Classic Ghost Stories
A weekly fiction podcast bringing you classic ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales in audio form. Most episodes feature classic stories from the masters of the supernatural: cosy Edwardian ghost stories (E. F. Benson, Walter de la Mare), Victorian supernatural mysteries (M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens), and 20th‑century Weird Tales (Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft), wandering from the Gothic to the Odd, even to the Literary, and back again. Occasionally, we feature living authors – but the majority are dead. Some, perhaps, are undead. Each story is followed by Tony’s commentary on the tale, its author, themes, and literary context – which can be especially useful for students and anyone curious about the history of ghost stories.
Episodes
June 1, 2019 • 1 min
Download Charles Dickens The Signalman Free Mp3 https://bit.ly/dickenssignalman (Subscribe to our list and keep in touch with the podcast. Learn of new episodes and bonus Content. )Support our work PLUS you get a free story right now!(The Story Link is in the Thank You Email)Show Your Support With A Coffee!https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (Buy the thirsty podcaster a coffee...)Final Request: The SurveyI want to know what you ...
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September 14, 2019 • 39 mins
https://tonywalker.substack.com/about (Subscribe For All Episodes!)Charlotte Perkins Gilman, nee Charlotte Perkins, was born in 1860 in Hartford, Conneticut. Sadly, she committed suicide in 1935 in Pasadena California. Her father’s family was relatively well connected, but her father left the family when she was young, leaving her mother to bring up the two children. Her mother was forced to move around a lot to find work and...
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September 16, 2019 • 28 mins
Edward Frederic Benson was born in 1867 at Wellington College in Berkshire, England and died in 1940 in London of throat cancer aged 73. Benson’s father was E W Benson who was Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest office in the Anglican Church and the Anglican version of the Pope! His father had been bishop of Truro in Cornwall and Benson sets some of his horror stories in Cornwall.Benson’s elder brother wrote the ...
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September 16, 2019 • 44 mins
M R James is known as the father of the English ghost story. He wasn’t the first to write ghost stories, but he was the finest of his generation whose work continues to be published and re-presented as TV shows and radio plays.He was born in 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent. His father was a clergyman and was rector of Livermere in Suffolk. East Anglia features as the setting of many of M R James’s stories. James’...
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September 22, 2019 • 53 mins
Edith Wharton, nee Jones, (born New York 1862, died aged 75 in France) was a famous American novelist. Her nickname interestingly was Pussy Jones. She was very high society and was a debutante and socialite. She was also a very good writer.Wharton wrote best-sellers such as The Age of Innocence, which won the 1921 Pulitzer prize, and Ethan Frome. She also wrote short stories, and among those short stories were several ghost stories...
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September 23, 2019 • 15 mins
August HeatW F Harvey was a Yorkshireman, born in 1885 and died in 1937. He was a Quaker and suffered from ill health all his life. He joined an ambulance unit in the First World War but then went to work as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He actually won a medal for saving lives but suffered from lung trouble the rest of his life from that rescue, though that didn’t stop him smoking a pipe.He published his first coll...
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September 26, 2019 • 68 mins
Charlotte Riddell was born in 1832 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. After she married she moved to London where she lived most of her life and died in Ashford in Kent in 1906. Riddell was a very prolific novelist and well known in the Victorian period. She actually owned and ran a Literary Magazine in the second half of the 19th Century. The Open Door is considered a classic Victorian ghost story and it reminds me of some o...
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October 4, 2019 • 34 mins
Edith NesbitEdith Nesbit was an English novelist born in 1858 in Kennington, which was then Surrey and is now part of London. She died in 1924 in the next county from where she was born.Nesbit is most famous for her children’s books and her most famous work The Railway Children is well beloved. I loved her Five Children and It stories which I read in a Victorian house all decked out for Christmas one year. That was splendid a...
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October 5, 2019 • 29 mins
Ambrose Bierce was a prominent American author in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He is most famous for his Devil’s Dictionary. He served in the Union Army in the American Civil War and his military experience forms the background of many of his stories.He was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. His ancestors were English puritans. By trade he began as a printer and he was later a journalist. He was a ...
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October 11, 2019 • 36 mins
Amelia Edwards was born in 1831 in London, England. As such she is one of the oldest writers we’ve read so far in this podcast. She died aged only 60 in Weston Supermare, a seaside resort in the west of England.She came from a wealthy background and didn’t have to work, but she was a very successful writer based on her own talents.She was in fact a very talented woman and had the potential to be a professional artist th...
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October 16, 2019 • 24 mins
#Ray Bradbury# Is the most modern author we’ve read so far in the #Classic Ghost Story# podcast. He was born in Illinois in 1920 and died in 2012 in Los Angeles.His most famous book is Fahrenheit 451 which he wrote as a young man in 1953. This story is set in a Dystopian future where books are burned and the fireman set any alight they find. The title is due to the temperature at which paper will catch fire.Bradbury hint...
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October 18, 2019 • 27 mins
The Monkey’s Paw was written by an English author W W Jacobs and published in 1902 in his collection The Lady of the Barge. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw (The Monkey's Paw)""The Lady of the Barge""Bill's Paper Chase""The Well""Cupboard Love""In the Library""Captain Rogers""A Tiger's Skin""A Mixed Proposal""An Adulteration Act""A Golden Venture""Three at Table"The Monkey's Paw is the only one to have s...
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October 25, 2019 • 19 mins
#Edgar Allen Poe#Needs no real introduction. He was in some senses the man who began the horror genre. There had been Gothic fiction before but Poe made it macabre and strange. I see some influences or commonalities between him and the French poet Baudelaire with his Flowers of Evil, or the French novelist J K Huysman’s with his studies of Satanism and Decandence. The insanity in Poe is also matched in the Austrian writer Gus...
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October 31, 2019 • 17 mins
Consistently rated as one of top scary stories ever...#Marghanita Laski# was an English journalist and author, born in Manchester to a family of Jewish intellectuals. She herself was an atheist and an advocate of nuclear disarmament. She was very intelligent and went to Oxford. She died in 1988 aged 67. She later lived in London at Hampstead (where I’d like to live if I lived in London: the home of psyc...
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November 2, 2019 • 71 mins
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuJ S Le Fanu was born in Dublin to a family of mixed descent. His father’s line were French Huguenots hence the French surname. Like many horror and ghost story writers his father was actually a clergyman. He studied law as his career at Trinity College Dublin. He didn't actually live in Dublin at the time but you could do a kind of distance learning. He became editor of a literary magazine at this time....
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November 9, 2019 • 43 mins
I won't say much about Le Fanu. This is Part 2 of Carmilla after all.Download Charles Dickens The Signalman Free Mp3 https://bit.ly/dickenssignalman (Subscribe to our list and keep in touch with the podcast. Learn of new episodes and bonus Content. )Support our work PLUS you get a free story right now!(The Story Link is in the Thank You Email)Show Your Support With A Coffee!https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (Buy the thirsty po...
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November 13, 2019 • 56 mins
Carmilla Part 3Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Ireland in 1814. He was highly regarded both in his time and afterwards as a master of the ghost story genre. He wrote many wonderful stories, but here we focus on his vampire story Carmilla. I think it's very interesting and a little amusing, that Joseph's father -- in common with many writers of ghost stories as it happens -- was a strict Protestant churchman. I ...
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November 16, 2019 • 47 mins
Russell Kirk was born in 1918 in Plymouth, Michigan to a relatively modest family. He died in 1994, but between birth and death, he became arguably the foremost American theorist on Conservatism in his time. He wrote lots of books on political theory, but he also wrote ghost stories. I have a copy of his collection Ancestral Shadows. Kirk spent time in Scotland as a student at St Andrews and with a name like Kirk, he had some Scott...
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November 23, 2019 • 52 mins
This story was written by Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell was born in 1810 in London and died aged only 55 in 1865 in Hampshire. She was an accomplished novelist and with many successful novels in her time, but we are most interested in her ghost stories.She is one of the earliest writers that we have featured and I think you can tell that in the writing which seems a little archaic at times. An Old Nurse’s Story w...
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November 30, 2019 • 24 mins
Hugh Walpole was an English novelist born in New Zealand in 1884 and died in June 1941. His father was a clergyman and he was intended originally for a career as a clergyman but he preferred writing and wrote his first novel in 1909. He was a prolific writer and wrote a novel a year. In common with many writers of ghost stories he was actually gay. He ended up living in the English Lake District not far from where I am now. A...
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