Classic Ghost Stories

Latest Episodes:

Phantom Silhouette by Joy Burnett Oct 16, 2025

Show notes

A lonely farmhouse stands in a hollow of the hills—its windows dark, its doors long locked, and a story clinging to it that no one in the valley will tell aloud. When a sceptical visitor decides to spend the night within, he discovers that silence itself can harbour memory, and that the past, once woken, does not easily return to sleep. Phantom Silhouette is a tale of curiosity meeting what endures when reason has gone.

First published in The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Shadows, edited by Rosemary Pardoe (Souvenir Press, London, 1971).

Reprinted in later anthologies of twentieth-century supernatural fiction.

Joy Burnett was an Australian-born actress who worked in theatre, film, and television after moving to England. In her spare time she wrote short stories, several of which appeared in British and American magazines; Phantom Silhouette was her first venture into the ghost-story tradition.

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Bad Company be Walter de la Mare Oct 10, 2025

Show notes

In a dim Underground carriage, a weary traveller meets a stranger whose silent presence unsettles more deeply than words can tell. Walter de la Mare’s Bad Company is a tale where dread arises not from what happens, but from what might.

Bad Company was first published in Walter de la Mare’s final collection, A Beginning and Other Stories (1955).

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, novelist, and short story writer, best known for his uncanny tales and dreamlike verse. His supernatural fiction remains admired for its atmosphere, suggestion, and refusal to explain away the mysterious.

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Cushi by Christopher Woodforde Oct 03, 2025

Show notes

# Cushi - Teaser Script

In the chalk hills of Hertfordshire lies Rooksgate Green, where tradition runs deeper than any rector's authority. Here, the sexton Cushi Holloway has his own peculiar ways—with hymn numbers, with cats, with the rituals of the churchyard.

When the Reverend David Evans arrives from Cardiff, he sees only quaint village customs that need reforming. But some traditions have roots that go deeper than doctrine. And some authorities cannot be challenged.

The villagers watch in silence as their world changes. Cushi says nothing, yet something shifts in the parish—something the new rector cannot quite understand. In the churchyard where the sexton tends his domain, an older power stirs.

When the outside world intrudes upon Rooksgate Green, it will uncover more than anyone expected. Some things, once disturbed, refuse to rest quietly.

Christopher Woodforde was an Anglican clergyman, Dean of Wells, and scholar of medieval stained glass who told supernatural tales to choirboys at New College, Oxford. He died in 1962, his stories published posthumously.

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Hand in Glove by Elizabeth Bowen Sep 26, 2025

Show notes

In a fading Irish house, two sisters live with their reclusive aunt. Outwardly clever, even charming, they are burdened by secrecy, shabby finery, and a restless need to keep appearances intact. What follows is a tale of genteel decay, of objects that carry more weight than they should, and of a past that refuses to stay silent.

“Hand in Glove” first appeared in 1952 and has since been recognised as one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most disturbing short stories.

It is reprinted in her collection A Day in the Dark and in numerous anthologies of twentieth-century ghost stories.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, short story writer, and critic, celebrated for her precise psychological portraits and her haunting depictions of Anglo-Irish decline.

Her work includes ten novels, more than a hundred short stories, and some of the most accomplished supernatural fiction of the twentieth century.

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Et Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams Sep 19, 2025

Show notes

Et in Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams

Lord Arglay, retired Chief Justice and seeker of forgotten knowledge, sets out for a quiet scholarly errand in the English countryside—only to find the landscape subtly warped, time grown strangely dense, and a chimney smoking where no fire burns. Drawn by a narrow path to a door that seems to wait for him alone, he enters a place where memory thickens, boundaries blur, and the air presses with the weight of something ancient and unyielding. Each step leads him deeper into a mystery that threatens not just understanding, but escape itself.

First published in The London Mercury, December 1935. 

Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a British novelist, poet, and critic associated with the Inklings. He wrote metaphysical thrillers—War in Heaven, Descent into Hell, All Hallows’ Eve—exploring theology, myth, and the supernatural.

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The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

A man walks the London streets, thin as a shadow, his eyes open but unseeing. He has no destination, yet something leads him — as if by an unseen hand — to a quiet room where the ordinary will no longer hold. What follows is not terror in the usual sense, but a slow unravelling, as if the familiar fabric of life has been touched by something that should have remained at rest.

The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke first appeared in Collier’s on 14 October 1933, and was later collected in Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales (Constable, 1935).

Thomas Burke (1886–1945) was a British author best known for his tales of London’s hidden quarters, especially Limehouse. He wrote across fiction, essays, and poetry, blending realism with the uncanny.

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A Visitor from Down Under by L. P. Hartley Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

On a wet and foggy evening in post-war London, a man arrives at a modest hotel carrying the calm assurance of wealth and distance. But something else arrives that night too—quietly, without fuss, with a newspaper clipping and a request for a room. In the lounge, the sounds of unseen children drift through the walls. In his sleep, the man dreams of trees and dead branches. And outside, the fog thickens.

*“A Visitor from Down Under” first appeared in *The London Magazine* and was later collected in *The Travelling Grave and Other Stories* (1948). It was included in *The Collected Macabre Stories of L. P. Hartley* (Tartarus Press, 2001).*

L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) was an English novelist and short story writer, best known for *The Go-Between*. Though celebrated for his novels, his ghost stories reveal a quieter, colder kind of terror.

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Old Man's Beard by H. Russell Wakefield Aug 29, 2025

Show notes

At Brinton-on-Sea, the summer passed in gentle rhythms. Mariella and her young fiancé read side by side on the beach, swam together in the quiet sea, while her parents looked on from their chairs. Nothing seemed amiss. But something was. She said nothing, yet her smiles grew thinner, her sleep unsettled. Her eyes lingered too long on nothing at all. And in the evenings, the air inside the house felt changed—thickened, as if it held its breath. Whatever troubled her was unseen, but it was growing.

Publication details:
“Old Man’s Beard” was first published in Old Man’s Beard: Fifteen Disturbing Tales by Geoffrey Bles in 1929.

Author biography:
H. R. Wakefield (1888–1964) was a British writer and publisher, known for ghost stories that marry restrained supernatural suggestion with psychological unease. He brought the Edwardian tale into the modern world with quiet menace.

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The Little Ghost by Hugh Walpole Aug 22, 2025

Show notes

In an old house by the Glebeshire coast, silence lingers more heavily than the sound of the sea. Its walls hold an atmosphere of watchfulness, as though the house itself remembers lives once lived within it. To a grieving visitor, it offers not terror but something stranger, something that cannot easily be explained.

“The Little Ghost” by Hugh Walpole was first published in When Churchyards Yawn (1931), edited by Cynthia Asquith, and later collected in Walpole’s own volume All Souls’ Night (1931).

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) was a bestselling English novelist and short story writer. He is remembered for his Lake District saga The Herries Chronicle and for a handful of haunting tales that combine psychological insight with Gothic atmosphere.

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The Victim by May Sinclair Aug 15, 2025

Show notes

Steven Acroyd is a jealous man—jealous, and prone to sudden, violent anger. He works in a remote country house under the quiet rule of an elderly master, brooding, watching, waiting. One night, he listens at a window and hears something about his fiancée that pushes him too far. He does something terrible, then tries to get away with it. Some ghosts come bearing messages, but this one brings a stranger message than most.

Publication Details

The Victim was first published in Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair in 1923. The collection reflects Sinclair’s deep interest in spiritualism and the metaphysics of consciousness.

Author Biography

May Sinclair (1863–1946) was a British novelist, philosopher and suffragist, best known today for pioneering stream-of-consciousness technique and for her fusion of idealist metaphysics with modernist fiction. She was one of the first critics to praise T. S. Eliot and to write seriously about Freud and mystical experience in English literature.

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