Classic Ghost Stories

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S01E34 The Sandwalker by Fergus Hume May 22, 2021

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Fergus HumeFergus Hume was born in Powick, Worcestershire in England in 1865. He died in Essex in 1932. His given first name was Ferguson, which was his mother Mary’s maiden name.His Glaswegian father Dr John Hume , was the doctor at the County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum there. Hume was only three when his father emigrated to Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand, where he set up a lunatic asylum, Ashburn Hall.Hume went to Otago boy’s school and then studied law at the University of Otago in Dunedin. (Otago is the name of the region). He became a barrister in 1885 but then moved to Melbourne in Australia where he became a barrister’s clerk.All the while , he had literary ambitions, primarily as a playwright, but was repeatedly rejected. The first time he came to public notice was when a play he had written was put on by someone else under their name.He turned then to writing mystery novels, and his first and most famous novel was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab which was set in Melbourne, in the poor areas that Hume himself lived in around Little Bourke Street. Because he couldn’t get a publisher to look at it, he printed five thousand copies at his own expense. This first edition sold out in three weeks.Even though the book was very popular he made no money from it because he sold the rights before it became the best -selling mystery novel of the Victorian era. It was this novel that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. However, Doyle was not complimentary about The Mystery of A Hansom Cab. Hume went back to England in 1888. He lived in Thundersley in Essex and wrote over a hundred and fifty novels. Hume never married and avoided publicity. He was said to be very religious. Despite his prolific output, he lived very modestly.The Sandwalkerhttp://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks17/1700531h.html#TheSandwalker (Link) to the ebook on Project Gutenberg The Sandwalker is the last story in Hume’s collection The Dancer in Red. It’s a bit of a yarn. In theme it is a fairly straightforward revenge ghost story. Those who do wrong are punished by the dead. There is a nice twist at the end which delivers a satisfying ending. Young Lottie was not disgraced by Amber and therefore it was in no sense just that Mrs Jarzil killed him in revenge. The twist is that she is a very religious woman with the emphasis on Old Testament style justice where sinners are punished and cast into the pit and it is always an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Despite her protestations, she does not leave vengeance to the Lord but takes it into her own hands.I am guessing it is set in either Norfolk or Lincolnshire though I used the narrator’s job working for a Yorkshire woollen firm to allow me to be slightly more northern in accent than Norfolk certainly. It was nice that the hero was a plain man working for a living: a commercial traveller or ‘bagman’. We had a bagman appear in one of M R James’s stories that we read recently.So his preoccupations are pleasantly down to earth. He does not have weekends in the country or houses in London, he has to work for a living.The characters are caricatures. The writing is clearly accomplished. It is easy to read and unambiguous with clever rhetorical use of repetition (anaphora and epistrophe) so Hume was clearly a smart man. I presume then that the one-eyed wicked schoolmaster Abrams and the Lurch-like Mrs Jarzil are drawn so boldly on purpose. They are almost comic, but we must remember that this is exactly what Dickens did too so there was public taste for it.All in all a fun yarn. I hadn’t read any of Humes’ work before. He reminded me a little of R H Malden, thougSupport the show

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S01E33 Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne May 08, 2021

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Nathaniel HawthorneHawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachussetts. He died in Plymouth New Hampshire. One of his ancestors was John Hathorne who was the only judge in the witch trials who never repented his involvement.His ancestors who came from England in 1630 were Puritans. It is thought that Hathorne added the -w- to his name to make it Hawthorne in his twenties in order to distance himself from these fervent ancestors.He published his first work in 1828 when he was twenty-four. He published a series of short stories. He was a Transcendentalist, a Romantic philosophy which believes in the goodness of human nature and a reliance on intuition and other promptings of the spiritual or natural person rather than relying on reason.Despite his puritan ancestors, Hawthorne liked to take pot shots at puritanism. He is a Romantic and technically what is known as a dark Romantic. He is most famous for his novel The Scarlet Letter which was published in 1859. Also famous is the House of the Seven Gables. His books often feature themes of sin and the inherent evil of humanity.Young Goodman BrownUnless I’ve missed it, we are not told what is special about this night that Goodman Brown is going out to have his tryst with the Devil. His wife, Faith, wants him to be there with her on this night ‘of all nights in the year’, but he has to go out on this night of all nights in the year. He is clearly expecting to meet the Devil and has some business with him, but it’s not clear to me what that business is.It turns out that all the people he thought pious, including his father and grandfather as well as various deacons and goodies and goodmen of the town and state are wicked to the core.But what was his own mission exactly? I’m not clear. He clearly needs to do his dirty deed on this particular night and afterwardsHe discusses meeting the Devil and then a man appears who has the look of his grandfather, it transpires. This man was in Boston only fifteen minutes previously and that seems pretty fast travel for the Seventeenth Century. The Devil says that Brown is late, and Brown answers that, ‘Faith kept me back a while.’ Ah, yes indeed. Faith has two meanings here, I think.We hear from Good Cloyse that a young man is to be taken into communion with the witches that night, and we hear from Deacon Gookin that a young woman is to be inducted. We realise that this is Faith of course as Hawthorne intends us to, but of which poor Goodman Brown is ignorant. This is called Dramatic Irony according to Robert McKee, where the audience knows more than the character.However, the story is well done. We are led step by step as our Goodman falls deeper into temptation and then, the scales are removed from his eyes and the Devil tells him that evil is the basic currency of human nature. He believes it and henceforth mistrusts the virtue of his own dear wife and his own pastor. This is foreshadowed by Hawthorne at the outset of the journey when, after Faith has failed to convince him to stay home, she hopes that he finds all well on his return, to which he replies: ‘Amen’. But when he returns has changed all due to his change in attitude, because as Hamlet says, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Goodman Brown is a lukewarm Satanist at the best. He begins by telling Old Nick that he has scruples in the matter that ‘thou wots’t of’. (You know of. English used to have two verbs for to know, like French and German an Welsh and Irish and other languages I know. One was ‘to wit’ which was to know a thing, and the other ‘to ken’ which is to be familiar with or know a person or place. German keeSupport the show

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The Owl by Anatole Le Braz May 07, 2021

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This is the cleaned up audio of a Youtube Video I did. The audio isn't as good as when I do the podcast purely as an audio project. The video of me reading this is to be seen on my Youtube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9o9Vf0G92Pu2MCgKr73vhQIf 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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S02E32 Pickman's Model by H P Lovecraft Apr 24, 2021

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Pickman's Model by H P LovecraftThis story was written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 edition of Weird Tales. The narrator opens by disclosing that he is frightened to go underground, into the subway or even into a cellar. Then he explains why.It's to do with Pickman, an artist with an unsavoury reputation.There are hints that Pickman, whose ancestor was a witch, is related in some sense to the ghouls. Pickman's ancestor was a Salem witch and in the painting where the changeling is being read to by the Puritan, the narrator suggests that the changeling's ghoulish features are reminiscent of Pickman's own. This suggestion of cursed ancestry is also found in other Lovecraft stories like the case of Charles Dexter Ward.Lovecraft's ghouls appear in other stories as well. The ghouls honeycomb the hills of Boston are like the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In this story, which was written later, we find Pickman the artist now a fully-fledged ghoul. These ghouls come up through wells and into cellars and basements. Ghouls in Arabic folklore haunt the graveyards and feed on the newly dead.In The Music of Erich Zann, an artist can summon the creatures of this devilish world that underlies our reality. There is something about the super-sensitive artist who can see into more rarefied worlds than ours. Erich Zann was trying to drive out the evil things from other worlds while Pickman welcomes them, or at least tolerates them. He feels himself superior to them I think because he takes his pistol to one of them at least. In the Music of Erich Zann the narrator cannot find the house again, and this is so in this story. These strange parts of modern cities lurk like shadows, over a river, or in a little-visited and hazardous neighbourhood. Boston's North End is like Brooklyn's Red Hook. These neighbourhoods are populated with foreigners and honeycombed with tunnels. These edge places are clearly manifestations of Lovecraft's Shadow. These monsters come from places that are liminal and other.The narrator suggests that Pickman is a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such pleasure in the torture of others as depicted in his art, yet he is a true artist because his art was the art that convinced. Like Lovecraft himself, Pickman is no sentimental friend of mankind and sees no kindness or joy amongst his fellow humans, only torture and disgust. Lovecraft appreciates that others shun people with this vision, though he depicts them as small-minded and unappreciative of great art and thought. It's a little bit Nietzschean, the superman or Uber-mensch.The narrator Thurber says that as well as being monstrous, Pickman was a great artist because he painted the truth. The implication is that the truth is that our daylight world lives on a foundation of terrible evil. That is of course a very Lovecraftian view. It's the opposite view of the Romantics like Wordsworth and Thoreau and Voltaire, and if fact the Green movement, who believed that our technological world is the aberration and that the natural world is the source of purity and joy. Of course for most of human history, survival has been a battle against the horrors of the natural world and in a sense then Lovecraft is a traditionalist and anti-Romantic. Lovecraft's escape is not through nature but through imagination and at times, though not here, his fantasies have a great beauty to them.The story form is a classic short story with a twist. We, the readers, realise ahead of the narrator (who only twigs when he looks at the photo) that Pickman's monstrous images were not imagination but reality. He presumed that the ghoul was paiSupport the show

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S02E31 The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe Apr 10, 2021

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Edgar Allen PoePoe was an American writer born in 1809 in Boston who died aged only forty in Baltimore in 1849. He is one of the best-known American writers of his generation and famed all over the world for his Gothic and macabre tales. This is the third of his stories we've done on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.Others are https://player.captivate.fm/episode/08a6766c-18ad-4ec7-9c1c-a6918e7306a6 (The Tell-Tale Heart) and https://player.captivate.fm/episode/704f4f35-a5c5-44f6-b4c2-f08313ac3870 (The Fall of the House of Usher)The Black Cat by Edgar Allen PoePoe sets up his character as a mild, animal-loving child and I guess this is to show how out of character his later muderous rage is. When he talks of an animal as a brute it is not a derogatory term and merely equivalent to the word animal. Beast is the same though in the intervening years both beast and brute have become tainted by usage connecting them with the vilest of human beings rather than dumb animals. Did you see what I did there?Near the beginning he mentions his wife's joking belief that all black cats are witches in disguise. This is a little foreshadowing the for the supernatural powers of the black cat that are revealed towards the end of the story.We aren't far into the story before the narrator reveals the cause of his change of character: it is through intemperance with drink. Remember the Temperance Movement (of which my grandmother was a proud supporter). Poe himself had a problem with alcohol. His death was very likely related to his alcohol abuse. In 1849, he was due to catch a ferry from Richmond, Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. He visited a doctor in Richmond the night before he was due to travel, complaining of a fever. He arrived in Baltimore and is next seen in a tavern three days later when he was found in an alcoholic stupor wearing someone else's clothes: a cheap suit and a straw hat, not his usual black wool suit. Perhaps he had sold his own clothes for money for drink?He was admitted to hospital and died four days later. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and talking nonsense. This sounds to me like Delirium Tremens from alcohol withdrawal. For people who drink heavily over a long period they can develop Wernicke-Korsakoff's syndrome which is a neurological condition caused by deficiencies of B vitamins, particularly Thiamine. It is also known as Korsakoff's Dementia.At the time of his death Poe had recently joined a temperance society. The doctor who saw him in the tavern thought he had been on a bender and was intoxicated, but the doctor in the hospital stated Poe had not been drinking. Of course, that is what causes the withdrawal: heavy drinking with a sudden stop. The most common causes of sudden death in people who abuse alcohol are through a seizure induced by the withdrawal, or by the bursting of blood vessels in the throat leading to catastrophic loss of blood. There is no report of a seizure, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Other theories are that Poe was assaulted and had a head injury in the tavern or that he was in late stage syphilis. This late stage syphilis filled mental institutions in the days before antibiotics and was very common—known as General Paralysis of The Insane. The doctors would have recognised this condition easily.Getting back to the story. He mentions that Pluto was becoming old, "And consequently peevish". On the eve of my sixtieth birthday I know exactly how Pluto felt. He is very nasty to the old cat though, and like others of Poe's protagonists, but not all (I quite like the protagonist from the House of Usher) he loses our sympathy. Support the show

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S02E30 His Beautiful Hands by Oscar Cook Mar 27, 2021

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His Beautiful Hands by Oscar CookThis will be the second of Oscar Cook's stories we have read, the first being Boomerang. Boomerang is https://player.captivate.fm/episode/f7098556-f342-4667-b9f2-65424796b616 (here)It was danged hard to find a copy of His Beautiful Hands, but I succeeded. HBH is rated as one of the best horror stories in those inevitable lists that pop up on the Internet, almost certainly compiled by people who never read it because print copies of the anthologies it was in are either out of print or cost hundreds of cash units (dollars, pounds, euros, roubles, take your pick). Cook's work, I realise now, is characterised by graphic body horror rather than the supernatural so it is a horror story rather than a ghost story. He deliberately sets out to shock us, but shocks modern listeners most probably by accident.What I mean is that we have become inured to graphic horror, after all we have had The Saw and The Human Caterpillar (neither of which I've seen) and the horrid bit in Midsommer when the old folks jump off the cliff and are then finished off... but let's not go into that. Then he throws in a bit of incest. That's never nice and I think even modern listeners find that shocking. As an aside, I actually deplore the race for shock that you see in detective series on TV. Once theft was enough (if you go back far enough), then murder became a staple, then we had serial killers, serial rapists and now we have a regrettably frequent addition of paedophilia sometimes with incest thrown in. I prefer Miss Marple personally, and I'd say to the TV companies: don't pander after these most base shock-jock tactics, you're better than that. I saw the Dig on Netflix recently with Ralph Fiennes. How brilliant that was. And I like the Detectorists also. But back to Oscar Cook.Oscar Cook BiographyRichard Martin Oscar Cook was born in London in 1888 and died also in London in 1952. His father owned an athletic goods company and they were fairly well-off. He seems to have been brought up in Broxbourne just outside London and his first job was a clerk there but very shortly afterwards he went to make his fortune in a rubber planation in Borneo. Unfortunately he did not get on well and was sacked, but remained in Borneo and got another job in the British Colonial Service.He was an administrator of the British Empire and worked in North Borneo from 1911 until 1918 and then had District Officer posts. This was a position in the British Colonial Service and these administrators and often magistrate was at the heart of colonial administration in the British colonies.He was married in 1924 to Christine Campbell Thomson but got divorced in 1938.When he returned to England he wrote an autobiography of his time in Borneo and thereafter wrote supernatural stories, many of which appeared in various anthologies. This story appeared in the 2nd Pan Book of Horror. I used to read those books when I was a kid, which may explain a lot.Cook bought a controlling interest in a publishing company which produced a series of horror anthologies called Not at Night which ran to twelve books.His Beautiful HandsStarts like Boomerang I think with the device of the urbane Englishman in his club in the Far East. This fellow has few adventures and relies on his unsteady journalist friend Warwick to tell him the ghastly tales. He even warns us it is going to be horrible. And it is. As the story goes structurally, it's pretty neat. It has at least two twists, probably three: that the manicurist poisoned him so his fingers drop off (ideal revenge on a violinist); that she is his daughter; and that the child is his. It is gSupport the show

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S02E29 Lady Ferry by Sarah Orne Jewett Mar 13, 2021

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Sarah Orne JewettThis episode is a real treat for me for a number of reasons. One is that this was my first commission! Susan Foust very kindly introduced me to this story and even paid me to read it out. Win-win-win. If you would like a commission, it would be remiss of me not to point out, you can get me to read any story under 10,000 words here. https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker/commissions (Order A Story!)So back to Sarah Orne Jewett. She lived her life on the southern coast of Maine in New England. She was born in 1849 in South Berwick and died in 1909 aged only 59 in the same year. She wrote a few collections of short stories, the most famous of which is The Country of Pointed Firs and you can get all of her work for free via the marvellous Project Gutenburg. Her family were Mainers going a long way back. The family home was built in 1774. Her father was a doctor who specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology. Her mother suffered from rheumatoid arthritis so the young Sarah spent many hours walking in the local countryside. She often visited Boston but her stories feature the small towns she was familiar with, even when she disguises their names.She had an interested in the Swedish mystic Swedenborg and she believed, apparently in Divine immanence: that god is in all things, though she was a firm believer in individual responsibility, which I always imagine as being a big thing in New England.I am struck by how different her New England is to that of Lovecraft of even of Russell Kirk whose Behind The Stumps we read out ages ago. I must do more of his stuff. I must do more of lots of people's stuff: there are outstanding calls for more Poe, which I will get to.Sarah Orne Jewett published her first story aged only 19 and her reputation grew in the 1870s and 1890s. People commented that her stories were driven by a focus on local colour more than plot, but I think Lady Ferry has an interesting, if gentle plot.She never married a man but had a close friendship with a married woman and the woman's husband and when the husband, a publisher died, the two women moved in together. Of course this was a time when certain types of love were not allowed to speak their name. They travelled together through America and Europe until in 1902 she had a carriage accident which ended her writing career. This was compounded when she had a stroke in March 1909 and she died soon after. Lady FerryThis is a delightful story and I am grateful to Susan Foust for bringing it to my attention. We see everything through the eyes of a young girl and the mystery is framed by her youth and her maturity as later she comes back to satisfy her curiosity.It appears to be a supernatural story but is very subtle. Lady Ferry haunts the garden as a ghost, but she is corporeal though no one knows her origin. It is hinted that she cannot die and that she is ancient. For example from the dresses she wears taken from the original builder of the house's chest at least a century or more earlier, by the fact she claims to have known Marie Antoinette and the grandfather of Mr McAllister. This puts her origin well back into the 18th Century. And she must have been born at least in 1750 if not earlier. She also references The Spanish Main, which might even suggest memories of the 17th Century.But this is explained away by her wandering mind. These are just fancies, surely? But there are a number of gothic touches which throw doubt on this. Firstly the visitors who come for the ball in the middle of the night. Though this is just a dream, surely? But then the boats are missing. I loved the funeral arrangement and I loved the descriptions of mSupport the show

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S02E28 The Cold Embrace by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Feb 27, 2021

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Mary Elizabeth BraddonAnother accomplished woman novelist of the Victorian period. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in 1835 in London and died in Richmond, Surrey (now part of London) in 1915.She wrote more than eighty novels, one of which, Lady Audley's Secret, was a great success. A number of her stories have supernatural themes, and she lived in the heyday of the ghost story so that is not surprising.When she was 25 she moved in with a publisher whose wife was locked away in an Irish mental asylum. She lived with the man and was stepmother to his existing children, marrying him finally in 1874, fourteen years after she first moved in, now allowable because his wife had passed away. She had six children by him.Her husband was also a property developer and a number of the streets in Richmond are named after characters from her novels.The Cold EmbraceThe Cold Embrace was published in is a very accomplished story both in form and in prosody. It has the feel of a folk-tale and its theme surely is that promises made in love should be kept and that the flighty and arrogant will be punished for breaking them.It was a delight to read because of the use of formal rhetorical forms like the repeated use on anaphora where the beginning of a sentence is repeated, usually three times to create a tricolon. Often an ascending tricolon where each phrase is longer building towards a climax.It almost reminded me of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride in its atmosphere. The final masked ball with the young lady on his arm who fades slowly into the corpse bride.We the readers are aware that the boisterous gaiety he feels at the ball, which he mistakes for his old light-heartedness is a return of the fever that will, this time, kill him.And the picture of stage coaches (the diligence) and hordes of labourers walking across Germany with their meerschaum pipes and dogs was like scenes out of Goethe, or William Wordsworth's account of his traipsing across Europe at a similar time. Braddon herself was born later than this, so this is historical fiction and we have the device that M R James endorses too: set the ghost story in the past, not too distant past, but enough that there is a mist of history which allows us to suspend our disbelief (although that phrase belongs to Tolkein). Music byhttps://bit.ly/somecomeback (The Heartwood Institute)The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by https://bit.ly/midnighfolk (The Hare & The Moon,) whose lead performer is Grey MalkinWe also feature music by Michael Romeo of https://bit.ly/dvoykinbandcamp (Dvoynik)Support the Podcast Any Way You Can!http://bit.ly/ghostiest (Buy the thirsty, hyperactive podcaster a cup of Java)Sign up For Exclusive Stuff and Early Bird Exposures on http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon)Get the https://bit.ly/substacklanding (Substack Newsletter) with ExclusivesMy Ghost StoriesGet my free audiobook download, The Dalston Vampire https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (here), and you may consider purchasing my https://bit.ly/HorrorStoriesForHalloween (Horror Stories For Halloween), which is now long past.Support the show

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S02E27 The Spider by Basil Copper Feb 13, 2021

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The Spider by Basil Copper@stuieburley on Twitter put me onto Basil Copper. He had recommended the Janissaries of Emilion. I'd never heard of Basil so I got a Kindle Edition of The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper which includes that story. However, it is long. I may do it another time, but for this week I selected a shorter story. But it's a good one.Basil Copper was born in 1924 and lived until 2013 when he died aged 89! He was born in London, England.His first story was published in March 1938, the Magazine of the Tonbridge Senior Boys School. Tonbridge is in Kent, and when I was a boy we went on an exchange visit to Kent. Most schools in England went to foreign countries but the trip from Cumberland to Kent, England's most northwesterly county to England most southeasterly county, was enough of a culture shock for us.He is most famous for his stories featuring the character Solar Pons. This character was created by August Derleth, H P Lovecraft's protege, and is very much in the Lovecraftian tradition of authors sharing worlds and characters between their stories. Copper was published by the Arkham House publishing house, run by August Derleth. Many of Copper's stories feature the Cthulhu Mythos. Despite his links with the Cthulhu Mythos, Copper admitted that his influences were M R James and Edgar Allan Poe and he was interested in Gothic literature. The Spider is a phobia story. It's very cleverly written, neat and effective. In that it reminds me of Marghatina Laski's The Tower where the phobia is vertigo. Here it is arachnophobia. Turns out that the landlord of the wayside auberge just south of Paris has a skin for picking up on a visitor's fears and killing the visitor via heart attack by inducing the phobia. The insect horror theme is of course featured in Boomerang by Oscar Cook.This story appears in the 1964 Pan Book of Horror Stories. He was paid £10 for the story. Copper lived at Sevenoaks in Kent and founded the Tunbridge Wells Vintage Film Society. He was a movie buff and a member of several societies related to films. His wife was French and he is clearly familiar with the county in which The Spider is set. Apparently the story idea came from a spider that was in a room in a hotel he and his wife stayed in while on holiday in Paris. He met his wife and married in her in 1960 when she was in England learning English.His first novel was actually a detective storyCopper was very prolific and in addition to his weird tales and novels he wrote 58 detective novels set in LA. When he wrote the first novels, he had never visited the city and used maps and films to provide background. He worked as a journalist, running a county paper at the age of 17. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and took part in the D-Day landings. Music byhttps://bit.ly/somecomeback (The Heartwood Institute)The final tune is by Michael Romeo of https://bit.ly/dvoykinbandcamp (Dvoynik)Support the Podcast Any Way You Can!http://bit.ly/ghostiest (Buy the thirsty, hyperactive podcaster a cup of Java)Sign up For Exclusive Stuff and Early Bird Exposures on http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon)Get the https://bit.ly/substacklanding (Substack Newsletter) with ExclusivesMy Ghost StoriesGet my free audiobook download, The Dalston Vampire https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (here), and you may consider purchasing my https://bit.ly/HorrorStoriesForHalloween (Horror Stories For Halloween), which is now long past.Support the show

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S02E26 Music Hath Charms by L T C Rolt Jan 30, 2021

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Music Hath Charms by LTC RoltLionel Thomas Caswall Rolt, was an English writer born in 1910 and who died in 1974, therefore for us, he's a recent writer! He was a prolific writer who had an interest in engineering and that shows in this story in his description of the tunnels and the knowledge of ventilation shafts which are integral to the plot of the story. In keeping with this love of engineering, he wrote biographies of major engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He had a major enthusiasm for vintage cars, heritage railways and was a pioneer of the canal cruising industry. From 1936, Rolt decided he wanted a life afloat and he converted his uncle's old boat Cressy into a boat he could live in and spent his time mooching up and down the canals of England.During the Second World War, he went to work for Rolls Royce and made Spitfire engines, the Royal Airforce's legendary fighter plan. After the war, Rolt teamed up with Robert Aickman, another major ghost story writer to form the Inland Waterways Association to promote the use of the canals and restore them. L T C or Tom Rolt was an accomplished author and an inland waterway enthusiast, and together with the another famous ghost story writer, Robert Aickman, and their wives, formed the Canal Restoration Trust which was responsible for bringing back the industrial waterway network of England and Wales back into service for leisure travel.When we know Rolt's love of machinery we understand the detailed description of how the musical box works in Music Hath Charms. I now know all about them. He also gives more detail than many would to about bus timetables.The story is set in wild Cornwall, which because of its remoteness and its Celtic past is a suitably remote setting for a ghost story. Cornwall has a history of smugglers and wreckers and this is the background to this story. We also see that another author who set her work in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier often used smugglers and indeed Frenchmen in her stories. La Pucelle means a maiden or a girl. This is of course a Faustian story. The smuggler, the Count Pierre Henneze de Hou. There is a French name Hennezel, and a De Hou, but no Henneze that I could find, so Tom Rolt may have miscopied the name. I suspect the title 'count' is a self-styling. I have often fancied called myself Count Tony Walker, but don't have the brass neck to get away with it.Carn Zawn doesn't exist, though the name is good Cornish. Carn is a heap of stones and Cornish 'sawan' means 'throat' and is used for a narrow inlet of the sea. Trevarthan is a real Cornish surname as well, arising from two separate places in West Cornwall. The only mistake Tom Rolt makes with his Celtic nomenclature is to have his housekeeper called Penrice. It sounds Cornish, but is in fact a Cumbrian surname arising from the place-name Penrith. Of course Cumbric and Cornish were closely related languages, so we can excuse him. Of course, it's also possible that the Penrices were Cumbrian immigrants to Cornwall. In fact, there were many Cornish who came to Cumbria to work in the mines, but not so-much the other way. This is proved by the fact there are two Cornish pasty shops in Keswick alone, but not a single Cumberland sausage shop in Truro, or Penzance.But back to the Devil. We presume that the shadowy creature in the engraving is Old Nick, gamboling and pranking. The Music Box conjures him. Count Pierre is presumed to have traded something, likely his soul as the De'il is found of those, for a life of opulence and the lusty company of La Pucelle, our Jeanne. She has a husky voice after all, surely a euphemism, or at lSupport the show

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