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Classic Ghost Stories: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Tony Walker
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.
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- 1 weeks ago1h 14m
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 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 2 weeks ago1h 27m
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 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
- 3 weeks ago1h 26m
All Souls by Edith Wharton
We call it Halloween. Its older name is All Souls' Eve — a night in the old calendar when the membrane between the living and the dead grows thin. Edith Wharton knew this night well. Every All Souls' Eve she sat alone by the fire and named her dead, one by one, until the room felt less empty. In her last story, written six months before her own death, she imagined what that night might look like from the other side. A woman alone in a large house. The servants gone. The telephone silent. The snow piling up outside. And somewhere in the lane, a figure who should not be there. "All Souls'" is not quite a ghost story. It is something quieter, and harder to shake. "All Souls'" was first published in Ghosts (D. Appleton-Century Company, New York, 1937), the only story in that collection to have had no prior magazine publication. It was Wharton's last completed work of fiction. Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She remains one of the finest practitioners of the ghost story in the American tradition. Ad Free Stories! Become A Patreon ! https://patreon.com/barcud
- Oct 1, 20261h 32m
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 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
- Sep 24, 20261h 5m
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, 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
- Sep 18, 20261h 7m
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 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
- Sep 11, 202647 min
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 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
- Sep 4, 20261h 52m
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 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Lot 249
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About 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.
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