PODCAST · fiction
Classic Ghost Stories
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.
Episodes
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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...
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All Souls by Edith Wharton | Supernatural stories and classic horror
Edith Wharton's “All Souls” begins with an empty house on a winter night and a woman waiting as the snow piles up. Written six months before Wharton's death, this final completed work of fiction is something quieter than a cozy ghost story—and hard to shake. Hear Edith Wharton's “All Souls,” her...
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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.…
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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.…
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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...
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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…
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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...
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The Haunted Dolls House by M R James
Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses... A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable...
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The Face by E F Benson
London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate. And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should — she has never had cause to wish...
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A Professor of Egyptology by Guy Boothby
Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other — a man treated with strange deference by those who know him best, a man whose knowledge of the dead seems to run deeper than any book could...
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The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous
A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go. He goes anyway. There are things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs....
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The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling
A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed...
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The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball
In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, master of the estate, has heard enough. He is a rational man. He does not believe in werewolves. He has moulded the...
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Gabriel Ernest by Saki
Something is wrong in the woods. The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone. It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice,...
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The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith
There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil,...
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A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost
On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own conclusions. The exception is a story he has told no one: a woman he met in Cairo, a wrong he did her, and something that has…
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Hertford O'Donnells Warning by Charlotte Riddell
Gerard Street, Soho. A winter's night. A surgeon sits alone by his fire, a practical man — a man who has cut through flesh and bone without flinching, who has long since made his peace with whatever comes after death. And then something comes through the darkness. Not a dream. Not imagination....
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The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Broughton
There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he has noticed it for four years, and he does not like to say it aloud. What happens inside...
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The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit
A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night,...
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To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens
A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count…
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A Walk in the Park by William Bundy
There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the moonlight, patient as stone, returning with...
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My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan
A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that…
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Gabriel Ernest Episode by Saki
Something is wrong in the woods.The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone.It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice…
more -
The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith
There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil,...
-
To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens
A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count…
more -
A Walk In The Park by William Bundy
A Walk in the Park by William Bundy There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the...
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My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan
A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that…
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The Moon Bog by H P Lovecraft
There is a bog in County Meath that the old people will not speak of after dark. They know, as old people in such places always know, that certain ground is not waste ground simply because nothing grows on it, that still water is not empty water, and that when a man of money and modern confidence...
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The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield
This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post. In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a long line, watches her companion, Amelia, wither into…
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The Death Mask by H D Everett
Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in return. There is nothing unusual in that either. What is unusual is what keeps happening to the white linen. His first wife...
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Lost Hearts by M R James
Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936) Join my patreon: https://patreon.com/barcud There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the…
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Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes
On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to…
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A Bottle of Perrier by Edith Wharton
Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on...
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For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford
The moon lifts off the water and climbs the sky over Calabria. Two men sit on the stones of an old tower above the coast, sipping the local wine, basking in the warm dark. Below them, where the rock runs down toward the sea, there is a mound in the earth. One of them notices something in the…
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The Thing Invisible by W H Hodgson
In an old private chapel attached to a country house, a trusted servant keeps night watch beside the ancient altar, alone behind a locked door. By morning he is found dead, a dagger from the chapel’s peculiar mechanism driven clean through his heart—though no human hand should have been able to...
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A Recluse by Walter de la Mare
There is a house at the end of a lane. You have seen it before — or something like it. Palladian, still, its pale stone holding the last of the May light as if reluctant to let the evening come. The chestnut trees stand tall around it. The air is warm and gold and very quiet. Charles Dash stops…
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The Bat by Bela Lugosi
Link to Audio version “The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural...
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The Bat by Bela Lugosi
Link to Audio version “The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural...
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The Terror of Blue John Gap by Arthur Conan Doyle
A young doctor, recovering from illness, is sent to the Derbyshire hills for his health. He takes lodgings at a remote farm, where he notices the family's reluctance to discuss the valley below. There's a Roman mine nearby that no one acknowledges, and a particular opening in the earth that...
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And No Bird Sings by E F Benson
A man takes a sunlit shortcut through an English wood and finds that something is missing. There is no thrush, and no blackbird, and no rustle of wings – only a strange dimming of the light, and a silence that feels willed, and watchful, and almost hungry. At his friend's house the dogs will not...
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Mezengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe
Two noble houses. Centuries of hatred. A prophecy that may mean nothing—or everything. In medieval Hungary, the young Baron Metzengerstein encounters a horse—gigantic, fiery-colored, unlike any creature in his stables. He rides it obsessively. Dawn and midnight. Sickness and health. Riveted to…
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An Encounter in the Mist by A N L Munby
A solitary man, lost in the Welsh hills, stumbles through thick mist—his only companion a mounting sense of unease. The landscape is indifferent; the path vanishes; every familiar landmark dissolves into obscurity. Rescue appears in the form of an enigmatic stranger, whose kindness feels both...
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The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by M R James
A mediaeval abbot leaves behind a cipher—not in his will, but scratched into the glass of his own church. The treasure it guards has lain undisturbed for centuries. Mr. Somerton, a scholar with a taste for puzzles, believes he can solve what others have missed. The Latin is difficult, the clues…
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The Occupant of the Room by Algernon Blackwood
A schoolmaster arrives late at night in a remote Alpine village. The inn has no rooms. Then suddenly—there is one. A room that's occupied, yet empty. A room whose previous tenant, an Englishwoman, left two days before and hasn't returned. As he unpacks his few belongings, the atmosphere begins to...
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Cwm Garon by L T C Rolt
Sponsored by the generosity of Gavin Critchley. Thanks, Gavin! The valley of Cwm Garon is a place of ancient ruins and emerald meadows, tucked deep within the Welsh Borderland. When John Carfax first arrives, it seems a sanctuary, far from the grime of the city. But the stillness here is…
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The Playfellow by Lady Cynthia Asquith
Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the fire that claimed a child's life twelve years ago. For Claude Halyard, it is an earthly paradise reclaimed. For his wife Laura, it is a home…
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The Skeleton Count or The Vampire Mistress by Elizabeth Grey
Let's go Gothick. Get your pitchfork. Get your burning brand. We're off to the castle to see the count. The Skeleton Count; or, The Vampire Mistress In the shadowed corridors of a remote castle, Count Rodolph has made a bargain that no mortal should contemplate. The price of eternal life is high,...
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A Message for Julia by R A Sunter
Jean-Pierre Ducharme and Ms. Esmeralda Spinoza are experts in the delicate architecture of the séance. Inside the stillness of Julia Silverman’s game room, they prepare to reach across the divide for a daughter lost four months prior. It is a space of flickering candles, soft whispers, and the...
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The Frost Fair by Tony Walker
One of my own stories. The River Thames freezes and a Frost Fair is held for the first time since 1814. Two friends meet for a pint of Dark Ale in the ancient London riverside pub, the Water Witch. What could go wrong? If you've never listened to one of my stories, give this one a try. Many…
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The Demon King by J B Priestley
It's Boxing Night in Bruddersford and the pantomime's a disaster waiting to happen. The company's second-rate, the theatre's half empty, and the actor playing the Demon King hasn't turned up. Then he does—and suddenly everything changes. The performance takes on an authority it never had in...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Tony Walker
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Classic Ghost Stories have?
Classic Ghost Stories currently has 395 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Classic Ghost Stories about?
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,...
How often does Classic Ghost Stories release new episodes?
Classic Ghost Stories publishes regularly with 395 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Classic Ghost Stories?
You can listen to Classic Ghost Stories on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Classic Ghost Stories?
Classic Ghost Stories is created and hosted by Tony Walker.
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