
*The Lost G
Squire Toby's Will by J S Le Fanu
Seen from a passing stagecoach, you might think that Gylingden Hall is not the sort of place where the dead rest easily. The chimneys are cold, the gallery echoes with no human tread, and the great trees that line the avenue whisper of old wrongs and buried fury. In the shadow of the ruined chapel and beneath the rot-black timbers of the house, something lingers—a grief curdled into malice, a lega
The Confession of Charles Linkworth by E F Benson
A man waits in silence. The law has spoken, the doctors have done their work. But something does not rest. In the quiet rooms and corridors of the prison, a sound is heard—faint, deliberate, and not easily explained. What follows is noted calmly, professionally. Still, it leaves a mark.
*The Confession of Charles Linkworth* was first published in 1912 in *The Room in the Tower and Other Stories*
Members Only Episode July 2025
In the Members Only podcast episode of the Classic Ghost Stories podcast for July 2025, I spent a lot of time apologising for being late in delivering the Members Only episode to you this month.
I then talk about my Uncanny Mirror project, which I'm sure many of you will find very interesting.
I then talk a bit about our holiday in Scotland.
I read from a book called Hungry Gh
The Friends of the Friends by Henry James
What do we see in others that we cannot admit in ourselves? In Henry James's haunting tale, a woman recounts her fascination with two people who have each witnessed a ghost. She delays their meeting for years, caught between longing and fear, until it is too late. Names are withheld, but emotions are not. Beneath the surface of polite society, something older stirs—jealousy, desire, and the quiet
The Tapestried Chamber by Sir Walter Scott
General Browne, a soldier hardened by war and governed by reason, accepts an invitation to the castle of his old school-friend, Lord Woodville. The place has only lately been inherited and is undergoing tasteful restoration, its mediaeval past slowly yielding to Georgian elegance. But not all traces of the past have been swept away.
One chamber remains veiled in its former splendour—its faded tap
The Squire's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell
In the year 1795, in the secluded Derbyshire town of Barford, a stranger settles into the old White House. He renovates it handsomely, pays every bill on time, and quickly wins the friendship of the local squire and his daughter. Among the hunting gentry, he seems to fit right in.
But this is a story of the hunting gentry—and the secrets they don’t know, and the things people do when no one is lo
The Roll-Call of the Reef by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
A gale howls in from the sea as a traveller takes shelter with a smallholder on the Cornish coast. Above the hearth hang two relics: an old cavalry trumpet and a weathered drum, bound together with a brass-lettered lock. No one knows the word that opens it. As the fire burns low, the smallholder begins to tell a tale—half history, half haunting—of shipwrecks, silence, and the names that must still
The Symposium of the Gorgon by Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith's "Symposium of the Gorgon," a masterful blend of satire and fantasy, made its debut in _Fantastic Universe Science Fiction_ in October 1958. Published relatively late in Smith's career, the story showcases his enduring talent for crafting bizarre and imaginative narratives, even as his output had begun to wane. The appearance in _Fantastic Universe_ introduced this darkly humor
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