The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

A weekly podcast that reads out ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales every week. Classic stories from the pens of the masters Occasionally, we feature living authors, but the majority are dead. Some perhaps are undead. We go from cosy Edwardian ghost stories (E. F. Benson, Walter De La Mare) to Victorian supernatural mysteries (M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and Charles Dickens) to 20th-century Weird Tales (Robert Aickman, Fritz Lieber, Clark Ashton-Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft) and wander from the Gothic to the Odd, even to the Literary, and then back again. Each episode is followed by Tony's take on the story, its author, its content and any literary considerations, which may be useful to students! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support.

Episodes

Gabriel Ernest Episode by Saki

June 1, 2026 • 27 mins
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...
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The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

May 29, 2026 • 69 mins
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 sp...
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The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

May 24, 2026 • 9 mins
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 ...
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To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens

May 15, 2026 • 30 mins
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. Whet...
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A Walk In The Park by William Bundy

May 14, 2026 • 65 mins
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 inhe...
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My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

May 8, 2026 • 43 mins
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 he...
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The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield

April 30, 2026 • 37 mins
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...
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The Death Mask by H D Everett

April 17, 2026 • 63 mins
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 honou...
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Lost Hearts by M R James

April 15, 2026 • 51 mins
Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936) Join my patreon: https://patreon.com/barcud 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. James wrote this story in 1895. His eru...
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Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

April 8, 2026 • 46 mins
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 places, and the question of who is w...
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A Bottle of Perrier by Edith Wharton

April 2, 2026 • 77 mins
Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal 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 New York drawing rooms, but somewher...
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For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford

March 26, 2026 • 57 mins
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 climbs back up, his companion turns...
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The Thing Invisible by W H Hodgson

March 20, 2026 • 60 mins
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 sanctuary has moved unseen. As Thoma...
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A Recluse by Walter de la Mare

March 13, 2026 • 115 mins
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. Worth seeing, if only for a few mi...
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The Bat by Bela Lugosi

March 10, 2026 • 11 mins
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 images about darkness, wings, and u...
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The Bat by Bela Lugosi

March 10, 2026 • 11 mins
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 images about darkness, wings, and u...
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The Terror of Blue John Gap by Arthur Conan Doyle

March 6, 2026 • 81 mins
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 mine workings beneath the Blue John ca...
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And No Bird Sings by E F Benson

February 27, 2026 • 54 mins
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 seems to lie under a shadow that fal...
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Mezengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe

February 20, 2026 • 50 mins
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 things they cannot explain. Some ...
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An Encounter in the Mist by A N L Munby

February 16, 2026 • 41 mins
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, and the hills have their own way o...
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