Classic Ghost Stories

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S0306 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Chapters 4-6 Feb 11, 2022

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Here's another hour of Dorian Gray in which Dorian is very excited, Lord Harry is languid, Basil the Painter disapproves, Sibyl Vane is ecstatic, her mother ashamed and her brother cross.Get a pencil and paper. You will want to write down some of Lord Harry's wisdom to deploy yourself when you're speaking to your neighbours.Support the show

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S0305 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Chapters 1-3) Feb 04, 2022

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The beautiful story of a beautiful man living a beautiful life that starts in a beautiful garden and ends this week at a rather splendid lunch with a duchess and a few lesser nobles not giving a fig for the lower orders but enjoying themselves immensely. Beautifully witty and beautifully camp. I hope you enjoy it.This is the first part of Oscar Wilde's famous novel. It has chapters 1-3. Nuff said.Support the show

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S0304 Beyond The Door by J. Paul Suter Jan 28, 2022

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Beyond the Door is a story of a haunting. A man is haunted by visions of something coming out of the well in his cellar and by the scratching sounds in the passages of his old house.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In here you could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Beyond The Door by J. Paul SuterThis story was recommended by Terry Illikainen and this version was from Weird Tales volume 01 number 02, 1923-4.Jospeh Paul Suter wrote pulp tales during the early to middle part of the 20th Century for the magazines that specialised in genre fiction. He wrote mystery, detective, and supernatural stories. He was prolific and had more than two hundred stories published in these magazine.He was an American author born in 1884 who died in 1970. And that’s about all I can find about him.Beyond the DoorIt seems to me that Beyond The Door is one of those stories that leaves it up in the air whether the narrator is insane or haunted. In this it is like The Yellow Wallpaper or The Horla or The Beckoning Fair One. It’s a common sub-type of the ghost story genre. My feeling is that this eccentric driven, bookish man who is focused on his interests in the scientific study of insects cannot tolerate deviation from his routine. He sees the love interest of his Australian lady as a threat to his work, and the anxiety thus provoked drives him to hill her and throw her down the well.If I was meeting him today, I would probably think he had Asperger’s Syndrome and that he couldn’t remember his murder due to dissociation. Clues to the fact it’s a murder not a haunting are that he keeps having visions of a dog and he comments how she nuzzled his hand like a dog. No one else sees or hears anything supernatural, though the freaky house decorated with bugs dose unsettle them. The body is bruised again supporting the coroner’s theory that the stone slab of the well came down on him when his guilt just wouldn’t let him leave the crime scene alone. The coroner’s theory that the slab somehow paralysed him is a nasty end for anyone. Apparently the stone caused an injury that left him paralysed for two days, head down the well and thus he died. He screamed, but no one heard.Suter wrote a whole bunch of crime thrillers, so perhaps he preferred a criminal to a supernatural explanation in this story too.Although listening it again, it seems that the girl killed herself, but then entomologist blamed himself for her death because he had refused to marry her. I don’t think it’s his fault. He apparently covers her up with dirt at the bottom of the well. Out of guilt? The coroner talks about people rarely being punished accurately for his sins, though the entomologist was.I still think it’s a lot to blame him for her suicide. Ghosts however are often the agents or retribution and the paying out of sins. So even if this is a ghost that only appears mentally, it still has the same role. Not supernatural retribution but some psychological expression of karma. As well as the pulp genre, this story reminds me strongly of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly The Tell-Tale Heart, where the subconscious pressure of a crime won’t let the criminal rest until a confession comes out.It is told as is very common in older stories through a frame: we don’t hear the protagonist themselves, but have the story related through a witness or documents. This is much less fashionable these days: I don’t think Steven King or Neil Gaiman for example use this structure, but it was very common in older stories and lots we’ve read on The Classic Ghost S tories Podcast follow this pattern: The Turn of The Screw. H G Well’s Support the show

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S0303 Number 13 by M R James Jan 21, 2022

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Number 13 by M R JamesNumber 13 by M R James is a spooky story of a missing room and its missing inhabitant. Including old churches, musty documents, secrets, the occult and bookish blokes rummaging aroundUnlucky for some, but not really for Mr Anderson though it gave him quite a shock. This story was commissioned by Gavin Critchley who kindly has allowed me to broadcast it to you all.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereYou could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Become a Patronhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)And you can join my mailing list and get a free audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback*** (https://bit.ly/somecomeback***)Babylonish Church. I wonder whether this was James’ own view or he is merely representing the view of his character. James was an Anglican and the protestant view of the Catholic Church was not and in some circles remains not wholly tolerant or kind. I read an article arguing that because James was so drawn to the medieval period that he must be in possession of a Catholic sensibility, in which the whole world is in some sense sacred. I am not sure this correctly represents Catholic dogma or the Medieval European World View. But it’s fun to read about such things.James leaves things out. For example the red light, the dancing figure that might be a man or a woman. I think he deliberately leaves unresolved threads. I think he does the same in Story of a Disappearance And an Appearance in which we have to try to reconstruct the narrative ourselves to figure out what actually went on, rather than James spoon-feeding us the rational explanation (rational though perhaps also supernatural. The two things aren’t exclusive). In this again I think he is a little like David Lynch who allows images to emerge from his subconscious and uses them leaving us to try and make sense like a Rorschach image. I’m not against, this, and I might be wrong.In the end, we might walk away from this story wondering: eh?The dancing, singing androgynous spirit, the portmanteau that vanishes and then reappears with apparently no significance. I think he just throws this weird stuff in to unsettle us. This is eerie (by Mark Fisher’s definition) in that it has an agent who has a purpose, but both are obscure to us therefore unsettling us.The weird arm that reaches out is one of a string of weird arms: Grendel’s arm in Beowulf, the arm that takes the baby Pryderi in the tale of Pwyll in the Mabinogi. I also heard via Jon Gower about some farmers in Carno who believed there was a house where a monstrous arm appeared.The number of windows is a clue. I take from this that there was a Room 13, but that Room 12 and Room 14 were enlarged to gobble it up. Perhaps because of its bad reputation. Nicholas Francken is a bit of a red herring. He is an occultist and I’ve said elsewhere that James’s interest in the occult suggests he knew more about it than he lets on in common with his contemporaries, Arthur Machen, W B Yeats etc who were members of the Golden Dawn. But he leads us to believe that we are going to find Francken’s body buried below the planks and then we just find some kind of occult document that no one can read. Another unresolved riddle. Support the show

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S0302 The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin Jan 14, 2022

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The Earlier Service by Margaret IrwinThe Earlier Service is a tale of what happens in a remote English church late at night. A Listener suggested I record The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin. I hunted it down via the internet and found it in an anthology called Bloodstock, published in 1978 by Ian Henry Publications in 1978. I believe the collection was initially published in 1953.Bloodstock is split into three sections: Stories From Ireland (five stories here); Uncanny Stories (four stories) and two ungrouped stories: Mrs Oliver Cromwell and Where Beauty Lies. Margaret Irwin doesn’t include any biographical information in this book so I had to go looking elsewhere.As usual, Wikipedia came up trumps and I gave them $2 for their great work. Margaret Irwin was born in Highgate, London in 1889, and she died in 1967 in London also. Her father was an Australian from Perth and her mother was English and her mother’s father was a colonel in the 16th Lancers, a British Cavalry regiment. She was brought up by her uncle in Bristol after her father died.She started writing professionally in the 1920s and specialised in historical fiction, particularly the Elizabeth and early Stuart periods. As well as historical novels she did ghost stories and two fantasy novels, one about a time slip and the other about a wizard’s daughter.She married a book illustrator who did the covers for some of her books. The Earlier ServiceThe story seems to hark back to a different England: a rural England of evensong and churchgoing that no longer exists. We have examples from the work of R H Malden and M R James of country vicars going about their business in rural parishes where they and the doctor and the solicitor are the only educated and literary people but where they service and minister to the illiterate throng. Most country churches now in England are dead or dying and this therefore is a picture of a world that once was and is no longer.The story begins with the rector’s family going to church. It’s dad’s job so it is the daughters’ duty to go to each service. The younger daughter Jane has developed an irrational fear of the church, though at the beginning, neither she nor we know why. There is some hint that that gargoyles on the church spire are stretching out their necks to get into her room, but that is not what’s happening and is just a little spooky detail thrown in to create atmosphere rather than foreshadowing proper.In the same way the bits of dried black stuff on the church door is said to be the skin of flayed heathens. Imagine torturing people just because they don’t think the same things you do. How awful. I’m glad we’re not like that now.When I was young, I used to collect plastic figures of crusaders. In films they were great heroes, but apparently they are the bad guys now. In any case, the crusader is a great defender in this story. I’ve been to lots of churches with tombs in them with knights and ladies in relief. There was a chapel near Chilingham Castle that I used to take my ghost tours to, usually in the middle of the night. It was always so cold and it was easy to believe in that quiet, chill atmosphere, that they might come back to life. But of course this is a witchcraft/satanism story. In the old days the two were thought to be the same thing. Of course this is what happened to the old pagan gods—they became demons.Jane sees the little dark man with the sharp object in his hand. Of course this is the old Giraldus atte Welle who was defrocked for demonism back in the day. It seems her mother gets a hint of it, but doesn’t see it as clearly as Jane. This is probably because she is not thSupport the show

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S0301 The Fair Family by Tony Walker Jan 07, 2022

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A timid man and his worried wife take a trip through Wales. The weather is awful and they worry they will be late for a Christening. That is the least of their worries. A story of the fairy folk and the Welsh gods and the Welsh weather. One of my own. In the afterword I reveal that this whole podcast was a trojan horse to get you to buy my stories. But hang on.... this one's free. My plan failed! Never mind.Support the show

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S02E64 The Pleasure Pilgrims by Ella D'Arcy Dec 31, 2021

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The Pleasure Pilgrims by Ella D’ArcyThe Pleasure Pilgrims can be seen as a love story, a murder tale or a sort of Christmas Story (though it’s not set at Christmas). But most of it all it is a story that lays bare the differences between British and Americans. They speak the same language, but they mean different things and seem incapable of understanding what the other really means.We’ve done another of Ella D’Arcy’s stories on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast: The Villa Lucienne. That too deals with the wealthy elite who skipped around Europe staying in grand houses. There is a ghost in that story, there is one in this too—ultimately.Observations as we go along are that the hosts, the Ritterhausens, and Germans in general don’t make much of an appearance in The Pleasure Pilgrims. They add a little local colour. The setting of a grand old German castle near Hamelin with its pied piper is delightful set-dressing. Ella D’Arcy really brings this out with the snowy train journey, the old bridge choked with ice floes, the German servant in the horse-drawn carriage in his second-best livery. The main character, Campbell is a successful novelist. However, he is a bit of an innocent. He has some funny ideas about the purity of love and we wonder whether he has ever kissed a girl. D’Arch makes two remarks on the British character, one at the beginning when Campbell is forced to share the carriage with the two American girls. They only ride with him out of kindness to the German servant to stop the man making two trips. Campbell is, like most British people, shy, D’Arcy says. Then at the end, when the deed is done, she refers to the ‘cold, complacent British unresponsiveness’. I don’t think this pairing at the beginning and the end is accidental. In fact, the whole story is a study of British versus American character, and the British don’t come out of it so well. Campbell has his cynical second Maynes, who won’t believe a single good thing about Lulie and when Campbell himself starts to relent, Maynes is always there to convince him she’s putting it all on. Campbell comes over was a cold-hearted, vain, prig, and Maynes as simply a monster.D’Arcy gives us a short passage where she explains that Maynes really did think Lulie was putting it on and that he wasn’t just an evil pig. At the end, she also explains that Lulie has led the loveless, homeless life of a poor little rich girl. Rich people are people too, you know in case you are ready to dismiss her suffering as not being as valuable as the suffering of a poor person. Lulie also has her second, Nannie Dodge who appears to be complicit in Lulie’s shameless seduction. If we believe Maynes’s version of the story.Throughout, Lulie’s ostentation and lack of reserve are emphasised, from her flamboyant and luxurious clothes to her persistent warmth and affection.I was reminded of the case of the English nanny Louise Woodward. There is a great article herehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/11/24/here-and-there-3 (Here and There | The New Yorker)Woodward was never seen to cry. In court she sat, hunched, deferential, submissive, lowered eyes and voice. This was seen apparently by American eyes as indicating her guilt. However, this deference and submission in an English court is exactly what would show her innocence. The writer makes the point that in America if you are telling the truth, you meet your questioners eyes, you throw your shoulders back, you have nothing to hide. The the British Woodward was appropriately modest and self-effacing as she should be in court being judged by a judge, who might well be a lord. In America, she was shifty andSupport the show

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S02E61 The Piano by Tony Walker Dec 25, 2021

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A short Christmas Ghost story. A couple move into an old house, a house whose foundations go back centuries. Once in there they begin to suspect it's haunted. A short, sweet ghost story for Christmas where a couple get an opportunity to remember things that have been forgotten.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereYou could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Become a Patronhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)And you can join my mailing list and get a free audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback*** (https://bit.ly/somecomeback***)Support the show

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S02E60 Surprise View by Tony Walker Dec 24, 2021

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A man who has lost everything goes to a remote part of the country for Christmas. In that beautiful landscape it seems the air is full of spirits: both of nature and of those long gone. A heart-warming ghost story for Christmas.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereYou could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Become a Patronhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)And you can join my mailing list and get a free audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback*** (https://bit.ly/somecomeback***)Support the show

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S02E63 Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson Dec 13, 2021

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Thrawn or Twisted Janet is a tale of devilish possession written in broad Scots. A chilling tale, if you can understand it. My commentary at the end has very little to do with Thrawn Janet, but does go on at length about the sound 'r'. Fascinating.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereYou could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Become a Patronhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)And you can join my mailing list and get a free audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback*** (https://bit.ly/somecomeback***)Support the show

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