Classic Ghost Stories

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S0250 Dragoon by DeWayne Hayes Sep 25, 2021

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Towards the end of the American Civil War in north west Arkansas, an old woman is faced with a dilemma. Her son is dead after falling in battle, and her son's wife went missing in the woods on hearing the news. Something happened to her in the woods, something that means the old woman's precious grandson is sick. He's sick, and something is coming over the hill.This story is followed by an interview with the author of the story Dragoon.Get a great discount on my Horror Stories For Halloween audiobook & ebook bundlehttps://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween (https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween)Support the show

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S02E49 The Night Wire by H F Arnold Sep 18, 2021

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Well after midnight in a newsroom high up above the city, a strange story comes tip-tapping in down the night wire. John Morgan, the night wire expert, turns the morse code into words and the words reveal a mystery. A town no one has heard of is brought to a standstill by a weird fog. This weird fog rolls right out of the graveyard and in it are seen twisted wailing forms. But this tale is stranger even that that. But you'll have to listen to find out why. This pulp story from 1926 was a favourite of HP Lovecraft. Even its author is an enigma. Or is he? The story inspired Stephen King to write The Mist in 1981 which was made into the 2007 movie of the same name."H. F. Arnold was an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, ‘The Night Wire’ (1926), first published in Weird Tales, is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story. "Arnold’s only other published stories were The City of Iron Cubes in the March/April 1926 edition of Weird Tales, and When Atlantis Was in the October and December 1937 issues of Amazing Stories. Who is who is an enigma. The content of The Night Wire suggests he was a newspaper man in a big city in the USA.We have dates for his life as 1902 until 1963, making him 61 at the time of his death, and 24 when The Night Wire was published. How we know his dates, I’m not certain.If you read most anthologies, we don’t even know if he was really called H F Arnold. But then someone called William Russo did some research and found out a lot about him.Here’s a link to the full storyhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire)It turns out that he was Henry Ferris Arnold who graduated from the Mid-West and went to work in Hollywood working in publicity (we’d call it marketing now) for movies. He started at Goldwyn Studies and became Sam Goldwyn’s Director of Publicity. There’s something about that night radio DJ thing. Play Misty for me. Other associations are being on night shift. Film noir. The Weird Anthologyhttps://amzn.to/3kF1LSr (https://amzn.to/3kF1LSr)The Night Wire read by by E F Frenchhttps://youtu.be/-SyT6Xga0Eo (YouTube)William Russo’s review on Good Readshttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire (The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold)Story suggestions by email pleaseClassicghostpodcast@gmail.comIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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The First Sheaf by H R Wakefield Sep 11, 2021

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The First Sheaf is a folk horror story set in the backwaters of rural England. A new vicar goes to a rural parish that has suffered a terrible drought. The local folk shun him and want nothing of his god. He fears they have other gods of their own. Then a young girl goes missing, and the vicar's son must search out the mystery of the round field and pay a terrible price for the knowledge he gains. Think The Wicker Man meets John Barleycorn. Folk horror before they invented the term 'folk horror'Download a my free audiobookhttps://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire) https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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S02E48 The Reluctant Bride by Iqbal Hussain Sep 11, 2021

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In rural Pakistan, a rickshaw driver stops by a Peepal Tree and a beautiful bride steps out from the shadows. Of course, at first he thinks she must be a churail, but despite his mother's warnings, he knows he must help this distressed woman. How will his kindness be rewarded?A story by modern British author Iqbal Hussain. After the story I had the great pleasure of interviewing Iqbal and talking about this story and his writing in general.Iqbal HussainIqbal is one of seven writers chosen for the 2021/22 Megaphone scheme for YA/children’s writers. He is one of fifteen emerging writers to feature in the Mainstream anthology by Inkandescent, with his short story “The Reluctant Bride”, publication date mid-2021. His short story “A Home from Home” won gold prize in the Creative Future Writers’ Awards 2019. He is a recipient of the inaugural London Writers’ Awards 2018 and was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House WriteNow scheme 2017. Iqbal is working on his first novel, Northern Boy, about being a “butterfly among the bricks”. https://www.ihussainwriter.comIqbal's Twitter @ihussainwriter Mainstream by Ikandescent This collection brings thirty authors in from the margins to occupy centre-page. Queer storytellers. Working class wordsmiths. Chroniclers of colour. Writers whose life experiences give unique perspectives on universal challenges, whose voices must be heard. And read.Mainstream by Inkandescent is here: https://amzn.to/2XURiKZ (https://amzn.to/2XURiKZ) (my affiliate link)If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen Sep 08, 2021

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Over in the Wild West of Wales, (despite him calling it England, the village is Croes y Ceiliog after all), strange signs appear, a girl disappears and it takes a man from London to work out the evil truth.This is the audio extracted from the edited version of my live reading of the Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen.All the audio is there (some of the live cut out) and it is as polished as well as I can do. There are two microphones in this: the streamed version which is compressed and a little fuzzy and the camera microphone which is tinny.With those warnings, listen if you dare. PS. An end of summer bargain for you:You can still get my London Horror Stories Full Audiobook plus the Ebook at the insanely discounted price of £2.99, which is not much dollar, and if you buy from my directly, then we don’t give the non-tax paying giants (you know who I mean) their fat cut.https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories (https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories)Support the show

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S02E47 W S By L P Hartley Sep 04, 2021

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In which a writer starts to receive mysterious and increasingly menacing postcards from an apparent stranger. He asks his friends what to do. He goes to the police. And then it all becomes clear.L P HartleyLeslie Poles Harltey was born in Cambridgeshire in England in 1895 and died aged 76 in London England.L P was educated first at home and then a Preparatory School before going to Harrow School–— a private school in North London, where he had won a scholarship. His father was not particularly high class, he was a solicitor and owned a brickyard. After Harrow, L P went to Oxford to study (or ‘read’) as they say at Oxbridge, Modern History. This was in 1915. In 1917 he joined the army. I think he was conscripted. He was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment but never saw active service due to having a weak heart.He was a famous hypochondriac in fact and had what we would call these days a health anxiety. In 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown and soon after this started spending long periods in Venice in Italy where he owned his own gondola.He had a particular male friend David Cecil. And this was in a time when being gay was illegal and punishable by time in prison so gay people did not come out. It was believed that he was gay. After the war he returned to complete his degree Oxford, and even at that time he had an ambition to be a writer. His first published work was in Oxford Poetry. And he became editor of Oxford Outlook. He was a lifelong friend of Cynthia Asquith who, as we know, was a famous author of ghost stories and editor of the Pan Horror series for a while. He mixed in aristocratic circles after graduation and worked as a book reviewer, but his own work did not initially find success and he was depressed. In 1924, his first volume Night Fears was published and it was well received critically and his work was supported by many influential writers including Cynthia Asquith.He had moderate to good success with later novels, but his major success was with The Go-Between.He was named after Virginia Woolf’s father. Hartley as a youngster was a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. He named his influences as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Emily Bronte, but I find his straightforward style different from all of these. His most famous quote is possibly:The Past Is Another Country. They do things differently there.W SThis is a cracking little story and very simple in structure. We have a writer, and like all writers, he is neurotic about his work. He has had some success, but still harbours doubts. Then he starts getting postcards from someone with the same initials as himself, though he doesn’t notice the initials as being significant at first.The story uses the ticking clock technique of modern thrillers. Danger is approaching step by step getting closer and closer: think Die Hard. Though if you didn’t know British geography you might not know that Forfar is distant and Coventry close to the West Country town where Walter Streeter lives. Nevertheless, each postcard brings the doom closer.There is some nice foreshadowing. The postcard writer keeps promising a hearty handshake and it is only at the end we are told the character William Stainsforth has only one hand. The comment that the author doesn’t give any depth to his characters is also a piece of foreshadowing.We are told near the end that the character is a policeman in the story. This is after the policeman has arrived outside to keep guard. The twist is in the phone call from the real police who apologise for not sending an officer. Who then is the policeman outside? I wonder if it would not have been more effSupport the show

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S02E46 The Lodgers by Joan Aiken Aug 28, 2021

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Joan AikenJoan Delano Aiken was the daughter of Conrad Aiken, whose story Mr Arcularis we read out on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. Her elder sister Jane was a writer and her brother John was a chemist. Her father, being a poet presumably appreciated the para-rhyming of their names.Joan was born while her father was domiciled in England, on Mermaid Street in Rye in East Sussex in 1924. She died in Petworth West Sussex in 2004.She went to a private school in Oxford but did not go to University. Instead she wrote stories. Her first story appeared on the BBC Children’s Hour in 1941 when she was seventeen. After the death of her first husband she went to work as an editor on magazines.She is most famous for her children’s fiction, notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea. Her stories have almost a magical realism feel (a term which of course really belongs to South American literature) in that she uses what appear to be genuine historical settings subtly twisted to become fantasy. Many of her novels have supernatural themes, such as the Shadow Guests and the Haunting of Lamb House.She won many awards for her fiction during her lifetime. The Lodgers is in her collection of short supernatural stories A Touch of Chill. Not knowing what to make of it, I went on Good Reads and found it got an average of three stars out of five with most reviewers not being clear about what the story is about.The best I can do is to suggest that this is a mid-20th Century story where small town life is subverted into the weird as people like Robert Aickman were doing. I wonder whether the deliberate cultivation of the irrational is taking place here where the weird is not meant to be understood rationally, but there to create atmosphere.The weird slovenly, drunken Colegates come from the Middle East. They have odd paraphernalia such as the 'collecting jar' which seems to be vaguely occult. The reference to the Egyptians and the black and white pillars put me in mid of the ritual magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It seems that the Colegates collect the souls of children. In the end, I think young Bob's soul flies out of the window and Desmond Colegate pursues it like a butterfly hunter into the graveyard where the exertion gives him a stroke of a heart attack. But I may be wrong. The boy, and the vet's boy who the Colegate also taught games of cards to (the cards seem important -- Tarot???) both die of natural causes. Are the Colegates then a drunken version of the Grim Reaper? They don't cause the death, they are just around to harvest the souls?If you know, tell me!If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here [Become A Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)) For Bonus StoriesOr [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)) , if you’d like to keep me working. [Music](https://bit.ly/somecomeback (https://bit.ly/somecomeback)) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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S02E45 The Amorous Ghost by Enid Bagnold Aug 21, 2021

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Edith BagnoldEdith Bagnold, later Lady Jones was born in 1889 in Rochester, Kent and died in 1981 in London . She was most famous for her novel *National Velvet* published in 1935, which was made into a famous film that starred Elizabeth Taylor. Her father was a Colonel in the British Army, and she was mainly brought up in Jamaica. She loved riding horses when she was in Jamaica and that inspired National Velvet. She went to art school in London and worked for Frank Harris, an Irish-American novelist and had an affair with him. She was very Bohemian and mixed with artists and free-thinkers.During the First World War she became a nurse but was critical of the way the hospitals were won and got sacked. She became a driver for the army in France and wrote a memoir of her time dung that. In 1920 she became the wife of Sir Roderick Jones and therefore became Lady Jones. they lived on the south coast of England near Brighton. They had a house in London and were neighbours of Winston Churchill and Jacob Epstein.Her great-grand-daughter was Samantha, wife of the recent British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Virginia Woolf called her ‘a scallywag who married a very rich man.’ Woolf thought that Bagnold had begun as a rebel and Bohemian but ended up being conventionally rich with a butler. Read this article about Bagnold.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre (Upstairs, downstairs | Margaret Drabble | The Guardian)If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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S02E44 The Door In The Wall by H. G. Wells Aug 14, 2021

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H G WellsHerbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent just outside London. He Died aged 79 at his grand house in Regent’s Park in London.He was a scientist by training having got his degree at Imperial College London (the Royal College of Science). He was a biologist with a strong interest in Darwin and Natural Selection. His early adult life was one of financial insecurity and job after job teaching and he earned his Bachelor of Science in 1890 through the University of London’s external teaching scheme. In 1893 while teaching A A Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh) at a school in London, he published a biology text book.By 1895 he was contributing stories and articles to different periodicals. Politically, he was a Socialist. His mother was a domestic servant and his father had been a servant gardener though later became a professional cricketer for the Kent county team and who had a sports shop which didn’t do very well. Because his family struggled financially, they put him out as an apprentice as a draper. He worked a thirteen hour day and slept in a dormitory and his later novels Kipps and The History of Mr Polly describe this lower middle class or tradesmen’s life.He suffered from Diabetes and founded the Diabetic Association in 1934.He was a progressive futurist who foresaw many modern developments such as tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons and satellite TV. His books deal with time travel (The Time Machine) and alien invasion (The War of the Worlds).The Door in The Wall by H G WellsThe Door in the Wall was first published in The Daily Chronicle in 1906, when he was forty, and reprinted in Wells’s collection The Door In The Wall And Other Stories published in 1911. It is one of Wells’s most well-known stories, and he wrote at least a hundred short stories, mostly in the early part of his career.The story is told to Redmond, and this device of having a story introduced to an otherwise blank hearer, who then learns of the ending of the story and makes his own conclusion, is well known. In fact more Victorian and Edwardian supernatural stories than not begin in this style (e.g. The Turn of The Screw, many stories of M R James) and it was copied by Ray Russell in the 1960s in his Sardonicus series when he wanted to write as if the story were Victorian.The way Wallace recounts the story to Redmond is set out from the beginning as questioning whether Redmond should believe him. He says early on that he does, and at the end confirms this again. On balance, as fabulous as the story is, he chooses to believe Wallace.The hero of the story, is Lionel Wallace a successful politician. And it is this success that is the central theme to the story, which to me is about putting off spiritual contentment in favour of worldly obligations time after time, until in the end, he makes the right, and final choice.Every time he passes by the door and chooses a worldly goal rather that trying the door he is sure in his heart the door is unlocked and only waiting for him to step inside. The first time he goes in, he is a child. The second time he is a busy schoolboy intent on not being late for school. The third time he is on his way to his Oxford entry exam, the fourth time he is on his way to an important appointment, which seemed to be to be with a lover. There is a long gap and he is finally a successful politician, overworked with a tarnish beginning to spread on this world and he becomes more receptive to the message. He sees the door three times just when he is finding this world burdensome. He is determined that he would go in through the door. Wallace at this time is around forty yeaSupport the show

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S02E43 The Grey Woman by Elizabeth Gaskell Part Three. Aug 07, 2021

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The Grey Woman Part 3In which Anna and Amante go on the run, meet some good souls, some bad ones and accomplish miracles with corks and home-made walnut dye, thus saving their lives. Will it all go right in the end? You will have to listen, won't you?Random Notes For Part 3Disguises. Victorians loved disguises. Think of Sherlock HolmesThe beautiful Ann breaks one of her front teeth! No one later remarks on this.Amante has corks in her cheeks to alter the shape of her face. A great idea, but did she keep them in all the time? It might make talking tricky. I think Mrs Gaskell got too carried away with the fun of disguises to think about its sustainabilityIn the blacksmith’s smithy, when M. De La Tourelle turns up, he describes his wife as having run off with a base profligate woman from Paris. It’s a good job he didn’t say she was Norman as that would have been more likely to give the game away. Phew.The Countess de Roeder (for it is she) shies away from the common room “full of evil smells and promiscuous company”. I’ve been in pubs like that. We are set up for this by the description of her being a fair-haired young woman speaking German French who had hair that Amante reminds Anna is the same colour as hers used to be before they cut it off and burned it in the stove.The Murder of the Countess De Roeder sets up the fate of M. De La Tourelle as we ultimately find out. However, in a modern novel, or film, it would be urged that the protagonist confronted and brought about the doom of the villain, not some minor character never seen (the Baron de Roeder).We get word of the crooked jeweller a few times just dropped in. I think the subtle hinting at this is very well done “Ainsi le Chauffeurs se vengent” means “Number 1: Thus the Bandits Revenge Themselves”Amante’s father was a tailor in Rouen, but earlier, Mrs Gaskell told us that Amante’s father was a Norman father.And then her complexion goes from roses and lilies to ashen grey. It’s a nice touch that M. De La Tourelle looks up and doesn’t recognise her. This emphasises her unfair transformation into The Grey Woman.I guess the daughter can’t marry Maurice de Poissy because her natural father killed his father? She slips this in at the end as an additional, but arguably unneccesarry other than for the sheer joy readers take in twists. But it also allowed me to finish in true thriller style with a revelatory sentence with a duh-duh-duh rhythm.The way this is written made me narrate it in short rhythmic bursts. I think this is due to her sentence structure.I’ve only been to Heidelberg once, but I liked it immensely and would like to go back.Next week we are reading another listener request. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here... https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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