Classic Ghost Stories Podcast: Recent Episodes
Tony Walker
Classic Ghost Stories Podcasts: Tales from the Pens of the Masters, Bram Stoker, M R James, H P Lovecraft, Edith Wharton
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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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City of Dancing Horses is the third book in the trilogy that began with Unreal City and City of Light. It is 1925. Rosa Oderberg lives in Vienna, moving through rooms thick with silence, her grief dulled but never soothed. Wilhelm has returned from Paris, where he and his confederates were nearly undone by the clan of the Secondborn — a hermetic brood of vampiric beings, neither real nor unreal, more contagion than creature, whose presence lingers like an infection of the soul. Now, in the dripping streets of Vienna, Rosa senses that her own hauntings are only beginning.
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A narrowboat moors in Eastwick, a village cut off by time and road. Among its postcards and memories stands an ancient stone — and in every image, a shadow that should not be there. When George Middleton takes his own photograph, the shadow moves closer.
This is one of my own stories — and this time, I’m out to scare you. Let’s see if I manage to.
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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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Haunted Castles by Tony Walker
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A letter arrives—calm in tone, almost conversational. But beneath its surface, something unsettles. A favour once done, a house long locked, a memory that won’t quite settle. There are impressions that can’t be explained, and a sense—quiet, persistent—that something was not as it should have been.
The Clock first appeared in W. F. Harvey’s 1928 collection The Beast with Five Fingers, published by J. M. Dent & Sons. It has since been reprinted in several major ghost story anthologies.
William Fryer Harvey (1885–1937) was a Yorkshire-born writer and Quaker, best known for his concise and unsettling tales of the supernatural. A former naval surgeon, he was awarded the Albert Medal for Lifesaving during the First World War.
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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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She was flawless. A model of grace and stillness, prized by every artist who worked with her. But beneath the surface of the painter’s studio—amid the heat, the charcoal dust, and the careful posing—something else lingered.
“Rose Rose” by Barry Pain was first published in Stories in Grey (T. Werner Laurie, 1911). It is now in the public domain.
Barry Eric Odell Pain (1864–1928) was a British humorist and writer of uncanny fiction. H.P. Lovecraft cited him as an influence, and Robert Louis Stevenson compared him to Maupassant.
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Seen from a passing stagecoach, you might think that Gylingden Hall is not the sort of place where the dead rest easily. The chimneys are cold, the gallery echoes with no human tread, and the great trees that line the avenue whisper of old wrongs and buried fury. In the shadow of the ruined chapel and beneath the rot-black timbers of the house, something lingers—a grief curdled into malice, a legacy neither signed nor forgotten. Squire Toby’s Will is not a tale of ghosts who startle, but of the slow, relentless suffocation of guilt, and of the strange things a man will refuse to see, even when they’re clawing at the door.
Published anonymously in Temple Bar magazine, Volume XXII, in 1868. Later attributed to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and often compared to his novel The Wyvern Mystery, written around the same time.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic fiction and supernatural tales, widely praised for his subtle and psychologically charged ghost stories. A master of atmosphere and ambiguity, he was admired by M. R. James and influenced the shape of modern horror fiction.
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In H.G. Wells's "The Red Room," a young man, confident in his rationality, seeks to debunk the supernatural in a reputedly haunted chamber. He is certain that his experience will be defined by logic and reason. But the air within the castle walls is heavy with unspoken dread, and as the candles dwindle, something shifts. Is it the room itself, or something within him, that begins to unravel? "The Red Room" was first published in The Idler magazine in March of 1896. H.G. Wells (1866-1946), a visionary of science fiction and social commentary, explored the depths of human experience with unparalleled skill.
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Returning home to England after the American Revolutionary War, General Browne, a soldier hardened by war and governed by reason, accepts an invitation to the castle of his old school-friend, Lord Woodville. The place has only lately been inherited and is undergoing tasteful restoration, its mediaeval past slowly yielding to Georgian elegance. But not all traces of the past have been swept away.
One chamber remains veiled in its former splendour—its faded tapestry concealing more than just stone walls. It is this room that is given to the General to stay in overnight.
The Tapestried Chamber was written by Sir Walter Scott and published in The Keepsake for 1829, during the final years of his life, when he was writing under intense pressure in an effort to repay heavy debts.
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In the year 1795, in the secluded Derbyshire town of Barford, a stranger settles into the old White House. He renovates it handsomely, pays every bill on time, and quickly wins the friendship of the local squire and his daughter. Among the hunting gentry, he seems to fit right in.
But this is a story of the hunting gentry—and the secrets they don’t know, and the things people do when no one is looking.
The Squire’s Story is a Gothic tale by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in Household Words in 1853. Known for Cranford and North and South, Gaskell here turns her subtle realism to darker terrain.
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Beneath the brooding skies of Braun Fell, the Dewle family grapples with a dark inheritance, and John, a boyhood friend, is urgently summoned to help them navigate their dilemma. A lust for wealth consumes beautiful Jonquil, driving her to urge the use of questionable methods, while her husband, who would do anything to please her, is wary about such a path. So what will John advise? Join me as we unravel this tale of greed, forbidden knowledge, and the shadows that linger in the human heart. I am, Tony Walker, narrator of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast and this week's story is: The Withered Heart by G G Pendarves.
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What happened down in the cellar?
In Andrea Smith's disquieting tale, Peg grapples with her brother Milo's delicate state after a shocking incident. Whispers, unease, and a chilling presence haunt their isolated cottage. Can Peg protect Milo from whatever threatens them, or will a haunting past cast a shadow over them both?
Listen now to "Young Billy Me Lad Story" and discover the unsettling truth! Perhaps it was for the best.
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An English traveller, delayed in an unfamiliar village, hears a troubling local legend—one the villagers are reluctant to discuss. Drawn by curiosity into a nearby wood no one dares enter, he finds the past is not so easily buried. What he encounters there resists explanation, hovering uneasily between tragedy and nightmare. L.A. Lewis’s tale unfolds slowly, in quiet conversation and half-glimpsed memory, before leading the listener into something far darker, and far stranger, than expected.
Not everything seen can be forgotten—even when forgetting is all we want.
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In a dim parlour by the sea, where the waves sigh like old regrets, Madame Lily Floss lays her tarot cards on green silk and dreams of escape. She longs for a life beyond the shore, beyond her mother’s house, beyond her fate. Then, one evening, a stranger arrives — a man who claims they’ve not yet met… but already remembers everything.
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Is time an endless ocean? Randolph Carter, armed with a silver key, sets sail across its fathomless depths. His quest: the ultimate truth. But the waters are treacherous, and the shores lead to alien worlds and entities beyond human reckoning. And what if once you go, you can't get back?
Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is a short story co-written by American writers H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price between October 1932 and April 1933. A sequel to Lovecraft's "The Silver Key", and part of a sequence of stories focusing on Randolph Carter, it was first published in the July 1934 issue of Weird Tales.
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The Lodger in Room 16 by David Dixon
In a faded guesthouse perched on the edge of an unnamed northern town, Room 16 has always had its secrets. When an elusive lodger, rumoured to work in the local cemetery, takes residence, reality begins to fray at the edges. The residents soon discover unsettling truths—each revelation more absurd and disturbing than the last. As it becomes clear that the lodger has always been there, predating even the current landlord, the occupants find themselves trapped in an escalating nightmare, haunted equally by their quiet desperation and the uncanny presence behind Room 16’s door. Dixon's chilling tale captures the grim absurdity and psychological unease of modern British horror, where dread seeps through the mundane, and the most disturbing terrors are those quietly entrenched within.
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Denys Val Baker (1917-1984), a prolific author and editor, made significant contributions to British literature, particularly in short fiction and regional writing. His work often drew inspiration from his adopted home of Cornwall, where he settled in 1948. "The Face in the Mirror" is the title story from Val Baker's first American collection, published by Arkham House in 1971. This limited edition of 2,045 copies introduced Val Baker's unique blend of everyday observation and uncanny elements to a new audience. The collection showcases his ability to capture the essence of human experience with both humour and poignancy, traits that had already established him as a notable figure in 20th-century British letters. "The Face in the Mirror" exemplifies Val Baker's skill in crafting tales that blur the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Substackers….
I’m not sure this is where people come to listen to podcasts, so perhaps it would be better for you and easier for me if I closed down this platform. Let me know if this would be a problem for you.
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My voice has given up so I can't record a story without it sounding like a rubber tyre riding on polystyrene. So, I dug into the archives and found an old 'true ghost' / timeslip story I narrated on an H5 zoom in a closet using the H5 Zoom built in microphone. As such, forgive the audio.
On 10th August 1901, two English women walked into the past.
During a visit to the Palace of Versailles, on the anniversary of the French Revolution, two ordinary women saw the French Queen, Marie Antoinette sitting in the gardens in front of them, along with nobles, gardeners, houses, bridges and stones that when they went back, were no longer there.
Backed up by a decade of research, the two women decided to publish their extraordinary adventure in 1910. Their timeslip experience has become known as the Ghosts of the Petit Trianon.
Did these two Edwardian women actually experience time travel, or did they see the ghosts of things that had been?
Previously, out of print, this is a new edition, edited and translated for the modern age, with additional material that looks at subsequent timeslip type experiences at Versailles
An Adventure Ebook For You To Read Along
Here's a link to a PDF I made of the book so you can read along and see where I made mistakes.
An Adventure by Charlotte Moberley and Eleanor Jourdain
Book Club
Áine Moroney has asked me to remind you of the existence of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast Book Club to be found on Discord. Please use this link to join.
https://discord.gg/tZQrbsCf
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Set against the charming backdrop of Cornwall's picturesque villages and folklore-filled hedges, "The Vicar's Ghost" by Lucy Farmer weaves a tale of intrigue and whimsy. During a Christmas visit, Lucy, her son Charley, and Aunt Martha become embroiled in a series of mysterious events at the vicarage. Charley's sighting of an enigmatic clergyman leads to Aunt Martha revealing a local legend of a vicar who died many years ago and whose ghost is said to return each year, accompanied by eerie disturbances. As a winter storm brews, the story transforms into a light-hearted romp, reminiscent of a Victorian-era adventure, with the community rallying to solve the mystery.
Unraveling the tale, Lucy and her companions discover that apparitions might not be as supernatural as they seem, hinting at Victorian times being unexpectedly "progressive." The story unfolds with a blend of humour and suspense, reminiscent of a playful detective story. As secrets hidden as a silver sixpence in a Christmas pudding come to light, it becomes clear that truth is sometimes stranger—and more delightful—than fiction. The captivating conclusion leaves both the characters and readers pondering the charming complexities of reality and folklore.
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In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Edgar Allan Poe presents a gripping tale where the boundaries of life and death are pushed in ways both fascinating and unnerving. The story unfolds with clinical precision, yet reveals a deeper, more disturbing reality that lingers long after the last word. If you’re drawn to stories that provoke thought and unsettle in equal measure, this is one you won’t want to miss. Listen now for an experience that quietly questions the limits of science and the mysteries that lie beyond.
Classic Ghost Stories Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
⭐ Join my Patreon ⭐
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Go here for a library of ad-free stories, a monthly members only story and early access to the regular stories I put out.
You can choose to have ghost stories only, or detective stories or classic literature, or all of them for either $5 or $10 a month.
Many hundreds of hours of stories. Who needs Audible?
Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work
https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk
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Henry Fern, an elitist with a very un-elite life, finds himself drawn to Venice by a recurring dream of romance and connection. His arrival in the famed city brings not the fulfillment of his fantasies, but a stark confrontation with decay and disillusionment. As Fern grapples with his shattered expectations, a mysterious encounter leads him on a haunting gondola ride through Venice's shadowy canals. What begins as a journey to reclaim a lost dream soon unravels into a chilling exploration of desire, mortality, and the thin line between reality and nightmare. This narration delves into the depths of human longing and the sometimes terrifying consequences of pursuing our deepest wishes.
Classic Ghost Stories Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonywalker.substack.com/subscribe
In the shadows of Victorian England, 19 Great Hanover Street stands as a silent witness to unspeakable horrors. Dr. Alan Forsyth, a man of science and reason, finds his convictions challenged as he confronts a terrifying presence that defies explanation. As the boundary between the living and the dead blurs, Forsyth must unravel the dark history of his new residence before it claims him as its next victim. Lillie Harris weaves a chilling tale that explores the limits of rationality and the power of the unknown, leaving readers questioning what truly lurks in the corners of their own homes
Thanks to Ed Winter for sponsoring this episode.
To sponsor further stories (you get to choose!) please contact me via:
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By the way, Substack is feeling like a quiet place and I’m not sure it’s where people go to listen to podcasts. It would make my life simpler if everyone on Substack come over to Patreon https://www.patreon.com/barcud as only about 53% (not about, it’s pretty precise) even open the mails I send them from Substack.
What do you think?
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Immerse yourself in the hauntingly evocative world of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," narrated by Tony Walker. This Southern Gothic tale unravels the life of Emily Grierson, a reclusive woman shrouded in mystery and steeped in tradition. As the layers of her existence are peeled back, the listener is drawn into a web of intrigue, secrecy, and the macabre. Walker's compelling narration breathes life into Faulkner's rich prose, making this timeless story of love, loss, and the passage of time an unforgettable auditory experience. Enter "Poor Emily's" enigmatic world and discover the chilling secrets that lie within.
I've posted this on my Classic Stories channel but I thought you might like a bit of Southern Gothic.
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Each episode of Ashridge is self-contained. This is the pilot episode where a travelling salesman hears tales of the sinister Rabbit Man.
Ashridge is an idyllic, English village in the south-west of England, just off the Ridgeway, and ancient track that has been used since the Stone Age. Crop Circles appear in the the cornfields around the village in summer. The landscape around the town is dotted with Bronze Age burial mounds. Strange lights are seen above Blackie's Woods, and modern secrets lurk under the village streets.
Part Folk Horror, part New Weird, the tales of Ashridge aim to terrify.
If you enjoy this audiodrama, please spread the word, tell your friends, share on social media.
I would like as many ears as possible to hear this collaboration with some great talents including Jasper LeStrange of Encrypted Horror, Ben Brinicombe of SciFi Theatre, Jonathan Sharpe of The Heartwood Institute, Gwyneth Evans, Chris Foley and David Thompson.
horror #folkhorror #audiodrama #horroraudiodrama
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In the darkness of a Mediterranean night, the Osiris slices through the waves, carrying with it a passenger burdened by a haunting tale. Alastair Colvin, a man with a shadowed past, reluctantly shares his story of Thurnley Abbey, a Gothic estate nestled in the heart of rural England.
Rumoured to be cursed and haunted, the abbey's notoriety has spread far and wide, striking fear into the hearts of locals and curiosity in the minds of the brave. As Colvin's narrative unfolds, his listener is drawn into a world where the line between the living and the dead blurs, and the abbey's dark secrets threaten to consume all who dare to uncover them.
Discussion of the story (with spoilers) here
https://tonywalker.craft.me/Sbfh2neVPiYdE7
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I am doing the notes separately because some people said they just wanted the teaser to help them decide to listen or not. Others did want notes so I've put them separately.
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See here for more details, and spoilers
Story ends at 31:56, after that is pure guff.
Requested by Fin Narthex
Prepare to delve into the haunting world of Guy de Maupassant's "Who Knows?", a chilling tale that blurs the lines between reality and the supernatural. Join the narrator as he recounts his unsettling experiences with his beloved furniture, which seems to take on a life of its own. As the story unfolds, you'll find yourself questioning the narrator's sanity and the true nature of the events that unfold. Is it a case of mental instability, or are there truly otherworldly forces at play?
Immerse yourself in this atmospheric masterpiece and unravel the mystery that lies at the heart of "Who Knows?".
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The Smoke Ghost PDF
Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for his sword-and-sorcery stories and his novel "Conjure Wife" (1943). Leiber's works often combined elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and he coined the term "sword and sorcery." He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in modern speculative fiction.
"The Smoke Ghost" (1941) is a key example of urban weird fiction, blending horror, fantasy, and social commentary. The story explores themes of urban alienation and the horrors of modernity, as seen in other works like H.F. Arnold's "The Night Wire" (1926) and Leiber's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" (1949). These stories tap into the sense of disconnection and vulnerability that people experience in the face of rapid urbanization and technological change.
Leiber's background in psychology and interest in Carl Jung's works are evident in "The Smoke Ghost." The titular entity can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Jungian Shadow archetype, representing the repressed aspects of the protagonist Catesby Wran's psyche and the collective unconscious of modern urban society. The climax of the story, in which Wran accepts the smoke ghost's dominion, can be seen as a twisted individuation process.
"The Smoke Ghost" shares similarities with M.R. James's ghost stories, featuring a protagonist haunted by a supernatural entity embodying his deepest fears and anxieties. Both Leiber and James suggest that even rational individuals are not immune to the lure of the supernatural. However, Leiber's story is firmly rooted in the modern urban landscape, reflecting the anxieties of a rapidly changing world.
Leiber's story also bears the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and cosmic horror. The smoke ghost can be seen as a manifestation of the cosmic horror lurking beneath the surface of modern urban life, defying easy categorization and understanding. The story's bleak ending echoes the cosmic pessimism in Lovecraft's work. However, Leiber brings the horror into the heart of the modern city, creating a kind of urban cosmic horror that transplants Lovecraftian themes into the gritty, mid-20th century metropolis.
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Alan Noel Latimer Munby (25 December 1913 – 26 December 1974) was a distinguished English librarian, bibliographical scholar, and book collector, noted for his contributions to the study of rare books and manuscripts. Additionally, he gained recognition as an author of ghost stories, influenced by the style of M. R. James.
Munby was born in Hampstead, the son of architect Alan E. Munby and Ethel Greenhill. He received his education at Clifton College and later attended King's College, Cambridge, where he acquired the nickname "Tim."
Munby's career encompassed various roles in the antiquarian book trade, including positions at Bernard Quaritch Ltd. and Sotheby & Company. During World War II, he served in the British Army and was later held as a prisoner of war. Following the war, he assumed the role of Librarian at King's College, Cambridge, and was subsequently appointed as a fellow. He held esteemed positions such as the J.P.R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at the University of Oxford and the Sandars Reader in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge. Munby was also a co-founder of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society and served as President of the Bibliographical Society until his passing in 1974.
Munby's scholarly works include a comprehensive study of the eccentric nineteenth-century book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, as well as a series of Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons. He collaborated posthumously on a union list of British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676–1800, with Lenore Coral.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Munby authored a collection of ghost stories titled "The Alabaster Hand." Three of these tales were written during his internment in Oflag VII-B, a German prisoner-of-war camp, and were featured in the prison-camp magazine, Touchstone. The stories, namely "The Topley Place Sale," "The Four Poster," and "The White Sack," received acclaim for their subtle yet chilling narrative style, reminiscent of the tradition established by M. R. James.
"The Alabaster Hand" was published in 1949 by Dennis Dobson Ltd.
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Another live reading that hasn’t been heard on Substack before. Forgive the les than ideal sound quality.
Saki, also known by his real name Hector Hugh Munro, was a British writer best known for his witty and satirical short stories. He was born on December 18, 1870, in Akyab, British Burma (now Myanmar), to a British colonial officer and his wife. Saki's mother died when he was only two years old, and he was sent to live with his aunts in England.
Saki's childhood was marked by tragedy and loss. His father was killed by a tiger while on a hunting trip in India, and Saki was sent to live with his grandmother in England. He attended several boarding schools, but he was often rebellious and did not excel academically. He left school at the age of 16 and worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent for various newspapers.
In 1900, Saki returned to England and began writing short stories. He adopted the pen name "Saki" after a character in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. His stories were often set in Edwardian England and featured dark humor and satire, poking fun at the upper class and their social conventions. Some of his most famous works include "The Open Window," "The Storyteller," and "The Interlopers."
Saki's writing career was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. He enlisted in the army and served as a private in the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. He was killed in action on November 14, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.
Saki's legacy lives on through his witty and clever short stories, which continue to be read and studied today. His writing has influenced many other authors, including P.G. Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. Saki's work is also known for its use of irony and surprise endings, which have become hallmarks of the short story genre.
In addition to his writing, Saki was also known for his eccentric and flamboyant personality. He was a member of the literary circle known as the "The Souls," which included other famous writers such as E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Saki was also openly gay, which was uncommon and often frowned upon during his time.
Despite his short life, Saki left a lasting impact on the literary world with his unique and satirical writing style. His stories continue to entertain and delight readers, making him one of the most beloved and influential short story writers of the 20th century.
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This story was salvaged from a live reading on YouTube. I haven't previously issued this on Patreon or Substack.
H. B. Marriott-Watson (1863-1921) was an English poet, novelist, and literary critic. He was born in London and educated at Oxford University. He began his career as a journalist, writing for various newspapers and magazines, including the Pall Mall Gazette and the Saturday Review.
Marriott-Watson's first published work was a collection of poems titled "The Flute of Pan" (1887). He went on to publish several more volumes of poetry, including "The Sirens' Song" (1892) and "The Unknown God" (1895). His poetry was known for its romantic and mystical themes, and was often compared to the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne.
In addition to his poetry, Marriott-Watson also wrote several novels, including "The House of the Wolf" (1890) and "The Devil-Tree of El Dorado" (1897). His novels were often set in exotic locations and explored themes of love, betrayal, and the supernatural.
Marriott-Watson was also a prolific literary critic, writing reviews and essays for various publications. He was a strong advocate for the Symbolist movement in literature, and was a friend and supporter of writers such as Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson.
Despite his literary success, Marriott-Watson struggled with financial difficulties throughout his life. He died in poverty in 1921, but his work continued to be admired by fellow writers and critics. Today, he is remembered as a talented poet and novelist of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras
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Abraham "Bram" Stoker was born on November 8, 1847, in Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland. He was the third of seven children born to Abraham Stoker and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley Stoker. Stoker spent much of his early childhood bedridden due to an unknown illness, during which he entertained himself with stories and books. Despite his illness, he eventually made a full recovery and went on to study at Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in athletics and graduated with honours in Mathematics.
After graduation, Stoker pursued a career in civil service while also working as a freelance journalist and theatre critic. His passion for writing led him to become the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he met and formed a close friendship with the renowned actor Sir Henry Irving. Stoker's association with Irving greatly influenced his literary career and provided inspiration for some of his most famous works.
Although Stoker wrote numerous novels, short stories, and non-fiction works, he is best known for his Gothic horror masterpiece, "Dracula," published in 1897. The novel, which tells the story of Count Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England in order to spread the undead curse, has become a timeless classic of English literature. "Dracula" introduced many of the vampire conventions still prevalent in contemporary culture, including the portrayal of vampires as charismatic and aristocratic beings with a thirst for blood.
Despite the success of "Dracula," Stoker struggled financially throughout much of his life. He continued to write prolifically, producing several more novels and short stories, but none achieved the same level of success as his iconic vampire tale. Stoker passed away on April 20, 1912, in London, at the age of 64. While he did not live to see the full extent of "Dracula's" enduring legacy, his creation has since become one of the most iconic and influential figures in popular culture, inspiring countless adaptations, sequels, and reimaginings in literature, theatre, film, and television. Bram Stoker's contribution to the horror genre and his enduring legacy as the creator of one of literature's most iconic monsters continue to be celebrated by readers and scholars alike
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One of my own stories from my newly published collection ‘Further Ghost Stories’.
For those who dislike buying from Amazon, you can get it from my Ko-Fi store, and I actually end up with a bigger royalty from Ko-Fi, but this is only for digital versions (epub and PDF).
For those who want a paperback, it will have to be Amazon.
This is an affiliate link, so I get a small commission on top of the royalty this way.
https://amzn.to/3AZWk9o
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This episode features an audiobook reading of William Hope Hodgson's classic horror story, "The Voice in the Night." The story is set on a small sailing vessel in the North Pacific Ocean and centers around a mysterious voice calling out from the darkness. The audiobook reading is filled with suspense and tension, as the characters encounter strange and unsettling occurrences on a deserted island.
Listeners will be transported to a world of terror and horror as they follow the story to its chilling conclusion.
WeirdTales #TheVoiceInTheNight, #horrorstory, #audiobook, and #WilliamHopeHodgson.
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P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, popularly known as P. G. Wodehouse, was a British humorist and author who was born on October 15, 1881, in Guildford, Surrey, England. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic writers in English literature and is best known for his humorous and cleverly written novels and short stories featuring the characters of Jeeves and Wooster, Psmith, and Blandings Castle.
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Wodehouse was the son of a British judge who worked in Hong Kong. His mother was a talented writer who encouraged his love of reading and writing. Wodehouse was educated at Dulwich College and later at the University of Oxford. However, he left the university without completing his degree and decided to pursue a career as a writer.
Wodehouse started his writing career as a journalist and humorist for various magazines and newspapers, including Punch and The Strand Magazine. His first book, The Pothunters, was published in 1902, and he went on to publish over 90 books, including novels, collections of short stories, and plays.
In 1914, Wodehouse moved to the United States, where he continued to write and became a popular figure in the literary and social circles of New York. During World War II, Wodehouse was living in France, and he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent several months in a detention camp and was later released, but the controversy surrounding his imprisonment caused him to leave England and move permanently to the United States.
Throughout his career, Wodehouse's writing was celebrated for its wit, humor, and impeccable comic timing. His characters, such as the hapless Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, became iconic figures in popular culture and are still widely recognized today. Wodehouse was awarded numerous honors during his lifetime, including knighthood in 1975, but he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the world of humorous literature.
Wodehouse continued to write until his death on February 14, 1975, at the age of 93. Today, his works are still beloved by readers around the world and are considered timeless classics of English literature.
Despite his immense popularity as a writer, Wodehouse was not immune to controversy. In particular, his decision to continue writing and publishing works during World War II while living in France was criticized by some as being unpatriotic. This controversy led Wodehouse to leave England and move permanently to the United States. Despite this controversy, Wodehouse continued to write and remained a prolific author throughout his life. He was married twice in his life, first to Ethel Wayman in 1914 and later to Ethel's former secretary, Edith de Selincourt, in 1947.
It's true that P.G. Wodehouse never officially divorced Ethel Wayman, but after they separated in 1921, they essentially lived separate lives. In 1947, Wodehouse married his second wife, Edith de Selincourt. Ethel Wayman was still alive at the time of their marriage, but she had been living in a psychiatric hospital for several years and was reportedly unable to communicate.
Ethel Wayman was an English actress and singer who was born in 1896. She began her career as a child performer and went on to appear in several West End productions, including "The Belle of New York" and "The Dairymaids."
In 1914, Wayman married P.G. Wodehouse, who was working as a lyricist for musicals at the time. The couple had a turbulent marriage, and they separated in 1921, but they never officially divorced. After their separation, Wayman continued to work as an actress, appearing in films and on stage.
In the 1930s, Wayman's mental health began to decline, and she was eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she remained for the rest of her life. Wayman's condition was never fully diagnosed, but it has been speculated that she suffered from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Despite the difficulties in their marriage, Wodehouse continued to support Wayman financially and even visited her in the hospital from time to time. He dedicated several of his books to her, including "Ukridge" and "The Clicking of Cuthbert." Wayman died in the hospital in 1962, having never fully recovered from her mental illness.
Wodehouse's marriage to Edith de Selincourt was not legally recognized in England because he was still technically married to Ethel Wayman, but it was recognized in the United States, where they lived. Edith de Selincourt survived Wodehouse and died in 1984.
Edith de Selincourt, born Edith Annette de Selincourt, was P.G. Wodehouse's second wife. She was the daughter of a barrister and had worked as Ethel Wayman's secretary before marrying Wodehouse. In addition to her work as a secretary, de Selincourt was also a writer and published several books under the name "Helen Cresswell," including children's books and novels.
De Selincourt was known for being a devoted wife to Wodehouse and for helping him with his writing. She typed many of his manuscripts and helped him with research for his books. Wodehouse dedicated several of his later books to her, including "Jeeves in the Offing" and "Much Obliged, Jeeves." After Wodehouse's death, de Selincourt continued to work as a writer and published a memoir about their life together called "Wodehouse at Home" in 1981.
Honeysuckle Cottage
The story was first published in the collection "Meet Mr. Mulliner" in 1927. "Meet Mr. Mulliner" is a collection of short stories featuring a character named Mr. Mulliner, who tells humorous stories about his various relatives.
"Honeysuckle Cottage" is a short story by P.G. Wodehouse, narrated by Mr. Mulliner, about James Rodman, a mystery novelist who inherits a house in the country from his aunt, romance novelist Leila J. Pinckney. The will states that James must reside in Honeysuckle Cottage for six months of every year or forfeit the money. James moves into the house, where he is perplexed to find himself writing a love interest into his mystery novel.
James becomes convinced that the house is haunted by the influence of his aunt's sentimental romance novels, and is concerned that the house will compel him to propose to Rose, an admirer of Pinckney's novels who comes to stay. When Rose's guardian arrives and James rescues her dog from the river, he is forced into proposing to her by her guardian. However, James is saved from his unwelcome fate by his aunt's dog William and the two flee to London, becoming inseparable companions.
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F. Marion Crawford
Francis Marion Crawford was an American author and journalist who lived from 1854 to 1909. He was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, to a family of art connoisseurs and spent much of his childhood traveling throughout Europe. Crawford attended Harvard University for a year before leaving to pursue a career in writing.
Crawford began his writing career as a journalist, working for several newspapers and magazines such as the New York Tribune and the Boston Evening Transcript. He wrote travel books and essays about his experiences living in Italy, and these early works were well received.
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In 1882, Crawford published his first novel, "Mr. Isaacs," which was a critical and commercial success. He went on to write over 40 novels, as well as numerous short stories, essays, and plays. Many of his works were set in Italy and drew on his experiences living there, including some of his best-known novels such as "Saracinesca," "Sant' Ilario," and "Casa Braccio."
Aside from his success as a writer, Crawford was also descended from a long line of artists and writers. His grandfather, William Crawford, was an American portrait painter, and his great-grandfather, Gilbert Stuart, painted George Washington's portrait. Crawford's father, Thomas Crawford, was a successful sculptor who created several prominent public sculptures in the United States, including the statue of Freedom on top of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
Crawford's novels explored complex themes such as love, betrayal, and social class, and his characters often struggled with their own personal demons, making them relatable to readers across time and place. Crawford was considered one of the leading writers of his day and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded several honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe.
Despite his success, Crawford was known for his private nature and his avoidance of public appearances. He was married twice and had four children. Crawford died in Sorrento, Italy, on April 9, 1909, at the age of 54. His works continue to be read and enjoyed today for their vivid depictions of Italian society, their engaging characters, and their ability to transport readers to other times and places.
The Upper Berth
"The Upper Berth" is a horror story by F. Marion Crawford, first published in 1886. The story is set on a passenger ship and follows a young man named Brisbane as he takes a cabin on the upper deck for a voyage across the Atlantic. Brisbane soon becomes aware of strange and terrifying occurrences in his cabin, including the sounds of someone moving in the upper berth above him, despite the fact that he is the only passenger in the cabin.
One of the strengths of "The Upper Berth" is Crawford's ability to create a suspenseful and eerie atmosphere. He builds tension throughout the story, gradually revealing more and more about the strange happenings in Brisbane's cabin. The descriptions of the creaking ship, the eerie silence of the night, and the mysterious noises from the upper berth all add to the story's creepy atmosphere.
Another positive aspect of the story is its twist ending, which is both surprising and satisfying. The ending provides a satisfying resolution to the mystery of the upper berth and leaves the reader with a lingering sense of unease.
However, one of the flaws of "The Upper Berth" is its reliance on clichés and stereotypes. The story includes many of the standard tropes of horror stories, such as the lone traveler in a strange place, the creepy sounds in the night, and the mysterious disappearance of previous passengers. Additionally, the story relies on stereotypes of sailors as rough and superstitious, which can be off-putting to modern readers.
Overall, "The Upper Berth" is a well-written horror story that effectively creates a sense of suspense and unease. While it may rely on some clichés and stereotypes, it remains a classic example of the genre and is worth reading for fans of horror fiction.
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Step back in time to Victorian Paris, a city of mystery and intrigue, where danger lurks around every corner and secrets are hidden behind every closed door. In this podcast episode, you will be transported to the heart of the City of Lights, where a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue awaits."A Terribly Strange Bed" is a little gem of a story, published in 1852 by the master of suspense himself, Wilkie Collins. The story follows the protagonist, who is bored of his usual respectable haunts and decides to venture into a low down gambling den, where he begins to win, and win, and win.
However, as the night wears on, our protagonist finds himself caught up in a web of danger and intrigue that he could never have imagined. The stakes become higher and higher, until he finds himself in a situation where his very life is at risk.So, if you're in the mood for a thrilling tale of danger and intrigue, look no further than "A Terribly Strange Bed." This little gem of a story is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat, and remind you why Wilkie Collins is considered one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era.
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Robert W. Chambers
Robert W. Chambers was an American author and artist born on May 26, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York. He is most famous for his collection of short stories, "The King in Yellow," published in 1895, which influenced many writers of horror and weird fiction.
Chambers was born into a family of artists and attended the Art Students League of New York. H e initially pursued a career as a fine artist, working as a sketch artist for magazines and newspapers. He also illustrated books, including editions of Edgar Allan Poe's works.
Chambers began writing fiction in the 1890s and published his first collection of short stories, "In the Quarter," in 1894. However, it was his second collection, "The King in Yellow," that gained him recognition as a writer. The stories in this collection were inspired by the eponymous play featured in the book, which is said to drive anyone who reads it to madness.
Chambers kept writing throughout his life and published many novels and collections of short stories, such as "The Maker of Moons" (1896), "The Mystery of Choice" (1897), and "The Tracer of Lost Persons" (1906).
In addition to his writing, Chambers was also an avid traveler and outdoorsman. He spent much of his time traveling and hunting in rural America and Europe, which provided inspiration for many of his stories.
Chambers died on December 16, 1933, in New York City, at the age of 68. Although he is often overlooked today, his work has had a significant impact on the horror and weird fiction genres and has continued to inspire writers to this day.
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Carcosa
Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" takes place in the made-up city of Carcosa (1886). After its destruction, the old and mystical city is seen only in retrospect by a figure who previously lived there.
Robert W. Chambers is credited with popularising the use of the name "Carcosa" in fiction. Other authors have followed in Chambers' footsteps.
Carcosa is a fictional city that appears in Robert W. Chambers' collection of short stories, "The King in Yellow," published in 1895. The city is said to be located somewhere in the distant past or future, and is associated with supernatural and otherworldly phenomena.
In the stories, Carcosa is often described as a mysterious, ancient city with strange and eldritch architecture, inhabited by otherworldly beings and surrounded by a mysterious and ominous atmosphere. The city is also associated with the eponymous play, "The King in Yellow," which is said to originate from Carcosa and is said to drive anyone who reads it to madness.
Over time, Carcosa has become a popular element of the wider Cthulhu Mythos, a shared universe of horror and weird fiction created by H.P. Lovecraft and other writers. The city has appeared in numerous works of fiction, films, and games, and has become an iconic symbol of cosmic horror and the unknown.
The King in Yellow
"The King in Yellow" is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. The book is named after a fictional play that features in several of the stories, which is said to have the power to drive anyone who reads it to madness.
The stories in "The King in Yellow" are primarily set in an imagined world that is similar to our own, but with supernatural and otherworldly elements. The stories explore themes of madness, despair, and the unknown, often blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
The eponymous play, "The King in Yellow," is said to be a forbidden work of art, which only a few have ever read. Those who do read it are said to be haunted by its contents and driven to insanity. The play and its titular character, the King in Yellow, have become iconic symbols of cosmic horror and the unknown.
"The King in Yellow" has had a significant impact on the horror and weird fiction genres and has influenced many writers, including H.P. Lovecraft, who incorporated elements of the book into his own works. The book remains popular today and is considered a classic of horror and weird fiction.
Eugenics
Eugenics is a term used to describe a social movement that gained popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding or other forms of intervention.
Eugenicists believe that by promoting the reproduction of individuals with desirable traits and discouraging the reproduction of those with undesirable traits, they can improve the genetic makeup of the human race. This led to the implementation of policies such as forced sterilization, immigration restrictions, and marriage laws, which aimed to prevent certain groups of people from reproducing.
However, eugenics has been widely criticized and condemned for its association with racism, discrimination, and human rights violations. The movement was used as a justification for forced sterilization programs in several countries, including the United States, where it was implemented on a large scale in the early 20th century. The eugenics movement was also exploited by the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, leading to the horrific genocide of millions of people deemed to be "undesirable" based on eugenic principles.
Today, eugenics is considered to be a discredited and morally abhorrent concept. The scientific consensus is that genetic diversity is a key factor in the survival and adaptation of the human species, and that attempts to control or manipulate human reproduction for eugenic purposes are unethical and potentially dangerous.
The Repairer of Reputations
"The Repairer of Reputations" is a short story by Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. It is part of the collection of stories titled "The King in Yellow."
The story is set in a dystopian version of New York City in the future, where the government has implemented a social order based on eugenic principles. The main character, Hildred Castaigne, is a young man who believes himself to be the heir to a vast fortune, but is also suffering from mental illness.
The story explores themes of power, madness, and the manipulation of reality. Castaigne becomes increasingly obsessed with a book called "The King in Yellow," which he believes holds the key to his inheritance. He also becomes convinced that he is the rightful ruler of a utopian society, which he plans to create through violent means.
The Repairer of Reputations is a mysterious character in the story who offers a service to repair people's reputations, by erasing negative memories and replacing them with positive ones. However, it is later revealed that the Repairer is not a real person, but a delusion created by Castaigne's damaged mind.
The story can be interpreted as a critique of eugenic principles and the dangers of social engineering. It also highlights the fragility of the human mind and the potential for individuals to create their own realities, regardless of their objective validity.
Hildred Castaigne, the narrator of Robert W. Chambers' "The Repairer of Reputations," is an unreliable narrator, a common literary device used by authors to create tension and ambiguity in their stories. Castaigne's unreliability is evident from the outset, as he claims to have suffered brain damage and to have read the cursed play, The King in Yellow, which has led him to believe in a fantasy world that is not real.
Castaigne's unreliability is further reinforced by his belief that he is the rightful heir to a vast fortune and that he is destined to create a utopian society through violent means. These delusions, along with his belief in the fantasy world of The King in Yellow, suggest that he is suffering from a serious mental illness.
Despite these red flags, Castaigne maintains his credibility as a narrator through his attention to detail and his ability to vividly describe the world around him. He describes the details of his environment, including the social order and political structure of the dystopian society in which he lives.
However, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Castaigne's perception of reality is severely distorted, and that his account of events is unreliable. He creates a false identity for himself as the rightful ruler of a utopian society, and his belief in the fantasy world of The King in Yellow leads him to commit violent acts.
In conclusion, Hildred Castaigne's unreliability as a narrator adds depth and complexity to the story of "The Repairer of Reputations." His delusions and mental illness create a sense of unease and tension in the reader, as we are left questioning the validity of his account of events. Ultimately, Castaigne's unreliability serves as a warning about the dangers of unchecked power and the fragility of the human mind.
True Detective
"True Detective" is a television series that premiered in 2014 on HBO. The first season of the show centers around two detectives, Rust Cohle and Martin Hart, as they investigate a series of murders in Louisiana. The show has been noted for its use of literary references, including references to Robert W. Chambers' "The King in Yellow."
"The King in Yellow" is a collection of short stories by Chambers, first published in 1895. The book is named after a fictional play that features in several of the stories, which is said to have the power to drive anyone who reads it to madness.
In "True Detective," the character of Rust Cohle is shown to have a copy of "The King in Yellow" in his possession, which he claims to have found at a crime scene. The book becomes a recurring motif throughout the series, and is used to symbolize the idea of madness and the breakdown of reality.
The show also incorporates other elements of Chambers' stories, including the concept of a cyclical time loop and the idea of a hidden, supernatural world lurking beneath the surface of reality.
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M. R. James The Tractate Middoth is a classic ghost story first published in 1911.
This short story takes place in a library and is about a mysterious book called the Tractate Middoth. The book holds the key to righting a family wrong, but the evil deceased has made it as difficult as possible to prolong the agony of his heirs.
Follow the main character, a librarian, as he becomes obsessed with finding out the secrets of a book and is pulled deeper and deeper into a dark and scary world.
Listen to "The Tractate Middoth" audiobook episode today on The Classic. Ghost Stories Podcast and get lost in the creepy atmosphere of this masterful work.
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Join Tony as we explore Edward Bulwer-Lytton's classic short story, 'The House & The Brain'. This captivating tale, first published in 1859, follows a narrator as he investigates the strange occurrences in a haunted house. The story is notable for its suspenseful atmosphere, its examination of the power of the human mind, and its timeless themes. This is an engaging listen for those interested in the Gothic horror genre."
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Rosemary Timperley was born in 1920 in North London and died in November 1988. Her father was an architect and her mother a teacher. Timperley went to her local girls’ school and became a teacher herself.
She taught English and history at a state school. Her pupils said she was a very dramatic figure (she ran the drama club) and wore long, swirling black dresses with long drop or hoop earrings.
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In 33 years, she published 66 novels and several hundred short stories. However, her ghost stories are the ones that people remember the most. She also put together a number of collections of ghost stories
She was editor of various editions of the Pan Ghost Book, including the 5th. This story, The Mistress In Black, was taken from that book, published in 1969.
Many of her short stories were published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly. Timperley's work often dealt with supernatural and paranormal themes, and she was considered a master of the ghost story genre. She also wrote several non-fiction books and articles on subjects such as writing and the supernatural. Timperley passed away in 1988.
While she was a teacher, she began to submit her stories to magazines, and they began to be accepted. She became a staff writer and agony aunt on the magazine Reveille. She lived in Richmond, Surrey (a well-heeled suburb of London now) for many years. Many of her stories are set in London.
During the Second World War, she worked at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in Kensington, London. She got married to a physics teacher in 1952, and they lived in Essex, just outside London. They separated in the early 1960s, according to some sources, but they appear to have been officially married until his death in 1968.
Timperley managed to travel widely across the world despite her hectic writing schedule, visiting Italy (a number of her works are set in Venice), Morocco, Belgium, Russia, and Greece.
Robert Hale, who was Timperley's publisher, said that her novels, plays, and short stories were influenced by her real-life experiences in other countries and her wide range of jobs. Indeed, Timperley is believed to have worked as a waitress, a counter assistant in a police canteen, a typewriter operator, and an artist's model before becoming a freelance writer. Timperley had to spend several months in the hospital in 1964 because of a serious illness.
After this life-changing event, Timperley went to work as an assistant nurse in a Surrey hospital. Her time in this industry surely influenced works such as The Tragedy Business (1969), The Haunted Garden (1966), and The Washers-Up (1967). She was also inspired by her experience as a teacher, as is evident by the fact that children play a significant role in most of her work. Also, the settings of her first two books are thought to have been based on her childhood at Hornsey High School.
Timperley spent much of her life in the London suburb of Richmond, and many of her stories are set there. Timperley knew a lot about London, and her books, especially, have a lot of references to different places in the city. Reading her anecdotes, it's clear that Timperley travelled by tube and bus a lot, avoiding the use of a car and, despite being city born and bred, loved open landscapes and desired to live an uncluttered, "carefree" existence.
In 1961, she mentions she is living in an old-fashioned flat and living on coffee, pink gin, and cigarettes. In 1964, she became seriously ill and had a long spell in the hospital. I’m not surprised, hearing about her diet.
She led a quiet, reclusive life until her death in 1988, which, despite her previous success, went unnoticed by the press, and no obituary was published.
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Afterward" by Edith Wharton is a haunting and evocative audiobook that delves into the mind of a young woman, Mary Boyne, as she moves with her husband into the ancient house at Lyng, jokingly asking if it has a ghost. It does, her friend admits, but you won’t realise till long afterward.
The narrator's voice will immerse you in the story, adding to the eerie atmosphere, making it an unforgettable listening experience.
Don't miss out on this classic ghost story from the pen of one of America's greatest authors, and experience the story like never before in its audiobook form.
I must admit ChatGTP wrote the last two paragraphs. It wrote a lot of nonsense about the story being about a ghost of a maid who died in a fire and it got the heroine’s name wrong, but otherwise it was fun.
ChatGTP has my back. It wrote:
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Look no further!
By signing up for the paid version of my Substack podcast, you'll have access to exclusive content, bonus episodes, and behind-the-scenes material that you won't find anywhere else.
Not only will you be supporting my work as a narrator, but you'll also be helping to ensure that I can continue to bring you the stories you love.
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Despite the title, this is not a supernatural story. It was requested by Leigh Grieveson, one of my patrons. I struggled to find a copy so in the end, he photographed his and sent the pictures to me and I read the story from the jpeg files.
It’s a story in the vein of Boomerang, in that it is the 1940s tale of white Europeans out in the jungle of the colonies. There is a zombie but it’s not what you think.
W Stanley Moss, or Billy Moss was a colourful figure who died of alcoholism aged only 44 in Jamaica. He was born in Japan the son of a white Russian countess and a British businessman. He lived a life of adventure and exploration, joining the British army and then the covert sabotage unit SOE, under whose auspices he captured a Nazi general in Crete.
He lived in a mansion in Cairo while in SOE and his and his Polish countess wife entertained the spies and special forces. He was a friend of kings and noblemen.
After the war he researched what had happened the Nazi gold and undertook expeditions to Antarctica and Tahiti.
He was a sort of Ian Fleming-James Bond-Patrick Leigh Fermor-Ralph Fiennes type chap and wrote very competent rip-roaring adventures for boys.
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Oh no, they were doing it in sweet New England too from at least 1799 to about 1892. For all I know, they’re still doing it.
Hop over to my Youtube Channel for the facts.
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Thank you to Steven Shipman for recommending this story.
The Lonesome Place was published by August Derleth in 1962 in a collection known as Lonesome Places.
You can still find copies but they are expensive.
I read the story and then say how great I thought it was followed by various rambles into barely related subjects.
My call to action is for you to check out my other YouTube Channel
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Dickens's second Christmas story is called "The Chimes." The main character in this story is an old messenger Toby Veck who has lost hope in people.
He is drawn to a church's bell tower, where he meets the ghosts of the bells and the goblins who help them. He learns through a series of visions why he shouldn't give up hope that people can change for the better.
Though called a Christmas Story, it actually happens on New Year's Eve and a big theme of the story is closing off the business of the New Year and looking forward with hope to the new one.
Again, Dickens's sympathies lie with the impoverished working classes whom he paints (on the whole) as kind to each other and human as opposed to the wealthy who are seen as shallow, hypocritical and cruel.
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The Shadow by E Nesbit is a masterful story of an apparition that signifies death. It is set in a large house with servants in England at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th Century. A Christmas party was held in the old manor house, the men have gone to billiards and left a group of young women to tell ghost stories. Then Miss Eastwich, the housekeeper is invited in and tells a real ghost story of her own.E. Nesbit was a famous and prolific woman writer for children who had a sideline in creepy ghost stories.The Shadow is a great story for Christmas or any other time. I really enjoyed reading it for you.
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The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth CBE is an English author and journalist. He was born on August 25, 1938.
A former RAF pilot and investigative journalist, created the modern thriller when he wrote The Day of The Jackal
He is best known for thrillers like The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra, and The Kill List.
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Forsyth's books are often on lists of the best-selling books, and more than a dozen of them have been made into movies. By 2006, more than 70 million copies of his books had been sold in more than 30 languages.
The Shepherd tells the story of a De Havilland Vampire pilot who is going home on Christmas Eve, 1957. On the way from RAF Celle in northern Germany to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, his plane loses all of its electricity. He gets lost in fog over the North Sea and is almost out of gas when he runs into a De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber that seems to have been sent up to "shepherd" him in.
The main themes of the story are how he is guided to a safe landing and how he tries to find the pilot who saved him.
Forsyth wrote this original piece as a Christmas present for his first wife Carrie, who had asked him to write her a ghost story. The story was written on Christmas Day, 1974, and came out around the same time the next year. The idea came to the author when he was trying to think of a setting that wasn't a haunted house and saw planes flying overhead. Many people have thought that the references were to old RAF stories. Even though Forsyth is a former RAF pilot and could have heard and changed such a story (whether on purpose or not), no references or personal stories have been given to back up such claims.
Since 1979, the story has been told on the Canadian news show As It Happens on CBC Radio One. It is always read by Alan Maitland and is always on the last episode, which is always on or before Christmas Eve. As it Happens had a 50th anniversary special in 2018, and Carol Off, Michael Enright, and Tom Power read lines from The Shepherd to honour the tradition.
On December 14, 2014, in London, at St. Clement Danes, the Central Church of the Royal Air Force, actor Nigel Anthony put on an original version of The Shepherd by Amber Barnfather, complete with music and sound effects. Frederick Forsyth opened the show, which raised money for the RAF Benevolent Fund. David Chilton was in charge of the sound, and the Saint Martin Singers sang a cappella pieces.
John Travolta confirmed in 2022 that he is making a movie version of The Shepherd right now.
Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Audiobook
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Thanks to Gavin Critchley for commissioning this episode.
The Ghost of Jerry Bundler by W. W. Jacobs is Jacob's second most famous supernatural fiction short story after The Monkey's Paw. It's a Christmas Ghost story set in the bar of an old coaching inn in an English country town just a few days short of Christmas. A group of travellers find themselves having to stay over Christmas at the haunted inn and begin to entertain and ultimately terrify themselves.
A spooky little story for Christmas ghosts with a twist at the end that deserves its place on any podcast that reads out classic horror audiobooks.
audiobook #SupernaturalFiction #HorrorAudiobook #WWJacobs #GothicLiterature #GhostStory #shortStory audio book
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One of my own stories, specially written for Christmas 2022. It’s a very personal story, and you may find it a little sentimental, but it is my Christmas present to those listeners who are happy to receive it from me.
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A most wonderful Christmas Ghost story. I know I tend to overenthuse, but Green Holly by Elizabeth Bowen is, for me, one of the best ghost stories in English from the mid 20th Century.
Bowen removes ghosts from their history of clanking and scaring and contrasts them with the ordinary world or ordinary importance (the war effort in 1944) and suggests that our aspirations for romance and glamour are phantasms, which neverthless we prefer to real life.
See what you think.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899 to 1973-Dublin). Bowen believed in ghosts and other strange things. Her stories about England during World War II aBowen did not just sit back and watch the war. She was an air raid warden. When bombs fell, she walked her route to make sure people were in shelters and had turned off their lights. When she was writing her stories, it wasn't at all clear who would win the war. Bowen later said that she had never felt more alive than when the blitz was going on.
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A Fall of Snow
A Fall of Snow by James Turner is a beautifully written and poignant story about a childhood visit to his uncle and a mysterious happening that stayed with him for the rest of his life. The story is set in a large house at Christmas, which is situated in the English County of Suffolk. It is a tale about family, loss, love, and friendship, and it is told in Turner's trademark lyrical style. It is an excellent read for anyone who loves atmospheric stories that explore the human condition.
The story was published in 1974, the year before Turner’s death.
It's from this book
Sunless Solstice, edited by Tanya Kirk
https://amzn.to/3V7JgHq
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The Magic Shop by H G Wells was published in 1903. "The Magic Shop" is a fantasy short story about a little English boy named Gip who wanted his father to take him into a magic shop they found while walking. They don't know that what they're about to see in the magic shop will permanently change both of their lives.
A whimsical story on a similar theme to a previous story we read out on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast: The Door In The Wall. H G Wells is saying that there is a world of magic and wonder that is always present and can be seen with those who have innocent and wondering eyes and hearts. But our ability to see it gets duller as we get tied up with the necessities of modern living and so we may miss our chance at wonder. A perfect bedtime story.
A sweet and lovely audiobook story with only a tiny bit of horror and not much sci fi (science fiction)
audiobook #magicshop #ToyShop #FullAudiobook #Fantasyfiction
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The Dead is is the last story, and the longest from James Joyce's 1914 short stories collection: Dubliners. It is longer than the rest, being more like a novella. It is considered one of the classics of Irish literature, and possibly the best literary short fiction in the English language.
Dubliners is a rich and generous story and though Joyce was considered a pioneer of modernist literature, with his 1922 novel Ulysses and especially with Finnegans Wake in 1939.
Joyce left Ireland in 1904 and lived abroad in Trieste, Switzerland and Paris and never really lived in Dublin again but his books and all his writing are set among the people and places he grew up amongst.
Analysis and Summary of The Dead by James Joyce here.
This audio book reading is by Tony Walker of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.
It was made into a film in 1987, by John Huston starring Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann.
Dubliners #Bloomsday #jamesjoyce
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The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter is a short story from her collection The Bloody Chamber published in 1979 that was made into the 1984 film called, surprisingly The Company of Wolves, by Neil Jordan and starring, amongst others, Angela Lansbury.
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In summary, the story is a version of the Little Red Riding Hood folk story or fairy tale but with a modern, possibly feminist, certainly gothic twist. It's no secret that it involves werewolves, the threatening kind not the Kindle book kind, of which no more shall be mentioned. There is also a grandmother who gets eaten. A simmering of a young girl's sexual awakening underlies Angela Carter's story, but it's all done in the best possible taste (unlike the Kindle werewolf books of which I promised I would say nothing)
Analysis of The Company of Wolves
The story begins by setting up the milieu: a peasant community in a north European forest that struggles to survive in the winter and has to guard itself against the common predators. Not only are there common predators but there are werewolves too which are the worst combination of the savage wolf and the savage man . The worst wolves are hairy on the inside.
The Little Red Riding Hood avatar, a cocky, spoiled young girl goes walking through the dangerous wood. She is savvy enough to carry a knife and keep to the path. Unlike in the myth of Little Red Riding Hood where the Huntsman and the Wolf are separate figures, in this story they are one.
The girl is in the cusp of womanhood but still intact. Even so she has an interest in such things as kissing. She has a bet with the Huntsman about who will arrive first at Granny's cottage. If she loses she has to give him a kiss so she dawdles so that she will deliberately lose.
He is a hungry wolf and has already not been able to resist snacking on his pheasant. The old granny is no match for him. An old woman at the edge of death, she cannot seduce him so he eats her.
It is clear that his initial interest in all these women is culinary not sexual: he wants to eat them only.
Red Riding Hood arrives next. She soon guesses that this is the wolf and that he has eaten her granny and that she is in real danger of him doing the same to her.
Summary of The Ending
I think Carter had three options here:
-
Little Red Riding Hood as weak woman victim who has to be saved by a man. As someone writing feminist literature, it's not surprising Carter didn't choose this.
-
An all men are evil feminist version where the woman kills the wolf herself
-
Or far better ending she did choose. Our Little Red Riding Hood is brave and competent and she knows the power she has over werewolves, which is the power she has over the male part of the beast. She knew she was no one's meat and with her seduction, she charms the violence of the male through the realisation and use of her power as a woman. And so the beast is tamed through the Savage Wedding
In this vision, the best relationship between man and woman is one of partnership, and that violence has no place within their loving and physical relationship.
However, violence might be needed outside the home where it is proper to protect the people and the community.
AngelaLansbury #NeilJordan #LittleRedRidingHood
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Ray Bradbury wrote "The Witch Door" in 1995. The main characters live in a dilapidated New England farmhouse. They've come to escape from the totalitarian government and collapsing cities.
One night, one night, they hear a hammering on the Witch Door in their house.
The witch door dates back to 1680, when people used it to hide witches from the Salem Witch Trials.
The noises grow louder and a woman bursts out of the tiny room behind the door. The woman dashes out into the night. Set in the future, The Witch Door is that mixes science fiction and dystopian futures with a witch thrown in to make the point.
A female friend of theirs who is on the run from the government arrives and asks them to hide her.
They put her in the room beyond the Witch Door.
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Happy Halloween! A disturbing and scary tale that will be performed live in Whitehaven this Halloween as part of our Eerie Cumbria programme.I hope you will be suitably disturbed by it, even it you don't live in Whitehaven.You can listen to my version of Dracula free on Bandcamp (you get to play each chapter 3 x before you have to pay a cent) if you need more Halloween vibes.
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Sardonicus by Ray Russell is possibly the best Gothic horror story written in the 20th century. Ray Russell's mastery of language elevates this piece of genre fiction into literature.
Russell's reading of character and masterful portrayal of dark nuances are evident. It is such quality even though the author wrote it for Playboy magazine. This tale is perfect for Halloween, but it's captivating all year long.
It features a castle with a strange master, a beautiful woman in trouble, individuals, disfigurement, an isolated setting, and a perplexing plot that our protagonist must unravel.
Ray Russell serves as a link between contemporary masters of the dark like Thomas Ligotti and classic goth favourites like Dracula.
It was published in 1961 and adapted into the movie Mr Sardonicus the same year, showing that its quality was instantly recognised
Sadly, little this gothic masterpiece is little read now, but Sardonicus deserves to be resurrected!
audiobook #freeaudiobooks #audiobooksfulllength #audiobooktube #booklover #audible
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Basil Netherby is a masterpiece of brooding supernatural fiction. This unabridged audio book style story narrates a ghost story or a story of possession.
Basil Netherby has many of the elements of gothic literature. It was written by Arthur or A.C. Benson, the brother of E. F. Benson. It has elements of M. R. James, who was a personal friend of A C Benson and is even reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft at times in the idea of immense supernatural forces that cannot be beaten. Or can they?
ClassicHorror #SupernaturalFiction #HorrorAudiobook #ArthurChristopherBenson #GothicHorror #GhostStory #OccultLiterature #shortStory #GothicLiterature
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Brickett Bottom by Amyas Northcote is about a mysterious house deep in the woods that no one but lonely young girls can see. There is a dark secret to this house in the forest, as you will discover.
Amyas Northcote was the son of an English aristocratic family. This story was published in his one collection of ghost stories: "Ghostly Company". Though it was published in 1921, I think there is something genuinely eerie and even scary about the fate of the girl.
Northcote has been compared to M R James but this story reminded me more of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood's The Man Whom The Trees Loved.
Brickett Bottom by Amyas Northcote
Jay Rothermel’s blog Easily Distracted
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In this short chapter, Kay eavesdrops on Wicked Hill and hears the plans of the Pouncer 7 and also something about the Harker Treasure. He leads Nibs back home and has a run in at breakfast with his governess. A charming children's story by John Masefield.
The Midnight Folk by John Masefield
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The Birds by Daphne du Maurier was adapted into the 1963 horror thriller movie The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Daphne du Maurier wrote horror and mystery and crime stories and the birds can be considered science fiction. She was a master of storytelling and character building in English literature. The Birds concerns a bird attack in a horror story version of the near future when nature has been twisted by humankind – a kind of pandemic.
Her two other most famous stories which were made into films were Rebecca (also directed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Don't Look Now by Nicolas Roeg
This unabridged audio book version is narrated by Tony Walker of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast with an analysis and summary at the end. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #TheBirds #Audiobooks
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The Outcast by E F Benson
First we are introduced to Mrs Bertha Acres through the eyes of Tony and his wife Madge. The initial incident is her husband shooting himself due to detesting her. That is the first sign we have that this lady is to be the subject of the story and it is enough to make us prick up our ears and raise questions about her.
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We next have the description of the domestic scene in the little home and little village and here we see the wit of the humorist of upper middle-class social situations that came to the fore in the famous Mapp and Lucia series that made his name.
The theme of reincarnation is set by the brother-in-law Sir Charles Alington, particularly that a reincarnated spirit can inhabit a male or female body.
Then we are told the evil history of the Gate House and that one brother betrayed his brother for being a Catholic and then repented. Remember the end takes place around Easter, Judas Iscariot is mentioned. Benson’s father was a vicar and his brother a priest. Are these hearkenings to the Easter story: betrayal, sin and reincarnation an intentional inversion? The body is in the water three days (note three, surely not a coincidence?) and no corruption has come to it. It’s like an antichrist or Judas figure.
The end, the purging by fire may represent the expiation of the sin of betrayal by this spirit who was forced to live again and again and wander without rest. The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew.
In terms of style, it seemed to me that the story is made up of two. There is the witty social commentary (that we also find in The Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen) poking fun at the haut bourgeois, and then a masterfully creepy horror story. Benson is unequalled I think it writing these scenes. First the body in the sack that tumbles over and follows Made (though that was reminiscent of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You)
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Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen
A horror story about spirits who linger in old places in the English countryisde. Published 1892. Suggested by Susan Tudor-Coulson
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Grant Allen
Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen was born in 1848 on Wolfe Island in Ontario in Ca nada and died in Haselmere in Surrey aged 51. His father was from Dublin and he was a protestant minister. He was educated at home and then when he was 13, his family moved to the USA, then to France then to Britain. He was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham (where Tolkien later went amongst other famous alumni) and then at Merton College in Oxford. He went to teach in Brighton and in Jamaica. He returned to Britain from Jamaica and began to write professionally. He was most famous for his scientific essays. But he also wrote science fiction.
He was an atheist and socialist. He was married twice. He died of liver cancer in 1899. He was a friend and neighbour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Chanctonbury Ring, Old Weird Albion
The Old Weird Albion | Justin Hopper || Landscape, Memory & Myth
I mention how much I enjoy the work of Justin Hopper. Chanctonbury Rings – a spoke word and music album made with folk artist Sharron Kraus and Ghost Box Records co-founder The Belbury Poly (Ghost Box).
Long Barrows were the product of a late Stone Age civilisation with additions from Bronze Age folk. They are particularly to be found in Wessex and the south and west of England. But of course megalithic structures of similar types can be found all over Atlantic Europe. Nobody would suggest that the so-called Picts created them.
Theosophists & Madam Blavatsky
The Theosophical Society was created mainly by Madame Helena Blavatsky who had a background in Spiritualism. This was a time of religious change with a huge upsurge in Spiritualism. The first lodge was in Scotland. There were influences from western Occultism, but also Hinduism and Buddhism and they talked about the ascended masters. These ascended masters included Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Jesus but also the Buddha, Confucious and Lao Tzu but also Mesmer, Bohme and Cagliostro. Theosophy has evolved into the New Age.
Mrs Bruce (the esoteric Buddhist) seems to be one of these.
Ghosts
The story reports that we only see the ghosts from periods within our knowledge. But of course this is not true. Many ghosts are not really identifiable at all.
Flint and iron
This is an old piece of folklore
Cannabis Indica
Indeed. No wonder he saw visions.
Fiddlers Green, Clint Marsh
Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine
I love this 'zine. As the Clint Marsh says,
Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine was born of a languid afternoon of conversation on a sunny tavern lawn. Taking its name from the pleasant afterlife dreamed into being by sailors, cavalrymen, and other adventurous spirits, Fiddler’s Green gathers friends, good cheer, and a bit of magic to create a better world not someday, but now.
Tarantino’s from Dawn til Dusk
That genre shift from tense hostage movie to vampire killl-fest. I see something similar going on here.
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The Doll by Daphne du Maurier
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning was born in 1907 in London in 1931 and died in 1989 in Cornwall. She is a famous novelist with such best-sellers as Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, The Birds and the novella Don’t Look Now. This story is taken from a collection of short stories written before her famous novels. She was clearly fond of the name Rebecca for the dark-spirited anima-like femme fatale.
I did a recording of Don’t Look Now, which has proved to be my most popular recording on Youtube.
Her father was an actor and theatre manager who was knighted for her services to the arts. Her mother Muriel Beaumont was also an actress. Daphne’s sister Angela was also an author and an actress and her other sister Jeanne who was part of the painter colony in St Ives Cornwall. Daphne and her sister Jeanne look very like their mother in the photographs on the internet. Their cousins were the inspiration for the children in J M Barrie’s Peter Pan. Her great-great-grandmother was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany.
She was born when the family were living in a rather grand house on Cumberland Terrace on the eastern side of Regent’s Park in a house that is now a grade I listed building designed by the famous architect John Nash. Her father’s success made this possible.
Daphne du Maurier became more reclusive as she got more famous and spent her time n her beloved Cornwall. As she grew, the family had two houses — one in Hampstead, north London ( a grade II listed building from 1720) and a house in Fowey, Cornwall, where they lived exclusively during the Second World War. She got married to a prominent soldier and had three children, of whom both girls married prominent soldiers.
The Wiki notes that her marriage was somewhat chilly and she herself could be distant from her children. Her husband died in 1965, when she was 34. She moved permanently to Kilmarth, Cornwall. She was made a dame (equivalent of a knight) in 1969 but was very reticent about mentioning it and never made much of it. After she died in 1989, biographers discussed whether she was a lesbian. Her sister Jeanne had a close relationship with another woman. She notes that her father always wanted a son and so she was a tomboy. Her children denied that she was a lesbian. When she died of heart failure aged 81, her body was privately cremated.
In her obituary for du Maurier, Kate Kellaway said: “Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers’ minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings.”
The Doll
This story was published in 1937, that is two years after the death of her husband, and one year before the publication of Rebecca. Apparently she was only 21 when she wrote The Doll.
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A Pair of Muddy Shoes by Lennox Robinson
Lennox Robinson was an Irish author, poet, dramatist and theatre produce who was born in Westgrove, County Cork, Ireland in 1886 the son of a Protestant clergyman, who had previously been a stockbroker. Lennox (fully Esme Stuart Lennox Robinson) was often ill as a child and educated by private tutor and at a Church of Ireland (that is the Protestant Anglican Church) School. He became interested in drama when he saw a production by W B Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin when he was 21.
His play Cross Roads was produced at the Abbey in 1909 and he became manager there the same year. He resigned in 1914 after a poorly reviewed tour of the USA, but came back in 1919 and was appointed to the theatre’s boar din 1923 and served there until his death in 1958. It is said that he was an alcoholic and often depressed.
He was Anglo-Irish but was committed to the Irish nationalist cause (like Yeats and Lady Gregory).
His wife’s mother was a spiritualist.
A Pair of Muddy Shoes is written in a very naturalistic, conversational style which was fun to read and very different from some of the other things we’ve been reading out recently (Poe, I’m looking at you). It’s all fun, and I like both styles.
The story is written from an Irish woman’s voice and I read it as an English man. You will know I debate with myself whether I should do accents (which I enjoy) or read a woman ’s voice. The second I have few problems with to be honest, the first is more of a problem because though I enjoy doing the accent there is always someone who’s ear is so finely tuned that it jars and spoils the story. So, I decided to do this in my native voice.
The story is about a possession but it’s unusual and fresh in its setting in rural Ireland (I thought of Craggy Island and the big priests’ house looming up from the middle of a bare field, no garden, no path, no nothing leading to it). The spirit of the murderer remains very wicked and his pleasure in the crime infects the shy young woman who is speaking.
There is something about weird juxtapositions like the white cat with the narrator’s face and then when she goes into the house, the victim says that she has the face of a girl, but the hands of a rough man.
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The Milk-White Child of Ravenglass by Tony Walker, is one of mine. As I explain in the notes, this is one of my More Cumbrian Ghost Stories book. You can purchase the full book or audiobook (just saying, if you were so inclined, and you liked this one, well maybe you'd like the rest?)
Check out the Ko-Fi link. I think it's there. I'm giving you this because I'm off on my hols soon so I will schedule this to come out while I'm away.
Yes, there's a Romantic theme to it. Yes it includes the good people. So I'd been reading Wordsworth and Arthur Machen at the time. I was all Romanticked up. I like stories of the fey, fae, whatever you call them. Do I believe in them? That would be telling.
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The Entrance by Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur which was then part of British India, in 1925 and died in St Hellier, Jersey in 1995, aged 70.
This story, The Entrance was published in his collection The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium in 1979. This title was renamed The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories though I suspect that someone who didn’t understand the word pandemonium would struggle with inimitable too. But that’s marketing for you. His family’s life has been the subject of a popular TV series “My Family & Other Animals” taken from the title of one of his books.
He was a prolific writer, usually of light, comic fiction and autobiography and a life-long animal lover who set up the Jersey Zoo. Those of you who read these notes will probably predict offended comments about animals being hurt in The Entrance and how zoos are bad. My only comments are: it’s fiction. There were no animals, and; attitudes change over times. I don’t think he set up a zoo because he was a wicked man who wanted to hurt animals. Zoos were uncontroversial once. Those who don’t make comments on videos expressing their hurt and offence probably won’t read the notes.
Durrell’s famous siblings is the author and poet Lawrence Durrell. In his early years, as his family were middle class and British, he had an Indian nurse called an ayah. He ascribes his lifelong love of animals to a visit to a zoo when he was small in India. The family moved to the Crystal Palace area of London (with its concrete dinosaurs) and he avoided going to school by pretending to be ill. In 1939 the family moved to Corfu, Grreece and Durrell began to build his menagerie. This period of his life was an inspiration of his many books.
Because of the Second World War, the family moved back to England and he ended up working in an aquarium and a pet store. He was not medically fit to be a soldier but ended up working on a farm. After the war he went to work at Whipsnade Zoo. After that, he got a job collecting animals for zoos by visiting Africa and South America. He was known for treating his animals well, which caused him financial difficulties .
He founded his own zoo in Jersey in 1959.
The Entrance
The Entrance was recommended to me by Alison Waddell. It is a frame story and thus hearkens back to the classic ghost story tales which are often told as frames and often feature old, occult manuscripts. Gerald Durrell goes to meet his charming, slightly comic friends in Provence. They hand him a manuscript they found in Marseilles that belonged to a strange man called Dr Le Pitre. Dr Le Pitre is another layer to the story that seems quite unnecessary to me, but I might be missing something. The manuscript dated as March 16th 1901 features a lengthy set up of a Victorian (the old queen died on 22 January 1901, but her influence lingered a few months at least) antiquarian book dealer (very M R James) who is stalked by a strange foreigner on a foggy night in London (so far so trope, and I suspect that Durrell was doing this to play with the genre). He gets a mysterious warning from his friend about the family, but becomes great mates with this aristocratic frenchman. Ultimately we see that this was a grift and Durrell drops a few ominous sentences along the lines of “If I knew then what I know now”. “That was my gravest mistake” which sort of spoilt the surprise of the twist at the end.
But it’s full Gothic. Alone in an ancient chateau in terrible weather, cut off by snow with a lurking monster in the mirrors. Instead of strange old servitors he has some friendly animals. Again he can’t help himself intruding the comic parrot and friendly cat and dog. The canaries don’t get a speaking part. I wondered how such a monster kept such happy pets?
In fact we have pea soup fog in London, thunder and lightning in Provence and heavy snow in Gorge du Tarn. Classic stuff.
I am guessing that young Gideon resisted his hideous uncle but at the final summoning got eaten. “No, no. I will not be devoured so that you may live!”, or else when the mirror smashed at the narrator’s flat in London it got him. But anyway, Gideon in some way was possessed by his uncle’s evil, who only looked 50 (despite being described as old by the warning bloke in the pub) and whom the teen Gideon tried to resist being devoured. At least the uncle was decent enough to give him the heads up rather than just devouring him. Anyway, how did the uncle get into the mirror world?
The uncle was murdered when Gideon was in Marseilles. So what killed the uncle? Was the murder just the uncle getting into the mirror world? If so, then the inscriptions seem old. Perhaps the library had occult books because the uncle was a sorcerer? Then what’s the thing about the ornate key: the key to life and death with the ornate butt.
Earlier on in an ominous foreshadowing our Mr Letting hopes that Gideon did not set him up deliberately and that he actually did care for him as he had thought. They were friends for a long period, so is this statement doesn’t ring true.
The end becomes less horror story and more sword and sorcery fantasy epic battle against a monster where instead of a sword he has a candelabra. I’ve done stories like this and am aware I am departing genres. Then there’s the gruesome touches of snacking on a severed hand and all the blood and spit.
But it’s a beautifully described scene. He excels at enargia, putting us in the scene and the scene is beautifully gothic and almost like a fairytale. Even his modern scenes are written with colour, humour and life. His style is fluid and pleasing to the ear. A good story.
Resonances: The Snow Palace, The Grey Woman, The Pleasure Pilgrims, Cocteau’s Orphee., Dracula, Stranger Things
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Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer born in Long Valley, California in 1893 who died in Pacific Grove, California in 1961, aged 68. They are actually four hundred and twenty eight miles apart which is longer than the whole of England. For comparison I have only made two hundred yards from the place I was born to the place I now live. He lived most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California.
He was madly neurotic, agoraphobic and as with Lovecraft, the existential unease he no doubt felt in life, intrudes into his stories, giving them their unsettling quality, I would guess.
Because of his nerves, he was educated at home and was intelligent with a fantastic memory and educated himself by reading, including The Encyclopaedia Britannica all volumes cover to cover more than once.
He taught himself French and Spanish and translated poetry from those languages, including Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Naturally.
Clark was a weird poet and one of the now defunct West Coast Romantics. I can see him playing guitar for Mazzy Star (if he’d been spared).
He was one of the ‘big three’ authors of Weird Tales, the others being Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft. As a teen (though in those days I wouldn’t have been familiar with that word) I lapped up all three, though I preferred Ashton Smith. There is something more poetic and less rude about his style than either the barbarous, muscle-bound stories of Howard and the off-kilter, prolix and baroque tales of H P. Though, as I say, I read them all, aye. All.
We have done an Ashton Smith story before: The Maker of Gargoyles.
This story: The Nameless Offspring is another tomb story. We seem to have done a run of these recently: The Catacomb, The Secret of The Vault. And previously we did The Fall of the House of Usher.
It was published in Strange Tales in 1932, and in those days publishing in these pulp magazine was the standard process. Many of the writers of pulps purveyed Cosmic Horror. Of course the primary voice here is H P Lovecraft and his taste seems to have stamped itself on his followers and his approval, given them a significant advantage. Lovecraft was a great admirer of Ashton Smith.
You will recall that to write a classic story in this period: first set it somewhere obscure either in time or distance from your average reader> Make the weather bad. Have a gothic edifice: a castle, though in this case and old (Cornish from the name) Manor House will do. Have an aged retainer, an obscure history that is not fully discussed, an aristocrat, poor light then you just need a monster and you’re on. This tale has it all. And let’s face it what Hollywood producers say (though not to me) ‘We want more of the same, but different.” This is what we have.
Smith is great with descriptions. I prefer his prose to Lovecraft. IT was the fashion to use obscure words and lots of them, but he does it in a less awkward way than Lovecraft and one that is not as open to parody.
The story begins with a little background that makes sense of what is to follow along with a warning that he never foresaw the terrible truth, etc. he goes on a trip and inadvertently comes across the evil Tremoth Hall. How likely is that actually? The place receives few visitors in common with nearly every Manor House in all the stories we have read. None of them are open to the National Trust. I read one recently by Sarah Perry (author of Melnoth the Wanderer and the Essex Serpent) in a collection by English Heritage, that had as its scene a historic property open to the public, though the action there happened when the public were not present.
The horrible history is not too hidden, but what is well done is the weird scratching that grows and grows and I think this is the main suspense of the story because when it breaks through (spoiler alert too late perhaps) it’s all over in a flash and in common with old-style stories the narrator doesn’t get eaten or monstered as would surely happen in a more modern story.
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The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death was published in 1842 by Edgar Allan Poe in Graham’s Magazine. He was paid $12 for it. There is an app on the internet to tell you the value of money today and that calculates $12 in 1842 is worth $482 today. That is £353 Sterling, or £4,236 Scots. Good money in anyone’s book for a 16 minute story.
It was made into a film in 1964, starring Vincent Price. As any brief study will tell you, it follows the conventions of Gothic fiction: it’s set in a castle (in fact a castellated abbey so two for the price of one)
At the time of the story, Poe’s wife was suffering from tuberculosis and would be coughing blood most likely, and this image may have inspired (if that is a suitable word) the imagery of the story. People have wondered what the actual disease was - bubonic plague or tuberculosis or maybe Ebola virus, but in fact I think it’s most likely he just made it up.
There have been many attempts at understanding why there were seven rooms and the meaning of the colours. It may be because he liked the imagery, but of course why did he like the imagery? What subconscious needs and desires do the colours represent. Discuss at your leisure.
The story is about how even kings may not escape death, despite their pride and majesty and as such it reminds me of Oxymandias by Shelley and the Dog In Durer’s Etching story we did by Marco Denevi.
It’s a very neat story structure. Introduce Red Death, introduce Prospero. He retreats from the world, describe the abbey. Now the Masquerade Ball. Now entry of Death. Now he’s dead. Finish. 16 minutes.
What’s with the Ebony Clock? Perhaps counting down like a drum roll to increase suspense? Who knows?
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A Night On The Borders of The Black Forest
Episode A Night On The Borders of The Black Forest.mp3
Amelia B Edwards
Born in 1831 in London and died in 1892 aged 60 in Weston Supermare at the seaside near Bristol. She was a novelist, traveller and enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist. Her mother was Irish and her father had been an officer in the British Army and then became a banker. She was married, but her emotional attachments were with women and she lived with and was apparently in love with Ellen Braysher, widow, and Ellen Byrne a school inspector’s wife.
A Night on The Borders of the Black Forest was recommended by Nadia Astorga in May 2022
This is the third story by Amelia B we’ve done, the other’s being The Phantom Coach and Salome. This is the first of hers that is less a ghost story (if fact not a ghost story at all) and more an adventure. The collection of stories is also entitled A Night On The Borders of the Black Forests and was published in 1890.
For comparison Le Fanu’s Carmilla set in Styria in Austria was published in 1872 and Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Grey Woman was published in 1861. It reminded me most of The Grey Woman because it is set in the border area of France and Germany at about the same period and there are brigands in the woods in both.
It’s a definite nod to the Gothic but also a right rollicking adventure story and so reminds of The Grey Woman but also the Scottish set A Journey of Little Profit by John Buchan from 1896, because it is also a tale of wanderings on foot and George Borrow’s Wild Wales was published in 1862, which deals with supposedly true wanderings in the Wild.
Mary Braddon’s The Cold Embrace and Hoffman’s The Sandman also have people tramping all over Germany and venturing into France and the Netherlands. It must have been busy on the roads.
Wordsworth had an edition of the Prelude out in 1850. This thrilling love for mountainous wild places titillated the middle class urban readers on a trivial level while Wordsworth was aiming for the spiritual, but each to their own indeed.
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The Catacomb by Peter Shilston was recommended by one of my Patreons but it was hard to get hold of. It was published in the early 1980s in a fanzine for lovers of M R James's stories who wrote stories in a similar vein. This home-produced magazine was called More Ghosts and Scholars and is very hard to get hold of. Then it was reprinted in Best of Ghosts and Scholars and Best Horror Volume 9 edited by Karl Wagner. These are collectors items and expensive so I despaired of getting hold of the story but wanted to because it was so highly recommended.
Eventually I bit the bullet and shelled out (see what I did there?) for More Ghosts & Scholars on Ebay. It arrived. I read it. I hope you like it. It is followed by my thoughts about the story which in now typical fashion degenerates into random related thoughts.
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The Secret of the Vault by J Wesley Rosenquest or Rosenquist was published in the May 1938 edition of Weird Tales.
Not much is known about him. I am not doing many notes as I have spoken my piece at the end of the podcast. But every narrator needs a hand and podcasting doesn’t come free to the podcaster, so if you don’t / haven’t already then consider the following!
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Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher known as was the pen name of William Anthony Parker White and he was known at Tony. He was born in 1911 in Oakland California and died aged only 56 in Oakland of lung cancer. I guess he liked it there.
He graduated from Pasadena High in 1928 and went to the University of Southern California and did his masters at University of California, Berkely. Boucher is to rhyme with Voucher rather than the French bouche.
Boucher was close to his grandfather who had been a steel worker in Glasgow and got free passage to America after signing up to fight in the Civil War. He couldn’t have afforded the passage otherwise. It’s said that the grandfather who made a big impression on Boucher was a rake and a rogue.
He was a sickly child with asthma and other illnesses and this made him a voracious reader and later writer.
Boucher was a professional writer of fiction who wrote mystery novels, short stories, science fiction and radio dramas. His story Nine Times Nine was voted the best locked room master of all time. He edited anthologies of science fiction and was a translator from Spanish, being the first to translate Jorge Luis Borges (I must do one of his stories).
Boucher founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and edited it from 1949 to 1958. He was a friend and mentor of Philip K. Dick. In addition to other things he was a keen poker player, a sports fan and a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. He collected records of early operatic singers.
His first story was published in 1927 in Weird Tales when he was 15. It was entitled “Ye Good Olde Ghost Storie”.
They Bite
This story was suggested by many many people. I watched a couple of videos on how to do Western accents, but I think I have not succeeded very well and hope that doesn’t detract from the story.
This is a classic folk horror story albeit set in the American West, though it references Sweeny Bean a Gaelic cannibal from Galloway. Boucher’s grandfather was from Scotland. The story is similar to Samantha Hick’s story: Back Along The Old Track, though I don’t think Sam’s story was consciously modelled on this. The similarity is in the trope. Also similar is Lovecraft’s Dreams In The Witch House.
It isn’t clear to me why Tallant is climbing the rocks all day or has come here at all. He makes notes of what he sees of the glider training school. Perhaps he is going to sell what he sees to the highest bidder – some sort of freelance spy.
Some of the characters I don’t get. The old man who warns Tallant and whose dog is killed by the Carker. The young man with the beard who is a stranger, the Flight Sergeant on the pinball machine and the construction worker being fleeced at poker. I don’t get those, apart from Boucher’s real life love of poker. He only needs one Warner and the bartender really. He is planning blackmail but I don’t get how the Carker story will help that.
I wasn’t surprised when he killed Morgan. I think the dream of him being a superman king narcissist type let me know he was not a bloody good bloke. But it is Morgan’s murder that leads to Tallant’s doom. It is his fiendish plan to attribute Morgan’s death the the Carkers that leads him inside their tumble down adobe.
It has an unreliable narrator. Remember Boucher was a mystery writer and the unreliable narrator became a staple after Agatha Christie. There is no hint that Tallant is a blackmailer. In a sense he is like the Crakers who have come to Oasis opportunistically in search of prey — as has Morgan, a fellow blackmailer. There is a hint to Tallant’s shady past at the beginning, but no detail given so that when the twist comes it is satisfying. The end is a moral tale of the biter bit. We like stories that reinforces our ideas of good and bad and that bad needs go punished.
The things themselves are interesting and dessicated and I think come perhaps from Boucher’s Californian life of sun and dry weather (though SF can be foggy as it was when I was there. I went over the Golden Gate bridge shivering). British and Irish writers monsters have more moisture in them. But desiccation is death in the desert.
The guys in the bar are devices to fill in the narrative. Very tell not show. But it works. I recently read Call of Cthulhu and that is purely tell but a famous story nevertheless. They set up the end. That the Craker’s house is one to be avoided. And this man (his sin is a belief in his own superiority over fate and law). It is set up that the Craker’s should be avoided, he sins in ignoring this and persists in his sin (twist) and then biter bit, satisfying us.
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E F Benson
Edward Frederic Benson was born in 1867 at Wellington College, where his father was headmaster, in Berkshire just outside London and died at University College London at the age of 72. His father went on to be Bishop of Truro, and Cornwall features in both his and his brothers’ stories, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ranking of the Anglican Church.
He was the fifth child. His illustrious brother A C Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory, a patriotic English song and some fine ghost stories, although probably not as good as EF’s. His other brother also wrote ghost stories but he was a committed Catholic and RH Benson’s stories often contain religious lessons rather than being merely fun.
His sister Margaret was an amateur Egyptologist and author. Two other siblings died young.
E F Benson was educated at Marlborough College and then went to King’s College Cambridge. His first book was Sketches from Marlborough and he was most famous in his lifetime for the Mapp and Lucia comic novel series. Arguably however his ghost stories are his greatest legacy. Some of these including this one How Fear Departed The Long Gallery have comic elements, particularly the kind of humour that observes and gently satirises the social class he moved in — otherwise known as the idle rich. A status I aspire to myself, and with your help will one day reach.
How Fear Departed The Long Gallery
The story starts with a rather comic picture of a genteel English county family who live in a long occupied ancestral house full of quirky ghosts. Then after the comedy we are told about the scary ghosts: the murdered children, murdered quite horribly by Dirty Dick. It was one of those murders like Richard III, motivated by a desire to wipe out the line and inherit
I think the scariness of children is if I may say like that of a doll. It’s the uncanny valley. They are both like and unlike adults. They look like us, but we cannot be sure they think like us or what they will do. Who is hiding behind the eyes of the child. Anne Rice does this with her child vampire Claudia and there was a child vampire in Skyrim too. Just saying.
The servant who first sees the toddlers dies. Then Miss Canning, the great beauty and friend of Voltaire mocks the twins and gets a horrible lichen disease. E F wrote a few horror stories that feature diseases, notably Caterpillars. Colonel Blantyre shot at the poor ghosts. Miss Canning told them to get back into the fire.
When Madge wakes in the Long gallery after dark and gets lost in the furniture and disorientated that’s like the Blind. Man’s Buff story we did. Lighten Our Darkness indeed, and figuratively by mercy. So it’s a story about redemption
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The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long was born in 1901 in Harlem, New York (not the Netherlands) and died in 1992 aged 92 in Manhattan.
He was a horror and science fiction writer and is most famous for his contribution to the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Cthulhu Mythos begins with H P Lovecraft, but many other authors have contributed towards the corpus of stories that the faithful call ‘The Canon’. It was his 1921 story The Eye Above The Mantel that caught Lovecraft’s eye. That story was a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe and I have elsewhere commented on that histrionic overblown prose that contains many screaming crazy dudes and occult blasphemous horrors which is found first and best in Poe, then Lovecraft and here in this lovely story.
Frank and Howard maintained a long correspondence. Lovecraft was famous for his lengthy and multiple pen friendships as he sat shut up and nervous in his room. He became a mentor to Frank.
Frank contributed to the pulp magazines
The Hounds of Tindalos
Chalmers. Prefers illuminated manuscripts to adding machines and leering stone gargoyles to automobiles. Who doesn’t? He has a long nose and slightly receding chin. His bookcase has medieval pamphlets about sorcery, witchcraft and black magic (surely triple tautology) but again, what’s not normal in any of this? Although I think that Frank is setting it up for the norms so they get the idea that Chalmers is a bit weird.
He has the same name as the Australian Philosopher David Chalmers who famously came up with the term ‘the hard problem’ to describe how in a materialist way of thinking, matter can give rise to subjective experience. It’s as hard a problem as how cows make lollipops. We simply can’t figure either of them out.
So, Frank is using ‘modern science’ in the guise of Einstein to undermine the self-confident materialists, particularly regarding time. He throws this is in like spice. He lets us know that Einstein is relative: we each have our own versions.
Our interlocutor is our avatar. Think how hard it would be to write a story with one character? You need two to bring out the exposition. Anyway, on we go, getting more and more theatrical with each sentence.
But this idea about curves and angles seems original and it is quite weird. Like Lovecraft’s Colour Out of Space, an abstract idea like a colour or an angle can be jarringly weird. Weird is all about juxtapositions that should not be, and taking things out of context because they are juxtaposed with other, odd contents.
It sort of reminded me of H G Wells’ The Time Machine particularly the 1950s film version.
The Hounds of Tindalos was the first Cthulhu story written by anyone else than Lovecraft and we have references to Dholes and the Elder Races. Other than that, there is no clear connection, unless a Mythos buff can correct me. The Hounds of Tindalos are not actual dogs in this story. Other Mythos writers like Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley and Peter Cannon reference the Hounds. The the name Tindalos sounds Greek and there are references ‘The Greeks had a name for them, ‘ I don’t think Tindalos means anything.
The name Halpin is one I have only come across before in the work of Ambrose Bierce The Death of Halpin Frayser . Perhaps it is a common name in America, but I’ve heard in speech here.
20lb of plaster of Paris seems a lot. Despite the plaster of Paris smoothing out the corners of the room (I should have liked to have seen that), the Hounds find a way in by causing an earthquake which causes the plaster to fall and thus angles are created…
A hopeless maniac. I could tell you about those.
With the later excerpts from the news and the story of his neighbour who’d gone to let his cat in, I wondered if there wasn’t humour here? The superintendent on finding the body walks to the open window and stares for five minutes at the building opposite. Then presumably he’s fine.
Amusingly our anonymous interlocutor is the main suspect. And of course he’s anonymous so we can’t help the police even if we’d wanted to, which of course we would.
It seems that the lack of enzymes is what cause the hounds and other extra temporal creatures of their ilk to be immortal
The end proves the futility of biology.
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Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman
E T A Hoffman, as he is known, was born in 1776 in Konigsberg, East Prussia, Germany and died in Berlin, Germany of syphilis, which was extremely prevalent. He was only 46.
He was a romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror as well as being a composer, music critic and artist. He wrote the Nutcracker and the Mouse King which was the basis of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker and Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman is based on E T A Hoffman’s works.
His parents separated when he was 12. He remained with his mother and aunts. He was very fond of his aunts.
He started work in 1796 for his uncle as a clerk. He visited Dresden and was impressed by the paintings in the gallery there. He lived and worked for his uncle in Berlin from 1798. From 1800 he lived and worked away from home and took to a dissolute lifestyle. He was promoted and got a job in Warsaw in 1804. He was happy in Warsaw, but went back to Berlin which was occupied by Napoleon’s armies. In 1808 he got a job in Bamburg as a theatre manager.
He was given to falling in love, once with a young music student Julia Marc and another time with a married woman 10 years old who had six children. He also appears to had challenges with alcohol most of his adult life.
The Sandman
The Sandman is Hoffman’s best loved and most influential story. It was a favourite of Sigmund Freud and we might see some influence of this story on Tim Burton’s films.
M. Grant Kellermeyer on his great ghost story site says that the Sandman exists to sow suffering and everything he touches. Coppelius as the Sandman wants to throw hot coals and sparks into the eyes, not the soporific sand.
The story begins with a series of letters. This was a common convention and later Hoffman steps in as the author and discusses different ways he had thought of beginning the story. One can’t help think that he was amusing himself with this story as he seems to be satirising certain classes of people, notably Romantics. The Romantic Movement grew up towards the end of the 18th Century and lasted into the 19th Century, dated to end at the crowning of Queen Victoria in England in 1837.
I think the first letter from Nathanael setting out his horrified fantasies about the Sandman Coppelius is to establish him as a credulous and impressionable boy given to neurotic terrors. He seems incapable of distinguishing truth from his fantasies and believes his inward passions rather than objective facts. Again, I think Hoffman is poking fun at Romanticism.
There is some theme of eyes. Coppelius seems to want to steal Nathanael’s eyes, and eyes and optics crop up again and again. When Coppelius and Nathanael’s father are working as alchemists, they seem to be building automata.
Clara’s letter establishes her (a woman) as level headed and logical and not given to fancies. They are at odds in this and I feel that Hoffman is making fun of the brooding romantics who believed that nature should lead over thinking. Clara is endlessly forgiving and devoted to Nathanael despite him not really deserving it as he is moody and unfaithful with a robot and then tries to kill her. In the end, we hear that she has found someone more worthwhile to love and have children with.
Amusingly, when Clara doesn’t love his gloomy poem he calls her a lifeless automaton. The story is filled with little jokes like this.
Nathanael does not believe in free will. Clara does. Nathanael believes that we are controlled by mighty powers greater than ourselves. Clara denies this and says we are fooled by our own fancies if we think this. Ironically, that is what kills Nathanael and drives him mad.
Some translations use Oh! Oh! Oh! for Olympia’s words, but the translation I used uses the original German Ach! Ach! Ach!
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Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany
Edward John Moreton Draw Plunkett, or Lord Dunsany was known to his friends as Eddie. Lord Dunsany was born in 1878 in London England and died in 1957 in Dublin Ireland.
Though born in England, he was heir to the oldest inhabited house in Ireland: Dunsany Castle near Tara. In County Meath.
He worked to support the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with W B Yeats and Lady Gregory. In addition he was chess and pistol champion of Ireland. He was also a great traveller and, as you can tell from this story: he was a habitual hunter with horse and hounds.
He was a prolific writer produced over ninety volumes of fiction, essays, poems and plays. His most famous book is possibly The King of Elfland’s Daughter and he is thought to be the first fantasy writer who set out the later genre that produced the Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings and ultimately Game of Thrones.
Thirteen At Table
This story was suggested by Mike Jenkins. We have a beautiful description of the Kent countryside on a spring evening as they follow the fox. This is indeed a fox hunt and may not be to everyone’s taste but is part of the story. I like the idea that a gentleman at hounds may request a bed from any other gentleman who has a gentleman’s house.
It’s s simple tale thereafter. We have host, Sir Richard Arlen, who says he has lived a wicked life. What he has done to this succession of women that means he has to dine with them every night for the past fifty years is not explained. But we understand he has wronged them and we guess perhaps he was somewhat of a rake.
As the dinner goes on. It is explained that Mr Linton drinks a lot as he is dehydrated. He is also tired. He starts off by humouring the guest and then takes to his story of his wonderful twenty point hunt. The best hunt that ever was and a tale that grows in the telling. I am thinking this is a good humoured dig at huntsmen and their stories.
And as he feels the need for an audience to tell his tale, slowly the ghosts become visible to Mr Linton and he begins to treat them as real people rather than as figments of his imagination. It is so slowly and delicately done that it is very effective and smooth.
In the end he offends the ghosts by something he said. They are clearly very sensitive and collect slights. He is mortified, but the host is supremely grateful.
There is a happy ending in that Sir Richard Arlen
It’s a humorous and pretty story. I haven’t read much Dunsany, but I’m keen to read more now.
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A man in a car crash starts wondering how come the crowds gather so fast, and then he wonders why they all look so familiar. He researches the answer and is about to go to the police...
A short weird tale by the prolific master of the weird tale, Ray Bradbury
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You will notice I call this book by at least two different titles. I don’t know why.
That's it done. The commentary at the end is slightly nutty because I was tired and slightly manic. Make sure to listen to the very end.
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More Dorian. Here we go. In this he is effete, then psychopathic, then rather out of sorts. Luckily Harry is there to cheer him up.
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Part 3!
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Part 2
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Part 1
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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.
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Here’s another early listen for you lovely substackers.
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Hello Literati.
Here’s Tom Eliot’s famous, moving, erudite, meandering, existential poem. I fancied doing some poetry for a change and it gave me the opportunity of reading out French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. How’s that for a smart-a…
He do all the voices.
Have yourself a happy St Andrew’s day. Fittingly I have just done Thrown Janet in my best Scots. It was a commission from Catherine Sahu and she has kindly promised me I can share it with you soon.
TW
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Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is the original Christmas Ghost Story. Or technically a supernatural story set at Christmas in the kingdom of Logres ruled by King Arthur. It's pretty gothic.
This is a prose translation of a Middle English poem called Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. The translation by Jessie Weston was published in 1898 and though it is certainly not Middle English she has left enough archaic words in to keep that flavour.
Jessie Weston herself was born in 1850 in Surrey, England, the daughter of a tea merchant. When she was young the family moved to Bournemouth off England’s south coast and she began writing there. She studied in Hildesheim in Germany and in Paris and at the Crystal Palace School of Art in South London.
She was most famous for her studies of Arthurian romances and the Grail legend where she put forth the ideas that the material was actually pre-Christian and pagan in origin. T S Eliot’s The Wasteland was influenced by Weston’s Arthurian studies.
The Green Knight as it stands was composed no later than the end of the 14th Century (the date of the manuscript) and may be much older. The language is Mercian influenced Middle English, probably from Lancashire. The boundary between Mercian and Northumbrian Old English runs through Lancashire and its dialect is influenced by both, but South Lancashire and Cheshire have Midlands’ such as pronouncing the ‘g’ in ‘king’ and ‘thing’.
If you’re interested in Old English dialects, check out Simon Roper’s Youtube Channel for a real treat.
The poem shows signs of oral storytelling with the rich, detailed descriptions that run in sequences and would probably delight an audience as they were elaborated.
The themes are of honour and courage, as befitted the courtly audience, but also of love and fashion, which traditionally interest ladies. Tricky subject these days, but that was the established view for centuries. Things change. I for one embrace change, while I mourn what it lost. I’m a bit like the VoiceOver by Galadriel at the start of the Fellowship of The Ring movie.
There are folkloric features which Weston perhaps emphasis because she was interested in them: He bears a holly bough to symbolise life and rebirth. He pole vaults over water as fairies can’t normally cross running water. The bargain is for a year and a day which is in all good fairy tales.
The motif of the talking head appears again and again in Celtic stories: Bran the Blessed, and Bricriu’s Feast from the Ulster Cycle where the beheading challenge is seen. Of course the severed head is seen on a platter in the Perceval/Parsifal/Peredur Stories.
The old lady in the castle is the famous with Morgana La Fee.
“I trow” is “I think” or “I believe”
“In sooth” is “truly”, “really” ‘fo sho’
“Wit, wot, witen’ are ’to know’ . So “ I wit” is cognate with the German “Ich weiss” or the Dutch “ek weet”
“List” is “like” or “please” “As he may list” “As he pleases”
“Welkin” is sky.
“Hearken” is “hear, or listen to”
Going through the recording as I edit, it strikes me that perhaps the green lace on the axe is the one that Gawain later gets from the lady and transpires to have been the knight’s. It was the magic of this lace that allowed him to survive the blow. Not sure why I didn’t figure that before. This is just what a modern author would be: place an item and bury it in detail so its significance isn’t grasped until much later.
It’s mainly showing not telling too. We get some insight into Gawain’s thinking, but mostly the situations are simply described and we infer internal motivations and ruminations from what we hear. Described.
I also think it’s unfair of the Green Knight to chide Gawain for cowardice, comparing his fearlessness when faced with the axe. The Green Knight knew he had a magic item that would protect him, so of course he wasn’t scared. Unfair, I say. Unfair.
You will note that when he leaves North Wales he crosses into the “Wilderness of Wirral”. I just did a members only story but Ramsey Campbell called “Again” which takes place in the wilderness of Wirrall, but a good five to six hundred years later. Comparing the two stories, it sounds like not much has changed.
Mind you, the geography doesn’t match. The Wirral isn’t high moorland and mountains with valleys. That is much more likely to be my own country of Cumbria or if he veered east into the Pennines and Yorkshire Dales.
Gawain thinks the lady of the castle is fairer than Guinevere. Guinevere is his auntie. He doesn’t think much of Morgana La Fee either. She’s also his auntie.
The comely lady of the castle tries it on with our Gawain. Even at the end she tries to tempt him with a fabulously expensive ring. He’s not a gold digger though and he refuses. She offers him her girdle. I suspect that girdle is not worn as close to the skin as a modern girdle or Gawain surely wouldn’t have accepted it, honest and pure as he is.
In fact he is only swayed to take it because she says it is magic and will protect him. His virtue sags a bit here, but only because he loves his life and who can blame him for that? Certainly the Green Knight doesn’t.
I know I have a lot of animal lovers in the audience for The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast and I fear they will quail at all the hunting. It is interesting how times change as I often muse. The huntsmen feel no sadness at the killing of a beast, and don’t think there’s anything unfair or wrong of setting a forty hounds, fifty horses and a hundred men on one lone fox. They are glad when they kill the animals and have a right good day of it.
Sins change, don’t they?
After being tested again by the squire, Gawain leaves to find the green chapel or the sunkenkirk perhaps. It sounds like an ancient burial mound to me, the sort like West Kennet barrow or some at Kilmartin in Argyll. I did a short video about Long Meg and at one point there were barrows there.
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Very short and unsophisticated. Only 8 minutes listen
The Piano
By Tony Walker
“Rain at Christmas,” Amanda said.
The letting agent turned her head. “It’s not quite Christmas; maybe we’ll get snow yet.”
The woman stood at the top of a flight of worn sandstone steps that led to the front door of the old house in Abbey Street.
As we climbed, the cathedral bells pealed out.
“Practising for the Christmas service, I suppose,” I said, following them up.
We first viewed the house on a damp dog day in early December. Drizzle and darkness wreathed Carlisle but I hoped there was still time for a winter wonderland.
Amanda turned at the door and grinned at me. She loved the house. The fabric of the building was far older than its Victorian facade. In this part of the city, the house foundations went back centuries, maybe even to the Romans.
“A six-month let, isn’t it, Mr Hutching?”
I nodded. It was pricey, but the company were paying. They had a contract on an engineering project for flood defences. I was the lead engineer. Not the choicest job in the company, but I’d volunteered because I was born in Carlisle and not been back since I’d left aged six.
She struggled with the key in the lock.
The letting agent, a red-headed woman in her mid-forties, said, “Full of character,” finally getting it open.
As we entered, the house had a presence; a hush inhabited the vestibule like the place was a concert venue waiting for the performance to begin.
In the hallway, Amanda glanced around, head tilted up, eyes wide. It was old — Dickensian almost. A picture hung on the wall.
“Who’s that?” Amanda pointed.
“The current owner’s grandmother,” the agent said.
‘She looks miserable.”
I grimaced. Amanda always had spoken her mind.
“The grandmother was a piano teacher,” the agent said as if that explained the woman’s sad expression, then she changed the subject. “You know it comes furnished?”
I nodded. Amanda stepped up to the picture. “On second thoughts, she looks very gracious—very refined.”
The agent either didn’t hear or preferred not to answer.
Behind the woman’s back, I hissed, “I bet the house is haunted.”
Amanda laughed.
She had the Christmas Tree up three days after we moved in. I’d had a soggy day on site, and when I arrived home, she gave me a glass of mulled wine and a mince pie. The tree sparkled. I looked at Amanda and she looked so happy. I was glad. She had been so sad since she lost her mother. It was nice to see her smile again.
That night, I heard piano music. I lay in the dark, and Amanda knew I was listening because she said, “Is that from next door?”
“Must be. Or have you left the radio on?”
“No. Anyway, the piano sounds out of tune. Must be the neighbours having fun.”
“It’s three a.m.”
“Party animals?”
“Party animals playing Chopin?”
I laughed then we slept.
Three nights later, I sat bolt upright in the dark and woke Amanda. She put her hand on my arm. “What’s the matter?”
“I thought I heard someone downstairs.”
“Surely you locked the door.”
“I did.”
“Then there’s no one in the house but us. There can’t be.”
Piano music started again — a cascade of notes like snowfall, but still with that dissonance.
“Out of tune again,” Amanda said.
“Those crazy neighbours,” I joked.
Amanda replied, “It’s in this house, and you know it.”
When I woke before dawn, it was snowing. Amanda had left the curtain open, and the flakes fell, illuminated by the mock-Victorian streetlamp onto the genuinely Victorian cobbled street out front. I could still hear the piano, soft, beautiful, full of longing.
After that, the piano music came every night. But it was sad, mournful.
“I think her heart’s breaking,” Amanda said.
I was hanging a bauble — a glittering mouse with a sword on the Christmas tree. How the little thing sparkled, next to the golden deer’s head. I stood back admiring my work.
Amanda was next to me. “I love that you still get excited by these things.”
The tree gleamed. The baubles turned. I pointed. “There’s a draft.”
“It’s an old house.”
But it was the spider that gave it away — a giant wolf spider, the kind that comes inside from the cold when the year is turning.
Amanda stepped back, hand to her throat. “What a beast.”
The spider scuttled through a tear in the wallpaper. I’d never noticed that rip before, but now when I looked, I saw an edge. I moved behind the tree, avoiding needles and tinsel. I followed the edge of the torn wallpaper with my eyes then my fingers.“There’s a door here. It’s been papered over.”
“Must be a closet.”
“Let’s open it.”
“No, we shouldn’t. It’s not our house.”
“There’s a mystery inside, and you know I can’t leave mysteries.”
But still, she was concerned. “No, Don. They’ll keep our deposit or something.”
“It’s not my deposit, anyway.”
And so, reluctantly, she helped me move the tree, and I went to get a knife from the kitchen. It was a door. Someone had papered over it. And it wasn’t just a cupboard. It wasn’t a huge room, granted, but big enough.
“A piano!” she said.
“A dusty old piano too.”
“Didn’t the agent say the owner’s grandmother was a piano teacher? It’s probably hers.”
“And she’s probably our ghost.”
I went and lifted the lid to reveal the keyboard.
Amanda tried the keys. She knew how to play. The notes plunked — some melodic, but most of them off.
“Let’s get it tuned!” Amanda’s eyes gleamed.
“I thought you said we shouldn’t mess around with things?”
She laughed.
The owner was fine about it, pleased even. It turned out her father had closed off some rooms to save money after his wife died in the 1970s. He’d moved the piano out of the way, and they’d simply forgotten about it.
The piano tuner couldn’t come until Christmas Eve. He fitted us in as his last job before going home.
After we wished Merry Christmas to him and his family, Amanda gave me a personal concert, sitting on the piano stool, playing Schumann and Chopin and Satie, all by candlelight and the soft, quiet sparkle of the Christmas tree lights. Outside on the darkening street, the rain turned to snow.
That night, the playing woke me again.
Amanda lay quiet beside me. She reached out and stroked my arm.
I said, “She doesn’t seem to mind we messed with her piano.”
Amanda listened. “Note-perfect. I think she’s pleased.”
The new tenants came for a look around before we left. I was standing there in the hall when they entered.
The man pointed to the portrait and said, “What a lovely picture of that lady.”
And his wife said, “What a beautiful smile she has. Is she a relative?”
Amanda shook her head. “No, but we do know her quite well.”
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The Pomegranate Seed
The pomegranate seed is a reference to the myth of Persephone and Demeter. Winter and Spring and the Lord of the Underworld. In a sense Mother and daughter are the same, and one aspect of the woman spends time in the world of the dead, while the other walks the world of the living.
Kenneth disappears to see about ‘their passages.’ It is clear that it is his passage over the river Styx to the underworld that he finally arranges. He has been so attached to the ghost of his late wife, that he cannot escape her as she dominated him in life. He wants to escape, he wants to live with his new wife and have new experiences, but he is simply not strong enough to make it so.
Charlotte represents the living, mortal world while Elise Ashby represents death. In that sense it is a story about a choice that all of us have to make: to live in this world and be of it and do what work it sets before us or spend our time dreaming of the underworld whence we came and to which we shall return. Deep for a Monday morning, I feel.
However, Wharton’s skill as an observer of human behaviour also shines in this story, and for most of the time it is the skilful chronicle of that commonplace (sadly) or married life—the suspicion that our lover’s heart is tethered elsewhere. Trivial, but profoundly upsetting. Charlotte spends a lot of time arguing this when then that way that her husband is having an affair, trying to convince herself in a way that rings very true.
Old Mrs Ashby plays the role of the mother goddess who loses her son in this case to the Underworld. This doesn’t totally fit. But she is on the side of life, despite her age, and she supports Charlotte and regrets her son’s attachment to his late wife.
In construction there are four parts. We begin with a scene of Charlotte’s unsettledness, standing at the door. What had been her haven now disquiets her and she finds no comfort in modern New York or inside in her home that she once loved.
She coveted the house when it was Elise’s and of course it has always remained Elises and again this is the story of the second wife who is dutiful and loving but is reminded by the possessions and moments and indeed children that she can never really supplant the first. Iff the first wife had been unfaithful then it would be easier, but by dying while he still loved her this has made the second wife’s job impossible. She can never win.
Wharton raises questions throughout: what are the letters? Who are they from? Did he love this other woman? But she lays hints as the tension builds that these are not normal letters, they are grey, the handwriting is androgynous (perhaps because Elise is not a woman but a spirit? And therefore neither male nor female in that vague gray underworld?)
But its a slow burn and the tension is that of a story about adultery, until it is revealed at the end to be a story about death’s hold on the living. Depressed now?
She uses a lot of Britishisms: holiday for vacation, fortnight for two weeks —I don’t think Edith Wharton played Fortnite.
The ending is ambiguous. Wharton prefers subtle hints rather than clear resolutions in her ghost stories, listen to Bewitched or Mr Jones on this channel for that.
But it seems to me that both the Old Mrs Ashby and Charlotte are creatures of the daylight world and so they pretend that Kenneth’s disappearance is a daylight occurrence when they know that he has gone down into the night world. Still, they act as is their natures, and call the everyday police.
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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'
This was taken from a live stream so the audio is not perfect. I have done my best to repair it.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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 Hussain
Iqbal 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.com
Iqbal'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 (my affiliate link)
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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 Hartley
Leslie 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 S
This 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 effective if we had known that the character was a policeman but it might be hard to include that snippet without giving the game away too early.
The secret with a twist is to place the information in plain sight but in a way that it doesn’t feel significant to the reader. Then when it is revealed at the end, the significance is seen. If you unveil the information at the end, the reader is not satisfied and it can seem simply like an info dump to tie up the loose ends.
We have spoken before
Dramatic Irony is where the reader knows more than the character.
Unreliable Narrator is where the narrator knows more than the reader.
Suspense is when narrator and reader are both in the dark.
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Joan Aiken
Joan 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!
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The Amorous Ghost by Enid Bagnold
Listen above, but download link is here
https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/e9e2b504-9b22-4621-930d-da6121e3018a/s02e44-the-amorous-ghost-by-enid-bagnold.mp3
Edith Bagnold
Edith 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.
Upstairs, downstairs | Margaret Drabble | The Guardian
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The Grey Woman Part 3
In 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 3
Disguises. Victorians loved disguises. Think of Sherlock Holmes
The beautiful Anna 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 sustainability
In 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
“Numero un: 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 farmer.
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.
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Oke of Oakhurst by Vernon Lee
Vernon Lee
Despite sounding so masculine, Vernon Lee was actually a woman called Violet Paget, born in France in 1856 and died in Italy in 1935. Despite these location she identified as English. Her biographer Vineta Colby says that Lee was English by nationality, French by an accident of birth and Italian by choice.
As well as the ghost stories for which she is most famous, Vernon Lee, was an essayist who wrote about travel and art and especially aesthetics.
Her parents were globe-trotting, or at least Europe-trotting intellectuals and in 1873, when Vernon or Violet was 17, they settled in Florence Italy. She stayed living in the vicinity of Florence until her death in 1935.
Violet published her first collection of essays when she was 24. These dealt with Italian writers and dramatists and she later wrote on William Shakespeare and Renaissance Italy.
She made fun of English artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites in her 1884 novel Mrs Brown.
Politically, she was a convinced pacificst. She published under a masculine name because she feared that as a woman her writing would not be taken seriously. She was a feminist and mostly dressed as a man. Though she didn’t come out, she did have crushes on women and was probably Lesbian. She suffered from health anxiety.
She also fell out with other writers by making fun of them in her work; notably Henry James and Edith Wharton.
Henry James wrote to his equally talented brother William warning him about Vernon Lee: the most able mind in Florence, ‘as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent.’
Oke of Oakhurst
In Part 1, the story begins with our narrator, the artist, talking to an unknown interlocutor about a painting assignment he had. He begins to talk about the wonderful and strange Mrs Alice Oke of Oakhurst, Kent. We learn that the stay with the Okes left an indelible impression on the painter, whose name I have not yet learned.
We get the impression that the Okes are gone, possibly dead. Certainly, he will never be able to paint her. Some disaster has fallen. The painter painted the husband and the wife and he has no idea who know owns the portrait of Mr Oke. This suggests their home has been broken up as if in some terrible fate has befallen them.
He didn’t even finish the portrait of Mrs Oke. Vernon Lee withholds information to whet our appetite. She creates suspense.
“I suppose the newspapers were full of it at the time.”
So it was a scandal.
“It really was stranger than anyone could have guessed.”
Alice Oke is dead and her end was strange, but fitting. Lee tantalises us all the way. She was sent to our painter from heaven, “or the other place.”
Who is this woman!?? I want to know.
The narrator doesn’t normally retell the story, but luckily for us, he chooses to on this occasion.
Lee paints a very sympathetic picture of Mr Oke, very much in awe of his wife, but a decent sort and not without feelings and sensitivities. But she sets him up through the painter’s eyes as the very antithesis of what the London Bohemian painter would admire. The painter sets off presuming Oke is the dullest of the dull, the very pinnacle of boring Tory county life.
He had been a lieutenant in the Blues which is a nickname of the Royal Horseguards, a prestigious cavalry regiment in the British Army who had been, as its name suggests a royal bodyguard.
In part 2 we get the background to Mr Oke. The painter is very disparaging. He portrays Oke as a dull young Kentish Tory with no imagination and no style. He refers to him as a ‘squireen’ (which my spellcheck prefers to render as ‘squirrel’) I guess this is a pejorative diminutive of ‘squire’ with the Irish -een added.
She comments on Mr Oke’s frown: “A Maniac Frown”. Vernon Lee mentions this twice.
We learn at the beginning that Mrs Oke is extremely desirous of having her portrait painted by this particular painter after seeing his work at the academy. Later we learn that Mrs Oke is fascinated by the portrait of her ancestor and even dresses like the 16th Century woman to make the resemblance greater.
Wanting her portrait painted seems therefore to be connected.
Our painter is disgusted with himself at accepting the commission at first. This is out of pure artistic snobbery. He imagines the Okes boring and conservative, not like his own charmed artistic circle.
Vernon Lee is a great descriptive writer. The description of the damp sheep sheltering from the rain under the oaks in the grounds of Oke’s Manor House are splendid, as are the descriptions of the house itself—very poetic and evocative.
The scene where he sits in the room listening to the clock as the twilight grows around him in the room hung with tapestries is truly wonderful.
.
Young Mr Oke isn’t allowed to have children. He is such a good-natured slave to his wife that I felt sorry for him in his simple, if dull, decency.
On the other hand, Mrs Oke, so far, appears a pure narcissist, taking no interest in anyone but herself.
Towards the end they mention ghosts. There appears no real reason to mention ghosts and it is in passing. But Oke comments that if they do exist they should not be taken lightly as God must intend them as a warning or a punishment. Then he changes the subject. The ghosts are mentioned close to the naughty ancestor Okes (the lady has Pomfret blood of course and they are self-seekers). So we presume a connection.
I bet this is foreshadowing
So we end at the end of Part 3, some 45 minutes in, on a suitable cliff-hanger, our appetite whetted.
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Minuke by Nigel Kneale
Nigel Kneale
Nigel Kneale was born in Barrow in Furness in 1922, which was then part of Lancashire “North of the Sands”, and since 1974 part of the modern county of Cumbria. He died in 2006 in London.
Neale’s family came from the Isle of Man, which is clearly visible from the coast of Cumbria. I saw it yesterday but not today as it was too rainy.
The family went back to the Isle of Man when he was six (finding Barrow too rich for their blood no doubt) and was educated in Douglas, the island’s capital. His father was editor of the local newspaper.
Kneale went to study law but got bored with the legal profession. Apparently he tried to join the British army at the start of the Second World War but was declared medically unfit due to photophobia.
He wrote short stories and read out his own story Tomato Cain on the BBC in 1946. Inspired by the reception his story got, he went to London to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
He then got involved in a voice acting and writing melange of a career on the broadcast media, writing his first script in 1950.
His most famous work was the Quatermass Series, a horror science fiction drama series on the BBC which was a massive success. You can find this and his later great success The Stone Tape on Youtube.
He did an adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black in 1989. He adapted some of the Sharpe novels in the 1990s which were also a great success.
He was invited to write for the X-Files but declined that job.
So, Neale was a big cheese up until recent times. His work, particularly Quatermass and The Stone Tape are canons of British hauntology these days.
Minuke
Or, if I hadn’t done it northern ‘my nook’. But ‘nook’ it is to us.
This story is from the collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories published by Collins in 1949.
The book is out of print and second-hand copies are going for nearly £400. I didn’t buy one.
It was requested by a listener and I was only too happy to oblige.
The story is told as a frame story. It begins in media res where a man has gone to an estate agent (a realtor) interested in a property. By the end we learn that not only is the property cursed and haunted an on an old Norse burial site, but it is demolished and its site occupied by a scrap metal yard, so why would the guy be interested in it? He clearly doesn’t know it’s a scrap metal yard because the estate agent has to tell him.
This does seem to a plot hole, but we shall forgive Nigel Kneale this. It is also possibly that someone cleverer than me will point out how I have misunderstood this point.
It seems like a poltergeist story. We remember the Enfield Poltergeist from the 1970s which received a lot of publicity, but this story pre-dates that case, so couldn’t be influenced by it.
There was a recent long documentary on BBC Sounds about the Battersea Poltergeist, but that dates from the 1950s, so again can’t have influenced Neale.
The other hint is the old Norse (or even older) burial ground that underlies Minuke.
This idea was picked up and used in several Hollywood horror movies. It features in The Shining where the Overlook Hotel is built on an old Native American burial ground. But this came out in 1980, so again cannot be an influence on Neale.
We see this idea of archaeology creating apparitions and other supernatural events in Neale’s classic TV programme The Stone Tape which I recently watched. This came out in 1972, but the idea of archaeology holding records of strongly emotional events and replaying it, is hinted at in Neale’s story “You Must Listen” about a haunted telephone line.
There is a haunted telephone line in this story, as well as a haunted radio that plays monster noises rather than dance music.
I recently wrote an article on Medium about Phone Calls From The Dead
Unexplained Calls From Dead People. Does it Happen More Than You Think? | Inside the Simulation
Other than that the story is structurally straight forward. A man tells a stranger about an event that he can’t explain. In this event, weird stuff happened.
It reads more like a Reddit true-life confession of supernatural events rather than a fictional story.
I wonder if that is what Neale wanted? His style is much more conversational and matter-of-fact then the Edwardians, and far less literary than his contemporary in the 1950s, Robert Aickman.
It is presented as ‘a funny thing happened.’ It’s not a stretch to say that if you trawled Reddit now, you might find a story very close to this being put forward as truth.
Neale also sets the story back in time. We recall the master M R James advising us that if we want to tell a convincing ghost story, we should displace it from the present, either in time. This happened, ‘way back before the war’ and Neale throws in a historical commonplace about ‘ribbon development’ which grounds the story in a prosaic and believable matrix.
Stephen King does just this and you will notice all horror movies spend a fifth of the story setting up the happy family in the new home with the dog, the kids and then the poltergeist.
Neale was their forerunner. Horror movies didn’t work like this then: they were Dracula and Frankenstein and the Wolfman.
The name ‘Minuke’ is so woefully possibly, and even likely to convey a lack of imagination on the part of the Pritchards. Someone who calls their house Minuke isn’t going to be creative enough to fool someone with a made-up poltergeist story.
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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Le Fanu was an Irish writer born in Dublin in 1814 and who died in Dublin in 1873. In his time he was the leading writer of ghost stories and macabre tales.
On the podcast, we have read out his masterwork, Carmilla, but Green Tea is an equally well-known story.
He was judged by the master ghost story writer of a later generation, M R James as being absolutely first rank.
His family were of French protestant (who fled France because of persecution) and English descent. His family were writers, and his grandmother Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were famous playwrights. His mother was a writer of biographies.
Le Fanu’s father was a protestant clergyman in the Church of Ireland. He was a rector of a protestant church in Ireland and the family were disturbed by the 1830s Tithe War where the majority Catholic population objected to paying tithes to the Protestant minority church.
Le Fanu studied law at Trinity but as early as 1839 (when he was twenty-four) he wrote ghost stories for the Dublin newspapers.
In 1847 Le Fanu was active in the campaign against the cruel indifference of the British government which did little to relieve the suffering during the Irish famine.
Le Fanu’s wife had significant mental health problems and his married life was less than happy. He wrote ghost stories set in Ireland, but due to the influence of his publisher, began to write stories with an English setting because they felt they would sell better.
He died of a heart attack in Dublin aged only 58.
Green Tea
Le Fanu produced a collection of supernatural stories called In A Glass Darkly which was published in 1872. This was ostensibly the collected papers of the occult German medical-philosopher Dr Hesselius. Think of Sherlock Holmes cases ostensibly recorded by Dr Watson.
There is little doubt that no publisher would look at Green Tea now. It is full of ‘telling’ rather than showing. Most of the action happens at third hard. There are frames to the story: it is edited by the editor who got the papers at the death of a professor and much concerns Hesselius’s reports of things he has heard.
There are philosophical ramblings about Swedenborg’s metaphysics which are of very little interest to the modern reader. However, we know these things were of intense interest to Le Fanu and possibly to his contemporaries.
It does introduce Swedenborg’s idea that a man can be conjoined with an evil spirit, however. Sometimes these evil spirits, or even two evil spirits, take animal form. Hint. hint.
Le Fanu does dialogue well and the dialogue was smooth to narrate and quite naturalistic.
It is quite unclear whether the story reports an actual haunting by a devil monkey or a psychosis.
Hesselius diagnoses the end as a hereditary suicidal mania. I’m not sure we believe such things are heritable, though suicide can run in families, though more likely through a nurture rather than nature cause. But who knows?
The story that asks: was it madness or was it a monster? Has a strong pedigree. On The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast we have read The Horla by Guy de Maupassant and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman both of which can be interpreted either way.
I was recently reading the critic Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and The Eerie in which he draws a distinction between weird and eerie elements (and also uncanny components) of a story.
The ‘weird’ Fisher says is about the juxtaposition of the normal with things that should not be there. The devil monkey is therefore distinctly weird. He talks about how this juxtaposition, as beloved by the surrealists later, can lead to an unsettling of sanity.
My own view of this would be that the unknown provokes anxiety and the inability to map the new element into an existing world view can produce so much anxiety that it can trip up into a psychosis.
Fisher defines the eerie as doing with agency. When the reason that something is done, its agency, is mysterious: the eerie remains of Stonehenge, the eerie cry of a bird, the eerie empty landscape, then that is different from the weird.
In this case the eerie comes from us wondering about the agency of the monkey. What is it? What does it want? Why does it torment him? We get tentative answers to these questions, but nothing conclusive.
When the Rev. Jennings begins his account of the monkey, he starts by setting out the theological project he was engaged in and talks about the depth of study and the nature of the study: paganism both as contributors to his nervous affliction.
Hesselius then talks about the use of stimulants to fuel the student in his late night work. Incidentally, my mother reports the regular use of amphetamine by nurses on night shift at the Royal Infirmary Edinburgh in the 1950s, before it was illegal.
It is interesting that Green Tea is considered now an innocuous and gentle drink, beloved by Yoga teachers, but to Hesselius it is the very devil’s brew and dangerous to the nerves.
The descriptions of the monkey are pretty good, as when it sits on the wall, hands on its knees observing him sulkily.
The monkey is distinctly visible in total darkness, indicating its mental nature, I think.
I can’t explain the absences that are always over a fortnight. That doesn’t sound like a psychosis,
The monkey really seems to despise him when he is carrying out holy office This suggests its nature as an evil spirit.
The fact that when it learns to speak it interrupts him while he is praying also supports this view.
Its starts commanding him. These probably would be called command hallucinations these days, and a bad sign indeed.
The monkey always urges him to crimes, to injure others, and to injure himself. This is very common in mental illness these days. Not necessarily in psychosis because we also see this, probably se it more in Borderline Personality Disorder.
It urged him to jump down an old mineshaft. As well as being a symptom of mental illness, it is a bit of literary foreshadowing and leads us to go “of course!” When we find out that Jennings has made away with himself.
Because he’d flagged this up beforehand.
I see an interesting point in a review on the internet by Charlotte Spivack that reminds us that gothic fiction was interested in the projection of the vile components of a person onto a hideous companion. The prime example is Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, but also we could consider Dr Frankenstein and his monster or Rev. Jennings and the monkey.
In the last part of the story, Hesselius propounds his theory of a nervous fluid analogous to the circulation of the blood, where the brain is the pump for this nervous fluid which he considers is spiritual in nature, but physical enough to travel through nerves as the blood travels through arteries and veins. He even thinks there is an arterial and venous component.
He sees this nerve fluid as being similar to electricity or light more than blood, so not physical, but energetic though he doesn’t use that idea.
This is similar to the Chinese idea of qi, a bioenergy that permeates the body and whose correct flow is essential for good health.
Green Tea can negatively effect the nervous fluid. He also hints that disembodied spirits can have an influence on the flow of this nervous fluid, and so we never establish whether the monkey was real or a figment of Jenning’s imagination only.
He also talks about the eye of this system being above the eyebrows, so in the region of the Third Eye of the Indian Chakra system.
It can be helped the application of iced eau de cologne, which is of course a spirit.
If Hesselius had sealed this inner eye, Jennings would have been cured of seeing the monkey.
Some modern critics lambast the Frame and the end explanatory sequence, but probably unfairly. Le Fanu was a mid-Victorian. He hadn’t done an MA in Creative Writing.
His purposes and his audiences weren’t the same as ours and it’s unfair to judge this story by the requirements of modern readers. Mid-Victorians wanted something different as Le Fanu’s success shows.
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Only short, and not a ghost story. Imagine. This is my notes script. I did ramble off when reading from it. But it's just for you.
The Story of An Hour
It just shows how our life is completely transformed by seeing things from different perspectives. That is true both of the heroine, who dies, but also for us in this masterful tale with multiple twists.
The first shock, that Bently Mallard is dead and that his young wife, Louise — who has a heart condition— is now a widow is a fairly standard opening incident for a story. Things have suddenly, unexpectedly changed. And because the opening is standard, we are conditioned to expect a standard response and Kate Chopin leads is into this well.
We expect that the young widow cries and locks herself alone out of grief. That is what her sister and Mr Richards believe. They want to protect her from a sudden shock because of her weak heart.
The information about the weak heart is is a set up for the ending.
So far, so good. We are foreshadowed and wallowing in our expectations, then the first twist.
Just short of three minutes into the story, we have her crying herself to silence, sitting waiting for some unknown fear. We expect that the fear is of widowhood at such a young age—of being alone without a man to look after her. This last expectation would be even more expected when the story was published in 1894. But Kate Chopin was one of these ‘new women’ — I’m just reading Dracula, published in 1897, and Stoker goes on about these new women with their modern ideas, and I’m not sure he approves of them.
Even so, as Mrs Mallard begins to have an intuition about what her fear is, she tries to beat it back. But at last, at 3 minutes and 52 seconds into my reading, she says it: ‘Free!”. That’s what she was frightened of—her freedom.
She is free of the man who loved her, but whose love, as for most women of her class and position, enslaved her.
By 4 minutes and 2 seconds, she has reconciled herself and is no longer scared of her freedom.
The first twist then, is that she is not heartbroken to be a widow, but joyful.
We are told that Mr Mallard only loved his wife. But that she did not really love him. Perhaps sometimes she loved him, but mostly not. Now, in most stories this would be enough to brand her a heartless cow and the reader would lose all sympathy for her, but we don’t. We empathise and root for her in her new freedom, despite the fact is was won through her husband’s life being cut short and despite the fact that she never returned his devoted affection. Some trick that for a writer.
I was rooting for Louise Mallard even before I knew what she had wished her life was short because marriage made her so miserable. It made her miserable, and we can imagine that to be true even when the husband is not portrayed as a brute, even when he is portrayed as a good man. A good man, but a husband and therefore her captor.
She begins to revel in the imagined years of freedom. This is a further foreshadowing, which will be twisted. We buy it and then are switched.
At 5 minutes and 52 seconds, she realises that freedom is far more important than love. This is what the story is about.
At this time, when Louise Mallard is imagining and rejoicing in her free future, her sister is outside the door, taking our part, imagining that Louise is broken with grief, as would be correct and proper.
At 6 minutes and 54 seconds, Louise Mallard carries herself as a goddess of victory.
At 7 minutes and 4 seconds, someone is opening the front door. This is an example of prolepsis where a pronoun is used before the character is introduced, which is a device for creating suspense. It creates an ‘open loop’ in our minds. We wonder: who is this someone? and tension arises because that question has been planted in us.
He has a latch key. Oh, that must mean he is known and trusted by the household.
At 7 minutes and 8 seconds, Brently Mallard enters, unexpectedly alive. Another twist, and a big one.
We imagine the scene: the bemused Brently who has no idea what is going on in his house. The sister shrieking. His friend Richards, hiding him from his wife. Richards knows, even if we have forgotten, that Louise Mallard has a bad heart and that a shock could kill her.
At 7 minutes and 33 seconds Louise Mallard is dead.
The final twist then is that Louise Mallard does die of shock as they had all feared, but it is not at the shock of her husband being killed, it is at the disappointment that he is still alive.
And all this in 7 minutes and 42 seconds. Not bad.
So there is one initial shock to set us on the emotional roller coaster: that Brently is suddenly killed. The first twist is that she rejoices in his death. The second twist is that he isn’t dead, and the final twist is that her death comes from shock, as we might have expected, but it’s the opposite kind of shock that we were set up to expect.
It works so well because the final twist is well foreshadowed. She already alerted us to the weak heart right at the beginning. If Kate Chopin had revealed at the end that Louise had a weak heart, there would not be a plot hole, that is, the end would be perfectly logical. We would have said, “Ah, well, what a pity.” But because of the foreshadowing, and the deft touch where Richards realises what is going to happen before we do (unless we were very quick), instead of “Oh!” We end up saying “Aha!”
And Ahas are always better than Ohs.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne 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 Brown
Unless 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 afterwards
He 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 keeps the same two words. Ich weiss, and Ich kenn. There you go.
Salem
Puritan Salem is a favourite topic for writers from the movie The Witch, where the simple puritans are discombobulated by Black Phillip in the woods, to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
I guess it is all that repressed evil that must come out somewhere that is the interest.
I also was interested in the picture of a countryside that was filled with heathen darkness that was a real threat to the colonial settlers, and a landscape still full of Native Americans living with their full culture still flourishing.
Deals With The Devil
I recently did a version of one of my own stories, The Bewcastle Fairies with sound effects which has a similar theme. I also did John Buchan’s A Journey of Little Profit which is also about a man tempted by the Devil’s bargains.
So, I’m quite fond of these. Usually, in the folk stories, like the various versions of the Devil’s Bridge story, the Devil is outwitted. In more artful stories, like Goethe’s Faust or Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus the Devil is a bit smarter, and even quite amiable.
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Pickman's Model By H P Lovecraft
This 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 painted from imagination when in fact it is drawn from life.
I have just been reading Robert McKee's book Story. He says in a story where the characters know more than the audience, that is a mystery story, where the characters know more than the audience that is suspense, but here, where the audience knows more (or at least guesses better) that the character that is dramatic irony. Here we have some dramatic irony then.
Notes
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Edgar Allen Poe
Poe 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 The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher
The Black Cat By Edgar Allen Poe
Poe 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. We are quite pleased with his ultimate destruction and getting what he deserves. Yet, we stick with him. Writers are urged to have characters that the public can root for: we don't have to approve of them, or like them, though we might (consider Dexter or Hannibal Lecter) but we must want them to succeed. For my part, I wanted this man to be caught and punished. But then, I'm a cat lover. And a dog lover too.
It is very hard to get audiences to tolerate killing an animal in a story, even though it is just a story. Poe seems to be trying to upset us, though people had harder hearts towards animals in Western culture in his day than they have now.
He hangs the cat because it loved him. He hangs it in order to commit a sin and put his soul beyond God's mercy. He clearly feels the need to be punished. This is presumably because of his alcoholism? Or is his alcoholism due to this wish to be punished? If only he were here and I could psychoanalyse Poe, but sadly he's dead, so it doesn't matter.
He find his explanation of the image of the cat in the plaster, that is that someone threw the hanged cat in through the window to wake him up and it struck the recently plastered wall, plausible. I don't.
The new black cat likes him and fawns over him and he hates it because of that. I have heard it said that cats always go to people who hate them. I have even seen that myself. I don't know why people don't like cats. Someone told me that they didn't like the feeling of their bones, that they were alive.
The second cat was missing an eye. This should have been a clue that something weird was afoot. His wife likes the cat because of that. I once went to buy a hamster and I saw a three-legged one in the pet shop and the owner told me not to buy that as it was defective and she was going to fee it to the snake. Of course I determined to buy the poor thing immediately. I took him home and we named him Tripod. He was a great climber.
I struggle to visualise how the white mark on the cat's breast that resembles a gallows. That would be very odd.
And then, his wife stops him hitting the cat with an axe, so he turns and buries the weapon in her head. He shows not the slightest remorse for slaughtering his good-natured wife. Not even a little. His first thought is how to cover up the murder. His second is to kill the cat. What a psychopath!
When he walls up his wife's corpse he describes a blissful sense of relief. The man has no conscience.
He is able to plan the disposal of the body and think out a number of ingenious methods. He does not seem in the slightest disturbed.
In fact he says that because the cat kept away from him on the night after he murdered his wife, he slept soundly.
However, he clearly had not read his own story The Tell Tale Heart because in that story too, the murder seals up the remains in the house and in that story too he has the police come round and fail to find the body until he, in his maniacal carrying on gives the game away in an almost identical manner.
So what's that about?
I think that even though this is a horrible story about a horrible man carrying out horrible deeds, it is a moral tale and its message is pretty familiar. Murder will out, and the evil will be punished for their wrong-doing by supernatural means even if they manage to evade natural detection. The protagonist's erratic behaviour towards the end of the story is what gives him away and it is not within his control.
The cat wails indeed, but first he hits the plaster with his stick. Until that time, the cat kept schtum. The cat in a sense is the conscience he doesn't have himself. I guess that the cat crept into the hole in the wall to keep away from him and got accidentally walled in.
And then it caterwauls. My boy Mungo used to caterwaul just before he got into a fight. It was a truly horrible sound and Poe describes it well.
The protagonist blames the cat for seducing him to murder. Even at the end, like all psychopaths, he cannot take responsibility for his own crime.
Listening to the edit, I hear myself misquote Jung and conflate two of his sayings. What I meant to quote was:
_“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”_
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His Beautiful Hands By Oscar Cook
This will be the second of Oscar Cook's stories we have read, the first being Boomerang.
Boomerang is 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 Biography
Richard 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 Hands
Starts 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 ghastly and shocking and if you like that kind of thing, then it's good. I'm amazed it was published in 1931.
I like the conversational style at the beginning that allows a lot of expression when reading. I also quite liked the fact that Paulina throws the rotted finger in the wastepaper bin. The fact that the baby is born without fingers or toes is another gratuitous excess.
These are all distasteful, and he meant them to be. The racism in it is casual and probably not even intended to offend us. We find this again and again in our stories. Now, this podcast is not intended to be political at all. We have enough politics outside our leisure hours. But, people might say, why read out this particular story? I could have de-platformed Oscar Cook, but I think if we erase all stories like this because of their racism, it is in some way like erasing the racism itself: fundamental world views from the period they were written in. We could pretend it didn't exist and we might feel easier about that, but it did exist, it was pervasive and fundamental to the way certain groups of people looked at the world and how they treated other people.
So that's my justification for reading this story. I have avoided other overtly racist stories for two reasons: firstly that the racism in those stories conveyed hate, and secondly when even if it was just casual it was every page. I am minded here of Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo and Hume Nisbet's Land of The Hibiscus Blossom where the language was so casual and frequent I couldn't enjoy reading it.
There we are.
Next week, some more Poe.
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I got my second commission. The first was Lady Ferry and the second was from a writer who wanted me to do a version of one of his own stories for publicity purposes. It was a good story and I enjoyed doing it.
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The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by The Hare & The Moon, whose lead performer is Grey Malkin
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Sarah Orne Jewett
This 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.
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 Ferry
This 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 meeting Lady Ferry in the garden when the glowers glow in the gloom. Fantastic stuff.
The book that might have solved the mystery is tantalisingly lost as it falls through the floorboards, only to be found again many years later.
Our heroine returns to find the house desolate and Lady Ferry at last in the graveyard. So it seems that she can die. Throughout the story we are kept in suspense: is she a supernatural creature, albeit cursed like the Flying Dutchman or the Wandering Jew, (and the Comte de St Germain comes to mind though he isn't mentioned as I recall)? Or is she mortal?
For me the last words "she is dead" seem poignant and regretful. All the childish wonder that such things might exist is regretfully extinguished. The world is ordinary and everyone dies and I catch a hint that she hoped it was not so: she hoped that Lady Ferry still lived and if she still lived then all the magical memories of that summer, and by extension of childhood, were really enchanted.
Readers, why do we linger with stories like this? Because we want to re-enchant our world. We don't want to live in the dead machine of modern materialism, we want to live in a world where ghosts walk and magic is real.
Notes on My Accent
Yes, I decided it had to be done American. I watched Youtube videos on the east coast Maine accent and its lack of rhoticity. I attempt to do that with the servants voice, but the problem is me missing off American rs just sounds like I'm lapsing into British English. Fire is fiurr or fiah. It needs work, but I hope my attempts didn't detract too much from the story.
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Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Another 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 Embrace
The 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 by
The Heartwood Institute
The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by The Hare & The Moon, whose lead performer is Grey Malkin
We also feature music by Michael Romeo of Dvoynik
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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 story
Copper 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 by
The Heartwood Institute
The final tune is by Michael Romeo of Dvoynik
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Music Hath Charms By LTC Rolt
Lionel 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 least a sign.
Then when the box is found again, James Heneage seems to be possessed by the spirit of Henneze — Heneage/Henneze, a similar name, but is this a coincidence or meant?
Is it suggested that James is a descendent of Henneze? Anyway, you wind the music box, you get the opulent wealth, obtained from wrecking still, and you get the company of La Pucelle who we presume loves James in the daytime and all the nighttime too, as well as painting disturbing pictures and playing the piano rather well.
I wonder if La Pucelle isn't Rolt's equivalent of Helen of Troy, for whom Goethe's Faust sold his soul of course.
James Heneage does a lot of giggling when he's possessed by an evil spirit. Never trust a giggler.
The ending is understated. Our hero leaves, looks over his shoulder and sees Heneage welcoming the Devil in. As in common with many ghost stories of this period, though not with horror stories in ours, the narrator escapes unscathed apart from having his view of the world darkened, perhaps forever.
Though Henneze vanished under circumstances which suggested he came to a bad end, this does not let us know what price you have to pay the devil for good sherry and the company of La Pucelle. Neither do we know what it cost James Heneage for the same. Might be worth it.
Music by
The Heartwood Institute
The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by The Hare & The Moon, whose lead performer is Grey Malkin
We also feature music by Michael Romeo of Dvoynik
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The Story of Salome by Amelia B Edwards
We did The Phantom Coach by Amelia B Edwards as Episode 8, which seems a long time ago now.
That was a splendidly written story too. To remind ourselves:
Amelia Edwards was born in 1831 in London, England. As such she is one of the oldest writers we’ve read so far in this podcast. She died aged only 60 in Weston Supermare, a seaside resort in the west of England.
She came from a wealthy background and didn’t have to work, but she was a very successful writer based on her own talents. She was born in London to an Irish mother and a father who had been a British army officer before becoming a banker.
She was in fact a very talented woman and had the potential to be a professional artist though her father, a banker, frowned on that as a career. She also made home with a woman, long before such things were accepted by polite British society.
She was also an Egyptologist and after a cruise down the Nile and a long stay among the monuments, she devoted all of her efforts to saving the Egyptian monuments and took a lecture tour over several years in the United States to promote the cause.
I found this Story of Salome in the Virago Book of Ghost Stories
Edited by Richard Dalby. Richard Dalby had great taste in stories and there are lots of good ones in this anthology.
You may, or may not, know that I have a fondness for Venice. I have read this Story of Salome, on the podcast as well as Ray Russell’s Vendetta and Vernon Lee’s A Wicked Voice.
I have also written my own Christmas ghost story set in Venice which is available in my More Christmas Ghost Stories, soon to be out as an audiobook once Audible get their finger out. If you can’t wait for Audible, Audiobookstore has it here
The subject of the story is Salome, daughter of Isaac. She is Jewish and inevitably this throws up attitudes that make me uncomfortable. I do not think this is an anti Semitic story though it does have the theme of converting Salome to Christianity. It is of its period but better than many in its attitudes.
I think it very well written and was easy to narrate without the tripping syntax of James or the excitable lists and adjectives of Dickens.
Edwards performs the trick of portraying a main character who is reasonably convinced that the grave belongs to Salome’s aged father Isaac, rather that to her. In the end, when the truth is almost impossible to ignore she had a nice little run of him convincing himself that there must be another Salome, that his Salome can’t be dead. We’ve all been there, trying to kid ourselves that something isn’t true when we know fine well it must be.
And the description of his flighty friend, Coventy Turnour, loving Salome followed by a disinterested account by our main character only to slowly reveal that he himself is infatuated with her. This is the same trick as him believing the grave is Salome’s fathers. We the readers and listeners know before he admits it to himself both that he loves Salome and that she is dead.
And he finds her more beautiful as a ghost, though he doesn’t know it. He talks about her more spiritual beauty.
One mystery is why Turnour left Venice. He lost hope in winning Salome quite suddenly, and left. She in her turn converted secretly to Christianity. It’s not explained why, but I wonder whether it was something to do with Turnour? Did she convert for Turnour’s sake and then he grew bored of her and abandoned her?
His copying of the inscription on the tomb is the key to understanding the fate of Salome. Tantalisingly, he has the secret in his hands but can’t read it. He sends it to a laggardly professor and Amelia Edwards tortures us and him by having the reply take a long time to come back. This little withholding of information is a neat writer’s trick.
Music by
The Heartwood Institute
The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by The Hare & The Moon, whose lead performer is Grey Malkin
We also feature music by Michael Romeo of Dvoynik
Support the Podcast Any Way You Can!
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My Ghost Stories
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonywalker.substack.com/subscribe
Yes, I’m loading up the podcasts so I can do nothing much over Christmas and New Year. You will hear me claim on this one that it’s New Year’s Day. I’m sorry for the deceit, but I was not gong to be sitting New Year’s day doing this. I have a family argument to go to.
Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1890 and died in Bromley, Kent in 1969, aged 78. She was the daughter of a clergyman who though he was ordained worked as a teacher of Greek and Latin at Bury Grammar School. She was not born into the aristocratic world portrayed in this story.
She was educated at a private school for the daughters of clergymen in Lancashire. She trained as a schoolteacher like her father and got a BA in Classics from the Royal Holloway College in 1914. She was a supporter of Women's Suffrage. She worked as a teacher until 1923 when she became a full-time writer. She never married and had no children.
She contracted polio and had to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
She had moved to Bromley in Kent, just outside London when she was twenty-seven to teach at the school there. She never left the area and her writing was so successful she had a house built for herself on the Common.
She was a successful novelist and published forty one novels. Her most famous series of novels was for children and featured the comic figure of William, a rather feckless schoolboy. The first of these Just William was published in 1922. The stories are hilarious and were a great favourite of mine when I was a small boy.
She wrote several ghost stories and these were published in 1928 as Mist and Other Stories.
Rosalind By Richmal Crompton
In Rosalind, we are plunged once more into that Edwardian world of the leisured rich of England such as we see in the stories of E F Benson. However, the story is also about an artist and his model, such as we heard in The Yellow Sign. It's quite a different story to the Yellow Sign for all that.
I think this is one of the best ghost stories we have ever read. The characterisation is very poignant. Our unnam med narrator paints such a picture of Heath as the bored, but talented rich boy to whom everything comes to easily and for whom everything is therefore shallow.
He takes Helen, our man's beloved, with no thought. He doesn't even consider our narrator at all. It's not selfishness, it's blindness to the existence of other people.
He falls in love with Rosalind but there is no question that an artist's model will every be a life match for the future Viscount of Evesham. It would have been easy for Crompton to suggest Rosalind wished this but she is subtle enough to have Rosalind accept it too. I guess that Rosalind is willing to accept being his mistress and mother of his illegitimate child.
Heath is the selfish narcissist that he sees the pregnancy only as an interruption to his idyll. He is bad tempered about this, and we see him pleased that his child and Rosalind have died so as to put an end to the possibility that it will ruin his well-planned marriage to Helen.
But Heath is sentimental too. Once he realises he's lost Helen, and is unfulfilled by his planned marriage, he starts to mope and goes over the top bringing down armfuls of orchids and roses in a sentimental but ironically cheap gesture.
He is so sentimental that Rosalind gestures him to his death. We can look at this in several ways. First that this is Rosalind's revenge from beyond the grave and that her ghost has connived at this and timed it perfectly just before his wedding. We remember Rosalind's vow that se won't let Helen have him.
Or, it might be seen as the workings of a greater Fate, in that Heath's marriage to Helen was untenable because it was in bad faith, and that it could not be allowed to go ahead.
Presumably, Helen is going into this marriage with her eyes open. She knows what it will entail and is willing to take it on as a job in order to obtain the position that will suit her as Lady Evesham. But she's from the aristocracy anyway, so it isn't that much of a leap up.
In fact, I thought Helen came out of this very well—dignified and mature. Others say she is colourless, but our narrator's comment shows that these observers are superficial. He knows her worth. Heath's death allows him to marry Helen, the woman he'd loved forever.
But what does Helen think of our narrator? Is she merely putting up with him as the best job, or did she come to love him.
Our narrator isn't a bad chap either. He may be a little cowardly but he does mention Heath's obligation to look after the child and he does go to see Rosalind. He accepts the social conventions and tells her she will forget, so he is no revolutionary. I didn't dislike him though.
I thought Helen was the best of the bunch. Our narrator wasn't bad. Rosalind was swept away with the romance of being loved by a Viscount's son, I think. And Heath, he was tragic and pathetic.
Still, a great story I thought. It had the moral message of a ghost story with a typical resolution that lined us up with natural justice, but some lovely characterisation.
Music
Start and Middle Music by The Heartwood Institute. Also From The Forests, From The Furrow, From The Fields is the first track after I finally shut up. Listen on Bandcamp
End music is The Drowning by Dvoynik. Here's a link to Dvoynik on Bandcamp.
Last track is The Unquiet Grave by Greymalkin. Listen on Bandcamp
My New Collection Of Christmas Ghost Stories
More Christmas Ghost Stories. Selling well with some nice reviews. Thank you!
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THE STORY OF A DISAPPEARANCE AND AN APPEARANCE By M R James
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance is one of the few M R James stories actually set at Christmas. He was well-known for reading out his stories at Christmas, but few of them are actually set over the festive period. It was first published the June 4, 1913 issue of the Cambridge Review. It then appeared in his anthology A Thin Ghost and Others in 1919.
First of all some explanations of words which may be strange to some listeners. Bands are a kind of white tie worn by Anglican clergymen. A bagman is a commercial traveller, a salesman or pedlar. Clearly he'll be late home if he's still on the road on Christmas Eve.
So what happened?
It appears that Uncle Henry got murdered, his head bashed in and his corpse buried in the sandpit. My reading was that the two Punch & Judy men killed him. These two who were masquerading as Italians but who were English rogues really. The bagman told W R that he had not seen any suspicious characters on the road: no gipsies, tramps or wandering sailors. This all happened not long after the Napoleonic wars and out of work sailors and soldiers had to wander the countryside looking for a living. No Help for Heroes for them. The bagman did see a most wonderful Punch and Judy show. These travelling showmen or 'carnies' as such folk would later be called in the USA are inherently dubious, so it's no wonder that they would murder an innocent clergyman.
It is heresy to say anything against the great M R James, but I would only observe that he throws a few 'portents' and 'omens' into the story that seem to have no real bearing on the narrative. They aren't clues or anything, unless I'm missing some subtlety. I mean the owl that wakes our man W R from sleep, the Toby Dog running off and howling, the organ wolving during the funeral and the odd ringing of the bell. These are all signs that something unnatural and eerie is afoot. There is also mention of the bier being put out by mistake and the moth-eaten pall taken out and having to be folded on Christmas Day. Most inappropriate, but they seem more what we would have called 'dungeon dressing' in my D&D days—something to create atmosphere that is not essential to the plot. But again, I may be missing something.
The mention of the Toby Dog reminds me of Cole Hawkins and the Toby Dog in John Masefield's Box of Delights that I will be re-reading, or at least watching the 1980s BBC version this Christmas.
Punch and Judy is a ghastly tale of murder played out for children and so it has its own horror lurking not far below the surface. It seems that the dead Uncle Henry came as visitation to the two murderous Punch & Judy chaps, like a proper vengeful ghost and cause the first to die of fright inside the Punch and Judy set-up, while the other runs to the sandpit, breaks his neck and reveals the resting place of Uncle Henry, up until now hidden.
Mr Bowman the inn keeper seems only there for comic effects, and to show that Uncle Henry was rather serious and straight-laced.
I think that M R James has put in the comic inn-keeper and the portents and omens to entertain the audience rather than to drive the narrative. W R also at one point alludes to a vague reason why he's writing everything out in longhand, but this is well before anything supernatural or even out of the ordinary occurs. Again, I can't help but suspect that this is just to gee-up the reader because it comes to not much.
James has a way or inserting the jarringly weird into his stories, and it is this weirdness that really unsettles the reader. We have it in the flapping shirt and advancing figure in Whistle And I'll Come To You, and the crawling figure in The Mezzotint. E F Benson does it a bit too. Up until these late Victorian/Edwardian writers, the ghost story is naturalistic. Supernatural elements intrude cleanly into an otherwise normal (if at times Gothic) world. But the figure with the bag over its head would remind James's readers of an execution. The dream itself is almost Grand Guignol in its luridness and the oddness is disturbing. This is James's gift and the reason his stories are genuinely scary.
Music
Start and Middle Music by The Heartwood Institute Listen on Bandcamp
End music is The Drowning by Dvoynik. Here's a link to Dvoynik on Bandcamp.
Free Download Audiobook
The Dalston Vampire
My New Collection Of Christmas Ghost Stories
More Christmas Ghost Stories
The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast Newsletter
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A Christmas Carol Part 4: The Spirit Of Christmas Future & The End Of It
The Ghost of Christmas Future is the scariest of the ghosts. No jovial sprite he! He's just a heap of black cloak and a pointing hand. At the end, the spirit's hand quivers kindly, but he gives Scrooge no answers. Scrooge, even unanswered, intuits that he will be okay if he mends his ways. I thought that the first scene with the lowly char-folk and undertakers men and old Joe with his greasy fat and mouldy bones was a masterpiece of dialogue.
The attitude of the working folk to Scrooge reveals tons about the man. It is this scene that breaks Scrooge even though he thinks it's some other skinflint that has met his end.
Dickens withholds the information in a neat little device that we twig who the dead man is far sooner than Scrooge does. We are shouting out, 'Scrooge, it's you lying there you damn fool!' All the while as he wonders why he doesn't see himself. It's darned obvious.
Then the last walk to the walled graveyard (and the fact it's walled adds something) to the graveside when we see from Scrooge's faltering steps that at last he realises what the name on the stone will be.
The last section, the denouement with happy jokey Scrooge is a nice bit of comic Dickens that I enjoyed reading out. I enjoyed reading the scary bit of the Ghost of Christmas Future too.
So that's that. A job well done, I thought, if only that it's done and nothing else. You see I am getting quite Dickensian in my ramblings!
I promise you a bit of M R James for Christmas, but if I don't see you before, have a Merry Christmas or a happy Hanukkah. It's a bit late for Diwali, but may any Festival of Light you choose be truly marvellous. And for those of you who don't prefer light, your Festival of Darkness. Actually, I love the winter dark in its stillness and brooding. I love the dark and star-spangled winter skies. I've never seen the Northern Lights, though Sheila says she has. Me, I think it was Dumfries.
Music
Start and Middle Music by The Heartwood Institute
Listen on Bandcamp
End music is The Drowning by Dvoynik. Listen and download for free
Free Download Audiobook
The Dalston Vampire
My New Collection Of Christmas Ghost Stories
More Christmas Ghost Stories
The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast Newsletter
On Substack
If you'd like to show your appreciation for the Podcast, you can buy me a coffee!
Ko-Fi
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A Christmas Carol Part 3: The Spirit Of Christmas Present
He brought a tear to my eye and halt to my throat, did Old Dickens in this episode. I think he was a man of great humanity who genuinely did care for those who were not as well-off as he was.
The only slight caution I had was Old Topper chasing The Plump Sister and getting her in a corner. We inevitably all view behaviour through the lens of our own time and of course this behaviour reminded me of the #MeToo. I certainly wouldn't want my daughters, mother or my partner cornered like this. Though that is very patriarchal of me to say so. Knowing them, they would look out for themselves and give him a smack, not requiring me to do anything, thank ‘ee kindly, old man.
But I read it out, because I must make some kind of editorial decisions about which stories I read out. Some, I suppose, I will choose not to read, and if I read them out, I won't abridge them.
Except, I recall changing single offensive words that would just be a jolt to the reader. I suppose if the word is not used by the writer to be offensive... but that might be a cop out.
It's all up for debate I know.
But yes, this was a lovely episode. The descriptions are wonderful and lots of episodes are superfluous to the narrative, but great fun.
The other observation is about the degree to which Dickens is reporting the Christmas festivities of his period or is actually encouraging them, and in measure therefore creating them.
Were Christmasses as Christmassy as Dickens portrays them? Maybe not before, but certainly afterwards as we all began to emulate what we read and heard in this book, even if we didn't read it or hear it ourselves but only obtained it via the TV.
Enjoy your plum pudding.
More Christmas Ghost Stories Ebook & Paperback
Oh, did I mention my More Christmas Ghost Stories it out? The paperback and ebook are done and the audiobook is being approved now. So you can get it if you want. The stories are good, and improved by the attention of my Beta Readers. I have had the most wonderful 5 star review. Thanks a million Emhack from Torquay for that. Also had a splendid and rather humbling review for the podcast from Sandra Quintal from Canda.
Thanks also to my Substackers and Patreons for your ongoing support. Dracula soon, just for you.
Music
The opening music is Some Come Back by The Heartwood Institute. At the end I've added The Heartwood track: From The Forest, From The Furrows, From The Fields which is on their Secret Rites album. As I say in the episode, this is a canonical folk horror track.
The last piece of music is from The Hare & The Moon and is called The Midnight Folk. I talk about my love of John Masefield's book of that name. Of course the Midnight Folk was the sequel to The Box of Delights and that was made into BBC series which I think is enjoying its 36th anniversary this Christmas.
Both Jonathan of The Heartwood Institute and Grey Malkin (ex Hare & The Moon) allow me to use their music free of charge, so if you fancy popping over to Bandcamp and getting some of their stuff, I (and I'm sure they) would be very pleased.
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Christmas Carol Part 2. The First Spirit.
I am enjoying this story. It's a long time since I've read it, and I'd forgotten a lot of the detail. I do like Dickens's writing. His description of the Ghost of Christmas Past with its extinguisher (a candle-snuffer I think) and its sparkling belt.
His description of the country lane they appear on on Christmas Day where young Scrooge is alone is wonderful.
With all these stories that go over more than one episode there isn't much to say in the show notes.
The only thing that occurred to me as I was driving along today is that writers today are told to cut things out—extraneous scenes and superfluous words must go! Dickens didn't work like that. He was paid by the word so he puts scenes in that the story could probably do without and still get its message along. I mean the scene with Fezziwig dancing and some of the others. When they make adaptations of the story, they cut out huge swathes.
But it made me think that these scenes are a delight. It doesn't matter that they aren't essential to the story; they are fun. It's like telling a composer to cut out the extra bits that aren't essential to the story. Those pieces of music are what we listen for, and these extra scenes in A Christmas Carol are to the story, not take away from it.
I shall make my stories three times as long.
More Christmas Ghost Stories Ebook & Paperback
Oh, did I mention my More Christmas Ghost Stories it out? The paperback and ebook are done and the audiobook is being approved now. So you can get it if you want. The stories are good, and improved by the attention of my Beta Readers.
Music
The opening music is Some Come Back by The Heartwood Institute. Check out their new release Witchseason. Listen to it for many reasons but at least one of those should be to hear the insane comments in Witchphase 1.5 from the King of The Witches, Alex Sanders. Who knew he was so mad?
The first track after my commentary is The Haunted Cabaret by Kentin Jivek and The Hare and The Moon.
The second is Circle of Protection by The Heartwood Institute.
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Yes, I didn’t record the whole chapter about Marley’s Ghost last time. An illustration got in the way, and… well, I maffed it up. So here’s the end of Chapter 1: Marley’s Ghost.
Sorry!
Tony
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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England in 1812. He died in Higham, Kent in 1879, aged only 58 and was buried at Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey—a high honour indeed.
Dickens's writing was very popular during his lifetime and he was recognised as a literary genius by the 20th Century.
His first success was The Pickwick Papers in 1836, when he was 24. He had been forced to go to work in a factory rather than school. Dickens worked pasting on labels on pots of boot blacking.
Dickens's father was locked up in a debtor's prison. Dickens was not formally educated, though his writing shows formal rhetorical devices so he must have studied later. He was certainly a voracious reader of the novels of his time and earlier.
One of his great tricks was the cliffhanger ending and this came about because most of his fifteen novels and umpteen other works were published in weekly serial publications.
Dickens's characters tend to be larger than life and he is especially good at portraying the great poverty and terrible social situations that those in his close family had experienced .
By work, his father was a clerk to the Royal Navy, the biggest employer in his home town of Portsmouth. There were eight children in the family. Dickens' third name Huffman came from his godfather, Christopher Huffman, a rigger in the Navy.
Unfortunately, the Dickens family lived beyond their financial means, easy to do with a family of ten I should think.
Dickens was massively famous and popular throughout his life and worked immensely hard, leading to ill-health in his fifties.
He died of a stroke while writing Edwin Drood, leaving that novel unfinished.
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol is possibly Dickens's most famous work, though there are so many to choose from.
It is the eve of December, and I have wanted to do this story since last year. It is such a delight to read Dickens's clever, lively prose after Henry James's convoluted sentences. Dickens's words always conjure vivid images, while James is more subtle. I am bound to compare the two. James's characters are subtly drawn too and he can reveal a great vista into a character with a little incident. Dickens's character are more like cartoons, but cartoons are very entertaining.
I have enjoyed both stories.
In this first part, the scene is set for the coming of the first ghost.
A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 on 19 December and the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve. Dickens had self-published, in that he paid for the costs of the printing and publication, which was a shrewd financial bet as it turned out. Dickens was only 31 at the time.
A Christmas Carol was so popular that a bootleg edition was published in 1844 and Dickens sued the bootleggers. He did public readings of the story from 1849 and went on tour with it, performing it 127 times until his death in 1870.
It turns out that Dickens was always a fan of Christmas. In 1835 he published an article on Christmas Festivities.
Music
The opening music is Some Come Back by The Heartwood Institute. Check out their new release Witchseason. Listen to it for many reasons but at least one of those should be to hear the insane comments in Witchphase 1.5 from the King of The Witches, Alex Sanders. Who knew he was so mad?
The closing music is The Unquiet Grave by Grey Malkin of The Hare & The Moon from their forthcoming album: Widow's Weeds. Check out their ethereal vibe.
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S02E18 The Ghost Of Christmas Eve By J M Barrie
James Matthew Barrie was born in Kirriemuir in Angus in North East Scotland in 1860. His father was a weaver. He was one of nine children, though two died before he was born and Barrie’s brother David died in an ice-skating accident the day before Barrie’s fourteenth birthday. Barrie tried to comfort his mother by wearing his dead brother’s clothes, whistling as his brother used to and taking on his mannerisms.
Barrie’s most famous work is of course Peter Pan, and it’s said that his mother took comfort from the fact that his dead brother David would never grow up and leave her.
He went to school Glasgow, then Forfar then Dumfries in Scotland. He studied literature at Edinburgh and wrote drama reviews for the local Edinburgh newspaper. He graduated with an MA in 1882.
He went to work as a journalist in Nottingham, in England and wrote stories which he submitted to journals. Some fo them were accepted.
His short stories and novels were received with what are politely known as mixed reviews.
Barrie started writing plays and was drawn to the theatre. He married and moved to London, living in South Kensington. It was his habit to take walks in Kensington Gardens.
Unfortunately for Barrie, his wife had an affair with a younger man and they were divorced in 1909. Apparently, Barrie was heartbroken. Even though she had left him, he gave her an allowance every year even after she married her lover.
Peter Pan was first performed just after Christmas, on 27 December in 1904. He invented the girls' name Wendy, apparently because a girl called Margaret Henley called Barrie ‘friendy’ but lisped her rs, making it sound like ‘fwendy.’ Apparently.
An interesting fact is that Barrie was only 5 foot 3 inches.
He gave the copyright of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and they continue to get royalties from Peter Pan.
He was made a baronet in 1913 by King George V, and became Sir J M Barrie
Barrie died in London in 1937 aged 77 and was buried in his home village of Kirriemuir with his family.
He has two schools named after him, the Sir James Barrie Primary School in Wandsworth, London and the Barrie School in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The Ghost Of Christmas Eve
This story is very short and intentionally so because I felt I deserved a rest after the marathon that was The Turn Of The Screw.
It's a neat little story and falls into the tradition of ghosts that weren't ghosts. I tend to prefer stories about ghosts that actually were ghosts, but there is an honourable tradition of stories that debunk the supernatural. Of course, Scooby Doo is the most famous example of this kind of story, but you will remember that The Open Door by Charlotte Riddell is mostly a debunking story, though the door is left open (ha ha!) to the possibility that as well as the fraud, there may have been a ghost there as well.
And of course Wilkie Collin's The Woman in White is about a ghost who turns out to be a con-trick.
A briar is a pipe used for smoking tobacco. The only other mystery is the hint that his room, when he awoke on Christmas Day smelled of tobacco. his recollection of going to fetch his briar from his coat downstairs is a bit hazy, but what does this smell of tobacco suggest? I missed this. Does it mean the he had a sleep-smoke? Or that there was a ghost?? I don't get it, Ted.
Thanks for listening.
Listen again soon.
Tony
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Music
Start Music: “Some Come Back” by the Heartwood Institute, Check our their new release for Halloween, Witch Season.
End Music: “The Ferryman” by Dvoynik
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I bet you are sick of me sending you emails entitled: The Turn Of The Screw blah blah blah.
Well it’s done. Finished. I’m bushed, but proud like a shy new dad.
Anyway, no more emails about the Turn of the Screw. No more emails for a week I promise.
Phew
It's done! This is the final part of our reading of the The Turn Of The Screw novella.
While, I'm pleased the job is done, the race is run and I can take a small break before focusing on Christmas ghost stories, I am somewhat sad to leave the sombre glory of Bly.
The last part is full of mysteries. I discuss my take on them at the end of the Podcast.
The podcast also includes music by the Heartwood Institute. The intro music a snippet of Some Come Back, and the last track is the very haunting We Are The Past.
Thanks all the supporters who bought me coffee (and some cakes). Respect and thanks. Remember if you go to Ko-Fi, you can buy my coffee, yes, but there are free audio stories you can snag. That is an Americanism, but like many Americanisms, cute.
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S02E16 The Turn Of The Screw Part 7
Forgive me not saying much in these show notes. We have one last part of The Turn Of The Screw after this. I hope to get it done within a few days.
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End Music: "A Drowning" by Dvoynik
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We continue with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. His language is getting easier. I think he's given up trying to impress me and is just getting on with the story. That is all good because the story is nifty.
However, I do think Quint and Miss Jessel are unfairly maligned. Poor old Mrs Grose! She’s all over the shop! She doesn’t know what to think! I think I’m channeling The Mighty Boosh…
Not sure about those (pesky) kids either. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out they were dead already like in the Sixth Sense.
I am knocking out the Turns of the Screw like a good ‘un. I think we have about 2 episodes left to do. Should be finished by end November, then I will do Dracula as an exclusive and some Christmas one-off stories just as wee twinkling gems before starting A Christmas Carol in December.
Busy, busy. Hope you all are well. I am well.
I brazenly ask Buy me a coffee, guv? Nip over to Ko-Fi and in return you can download some smashing audio stories, free and that. As my old nana used to say: fair exchange is no robbery.
When I check in on my coffee total, I notice I have a stretch goal on the Ko-Fi site that claims I will buy a laptop for editing the audio. Trouble is that I have already spent all the money on coffee. This will need to be rectified by me should the day ever come when all the coffees are bought and I have nowhere left to hide.
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Nothing much to say.
Please share.
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The Turn Of The Screw Part 4,
being chapters 9, 10 and 11.
Minimal show notes this week as I plough on trying to record and edit this novella.
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End Music: "A Ghost Story" by Dvoynik
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Part 3!
No dj-ing.
Share?
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I think I posted this in the wrong order. It should go 1, 2, 3…. Not 1,3,2
Forgive me.
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- Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done a Poe story before: [The Tell-Tale Heart (Episode 12)] and that was fine, but the Fall of the House of Usher is, in my humble opinion, finer.
Poe 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. It was long overdue that we did another of his stories
The Fall of the House of Usher was published in 1839, when grave-robbing was still a thing. He makes a play on the word 'house' which can mean both a lineage and a building. This is a rhetorical usage known as a syllepsis.
The story is a fine Gothic thing. We have dismal setting with the rotting trees and the stagnant tarn (which is a small lake) the gloomy castle, the sickly and neurotic hero, the storm and generally dreadful weather, the mysterious and sinister chatelaine, Madeline. It is quasi-Medieval also, though not set in Medieval times, it might as well be and at the end they read from some Arthurian legend to make even more Medieval.
The remoteness of the house, the lack of modern communications (even for the 1830s), the terrible weather and the vague dream time of no specific location and no specific time trap us in the legend. The house haunts the characters as much as their wraith-like dream forms haunt its halls. Roderick never leaves the house and I doubt Madeline of Usher was much of a gad-about either.
Poe never says anything clearly in a few words when he can draw it out over several obscure sentences with multiple clauses and hints rather than statements. We love him for it, indeed that's why we read him.
Old Roderick decides to entomb Madeline in the deep dungeon, because it is hinted that the medical men would seek to dig her up and use her for research, given the obscurity of her illness. This was a thing in Poe's days or just before.
The hint of the blush on dead Madeline's face is suggestive that she may be a vampire, and Poe, I think was encouraging this, but it is in fact, as it later transpires in a nice twist (nice?) that poor Madeline was not in fact dead, and furthermore, her brother suspected this.
Poe's stories are populated by the deeply neurotic and this, for me, is his masterpiece. I love the Gothic prolixity of it, I love the funereal sombreness and I am struck how much influence Poe had on Lovecraft in his vocabulary. Now, it may be an American usage, but, outside these two, I've never come across the word "litten" for "lit" as in red-litten, for red-lit, and my autocorrect dislikes it also. Also reminiscent of Lovecraft, is the long list of obscure books, mostly not in English; a favourite device of the Cthulhu Mythos.
What Poe does wonderfully in this story, I think, is identify the building with the family themselves and make the house a living thing. The fortunes of the House of Usher, as he says, is reflected in both the fabric of the ancient castle and the health of the living line. When the people die, the house dies also.
Shirley Jackson does this in her story, The Visit (Episode 52)
The co-mingling of story and actuality happens in the reading of the Arthurian legend where the breaking in of Ethelred, has its counterpart in the breaking out of the dying Madeline. In a sense this also mirrors the identity of the living Ushers with the symbol of the ancient building.
The purpose of the narrator is merely to give us a window into the goings on, for he does nothing active in the story. I love the image of the blood-red moon rising over the tarn at the end as the house (and its inhabitants) fall into the dark waters. We are reminded that the first image (nearly) is of the House of Usher reflected upside down in the waters of the tarn, and now at the end the tarn swallows it up forever.
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The Turn Of The Screw
So we begin The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I have wanted to do this story for a long time but have hesitated because it's so long!
Of course, we have read out The Beckoning Fair One, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and Carmilla that ran on over several episodes, but The Turn of the Screw will be the longest so far.
I reckon it'll take five weeks or so, though if I crack on well, I might get it squeezed into four. By that I mean, just making the episodes longer rather than cutting bits out of the glorious story.
I read The Turn of the Screw donkeys' years ago and liked it, but I'd forgotten much of the story, so it was like reading it for the first time again. A failing memory is one of the blessings of age.
Netflix is currently broadcasting their drama series doing The Haunting of Bly Manor based on The Turn of the Screw, so it's probably timely to do the original.
I am enjoying rereading it. James has the annoying habit for a narrator of breaking up his sentences with parenthetical information, which makes them hard to speak out. Reading them to oneself isn't such a problem.
The Turn of the Screw was published in 1898, and written in 1897-1898 when he had moved to Rye in Sussex, a quaint and picturesque small English town.
It was published as an illustrated serial in Collier's Weekly Magazine. Then in 1898, it was published as a whole in an anthology called The Two Magics.
Just listen to how he constructs the story. He withholds lots and lots and hints and foreshadows.
The introduction, set on Christmas Eve at an English country house, is just a long foreshadowing, whetting your appetite. He sets us up so that, like the guests in the house, we are on pins waiting for the story to begin.
James makes us wonder. We wonder about the gentleman owner whom she has taken a fancy to but who does not wish to be disturbed.
Miles is heavily foreshadowed, and as we end this episode, we can't wait to meet him to see what he's like: bad or good.
Henry James
James was born to a well-off New York family. His father was a philosopher, and his grandfather a banker. The grandfather's many allowed the James family to indulge their intellect, talent and tastes.
Henry James was the brother of the famous and ground-breaking philosopher and psychologist William James. He was born in 1843 in New York but moved to live in London, where he died in 1916. He took up British citizenship in the last year of his life; technically, he became a subject of the British Crown—just like me.
The family moved to Boston in 1864 because his brother William was studying law there. Henry set to studying law, but didn't like it and instead turned to literature. The American author Nathanial Hawthorne (who we will read out one day on the Podcast) was a significant early influence on James. James was particularly fond of French literature and of the French authors, Balzac.
Because of a back injury he suffered when fighting a fire, he was not fit to fight in the American Civil War.
He first published in 1863 when he was twenty. It has emerged that James was gay, though, during his lifetime, this fact was hidden. Of course, being gay was a crime in both England and the USA when James was alive.
James is an enormously influential figure in American literature. He wrote several very well-reviewed novels, for example, The Portrait of a Lady, but also The Bostonians, The Ambassadors and The Wings of a Dove.
His work can perhaps better be considered Trans-Atlantic literature rather than purely American or British.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916.
He turned his hand to ghost stories, which of course were all the rage at the end of the 19th Century. The Turn of the Screw is considered by some, even many, as the best ghost story ever written.
James has a touch that reveals the psychological concerns of his characters. He doesn't write pulp horror stories, oh no.
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S0209 The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith was born in 1893 in Long Valley, California and died in California in 1961. He began as a poet and wrote decadent, overblown Romantic poetry after the manner of Swinburne. He got early recognition for his work in California.
Lovecraft loved him and with Robert E Howard and Howard Philips Lovecraft he was one of the big three writers of Weird Tales. Ray Bradbury was also a fan. A few months ago, I re-read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes , and I can see that Bradbury too was a lover of poetic, sometimes overblown language—like myself!
Smith was clear that his use of language and rhetorical stylings as deliberate. He talked of trying to create a "sort of verbal black magic."
He uses some obscure words, such as 'vans' for wings and 'ferine' which neither I, nor my spell-checker, had come across before. I must have heard the word before because I read all of these stories as a teenager. But I'd forgotten ferine. Turns out it's a version of feral: savage and untamed.
I did enjoy the word 'troublously' and also 'lubricous'.
Smith wrote poetry from the age of 11, and his first novel by the age of 14. He began to sell his stories aged 17. His influences were The Arabian Nights, and he was clearly entranced by fairy-tale realms. He is also influenced by Edgar Allen Poe and the Brothers Grimm as well as the classic Gothic novel Vathek. Interestingly, he loved the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He translated his poetry from French as Baudelaire in his turn had translated the works of Poe into French.
He had a period of ill health. He was a correspondent of Lovecraft and also knew Jack London and Ambrose Bierce.
Smith and Lovecraft used the strange names and ideas they conjured in mutually influenced stories. This 'open source' was Lovecraft's greatest gift to horror: he allowed other writers to build on his ideas and so the Cthulhu Mythos was created.
Smith was a massively prolific author, but more or less gave up writing in the second half of his life.
He then turned back to sculpting and painting. He nursed his mother and father during their final illnesses until finally is father died in 1937. Robert H Howard killed himself in 1935 and Lovecraft died of cancer in 1937. It’s thought that these events may have knocked the love of writing out of him.
Smith himself had a heart attack in 1953, but he still married aged 61. He set up house with Carolyn Jones Dorman and took on her children, and they moved to Pacific Grove.
He had a series of strokes in 1961, and one finally killed him.
I must admit that of the 'big three' Weird Tales writers (Lovecraft, Howard and Smith), I prefer Smith. I found Howard mostly preposterous. The HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast did a reading of Robert E Howard's Queen of the Black Coast which had me in stitches. You need to check Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey out. They are very good.
I loved Smith from my early teens and I think that the creation of the mythical Provencal region of Averoigne is fantastic. I was mesmerised by this medieval city surrounded by werewolf haunted forests. It was merely a matter of time that I managed to sneak a story in, falsely claiming it as a ghost story.
It's not a ghost story, but it is a weird tale and it does contain the supernatural and a bit of murder, so I think it's okay.
Smith on occasion intrudes sexual themes, and these are mostly absent from Lovecraft's work and Poe's as I can remember. Let me know if I am missing something here. I could be. It's late. I'm tired. I've been working on sales funnels rather than poetry. Pity.
Coincidentally, Smith died the year I was born. That's a pity too.
The Maker Of Gargoyles
This is a nice story. I love the setting in the made-up French medieval city of Vyones in the haunted region of Averoigne. Apparently Averoigne is based on the real Auvergne region. Lovecraft used Averoigne in one of his stories 'Out of the Aeons'.
I think Smith illustrates very well the paranoid fear of satanism and the acts of the evil one that must have taken over small towns like this every now and again for hundreds of years. It's a bit like New England and The Crucible in New England or Witchfinder General in old England.
The picture of a population becoming overpowered by paranoid fear about a plague moving in their midst, a fear fanned by authorities, such as the church in this case, is obviously beyond belief.
The central idea of the story that an evil man creates evil works of art; statues that capture his wickedness and lust. It is somewhat reminiscent of The Picture of Dorian Grey, except of course for Reynard in this story, the transference of his evil into the gargoyles appears to have been unconscious and once he recognises his fault in this, he tries to rectify it with a tragic end.
So, he has a bit of a character arc! Also, Nicolette doesn't die. These are both positive things.
It also reminds me of the lost Dr Who story, The Daemons, which I loved as a young boy. In that satanic statues come to life. Very folk horror.
I was also interested in Reynard's sorcerous reputation. He is not a sorcerer, but blacksmiths, another type of craftsman were in older times considered to have magic powers. Then we have the Masons, later the Freemasons who had their own secret and somewhat magical ceremonies. It's something about the craftsman, or woman in that they create things from raw materials and particularly a sculptor who makes things in the shapes of things that might, and in this case do, live.
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LINKS
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Music
Start Music: "Some Come Back "by the Heartwood Institute
End Music: "A Drowning" by Dvoynik
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Mentions
Haunting at Captiva Hotel by Lois Lee Gates
The deadly past of an abandoned hotel off the coast of Florida comes back to haunt a team of investigators in this new novel by Lois Lee Gates, the first book in her Orlando Ghost Hunters series.
Experienced ghost hunter Carter Sherman has been waiting for his chance to study the Captiva Hotel, a historic landmark surrounded with stories of murder, mayhem, and mysterious disappearances. A relic from a more opulent era, the hotel is wrapped up in a legal battle for survival and the eccentric owner needs Carter’s help.
Psychic investigator Bridget Hart has made her share of mistakes, but she’s sure of one thing: Carter’s ghost hunting team is in grave danger. As the hotel comes back to life and the Captiva tightens its grip, there can only be one terrifying conclusion… Murder.
But Above All:
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S0208: The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood
We did the Kit Bag by Algernon Blackwood as Episode 20, and there I said:
Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Blackwood was an English writer born in 1869 who ended up as a broadcaster on the radio and TV.
His writing was very well received at this time and critics loved him. Even the great American author of weird tales HP Lovecraft cited Blackwood is one of the masters of the craft.
Blackwood came from a well-to-do family and was privately educated despite that he was quite an adventurous man. He was interested in Hinduism as a young boy and his career was varied. For example, he ran a dairy farm in Canada and also hotel in the country. It became a newspaper reporter in New York City and was also a bartender and a model and also a violin teacher!
All of this time, though he was always writing. He liked being outdoors and his stories often feature the outdoors. He was also interested in the occult and was a member of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn along with such other characters is Arthur Machen and WB Yeats and Alistair Crowley.
At one point he was a paranormal researcher for the British Society for Psychical Research and it is said that this story was based on a case that he investigated.
The Empty House
Structurally, the story is simple: our man hears of the house, he visits the house, he explores the house, weird stuff starts to happen, the ghost is revealed to be a replaying of a tragic scene from the house’s past, the protagonist is merely an observer. If he has an arc, it is the transformation of his attitude to his aunt from seeing her as a feeble old lady to a woman who is in some respects braver than he is.
Blackwood lays on the dust, the shadows, the moonlight as well as scurrying beetles and some black thing that scurries off (probably a cat, maybe a rat in the dark). He does this well. We are taken right there.
Michael Kellermeyer describes the story as an exploration of fear, rather than ghosts and I think that’s a good point. In that it matches some other stories like Marghatina Laski’s The Tower and H R Wakefield’s Blind Man’s Buff
There’s a whole genre of ‘night in a haunted house’ stories.
The Empty House Reminds me of a story I recently read from 1835, No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince by Ralph Adams Cram. That is much older, and more decadent. It’s worth a read though.
In 252 Rue. Me Le Prince, as in this story, the person visiting the haunted house is merely a witness to past happenings. At least that was my take. Of course, that is like the Stone Tape theory of hauntings, which holds that the fabric of a building somehow records strong emotion and plays these scenes back as hauntings.
It is also reminiscent of Blackwood’s own The Kit Bag, in that we have someone lurking out of sight who eventually is seen and in both cases they are the ghosts of criminals.
The story also reminded me of Blind Man’s Buff by HR Wakefield, which we read recently , not to mention The Judge’s House by Bram Stoker, which we haven’t yet got round to.
One bizarre incident in The Empty House is when he turns to see his aged aunt’s face is transformed into the face she had as a girl. He finds this horrific and turns from out, but I can’t see why it would be horrible and what purpose it has in this story. I had wondered whether she had been transformed into the murdered maid, but this does not seem to be the case.
Blackwood with his stories of outdoor adventure and colourful employment history sounds very much like a man’s man and I am familiar with that archetype from my father’s attitudes and most of the rugby-playing chaps I knew.
Blackwood’s stories, especially The Wendigo, are problematic for a modern audience because of their everyday racism. There is also a hint of misogyny, and ageism in his view that the aged aunt (I wonder how old she really was supposed to be – fifty?) is not expected to be brave or dogged, though she proves to be both. He doesn’t paint her as a feeble old woman, which is to Blackwood’s credit.
It’s overdue that I recommend Old Style Tales, a one-man labour of love by writer Michael Kellermeyer who produces annotated and illustrated copies of the stories we love.
Here's Michael's analysis of the story.
Notes
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Number 6!
Being a fan of The Prisoner, I was chuffed to see we have been listed as the sixth best ghost podcast in the world! The guy behind this list is Anuj Agarwal and this is the link
But on perusal, I see we are the first purely fiction ghost story podcast. So, way-hay!
Newsletter Swaps
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Music
The beginning music is by The Heartwood Institute “Some Come Back” and the end music is “A Drowning” by Dvoynik. They are both free to download.
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Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker was an Irish author born in 1847 in Dublin. Stoker is probably the best known horror writer in the world (after Steven King!) and is famous for his fantastically best-selling novel Dracula.
Interestingly, Stoker spent his first years in bed, stricken by an unknown illness , and then he went to school even becoming an athlete there!
After school he got his Bachelor of Arts degree at Trinity College and then got a Master of Arts in 1875.
Stoker’s early career was in the Irish Civil Service but on the side became the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, which was partly owned by Sheridan le Fanu, another Irish author of ghost stories who we have featured on the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. Stoker also knew fellow Irish author Oscar Wilde. I guess Dublin was a small town in those days, especially in literary circles.
In 1876, he became acquainted with the forceful English actor, Henry Irving after he wrote a nice review of Irving’s performance (Hint. You never know what good will come from nice reviews!)
Stoker became Irving’s manager and followed him around Britain, which entailed a stay at Whitby (a place I love, and was last at just before Christmas) in 1880. Of course this is where Dracula comes ashore.
Stoker died aged 64 in London.
Though he is most famous for Dracula, Stoker obviously wrote other stories.
This one, Dracula’s guest, which was later published as a short story was intended as the first chapter of the novel Dracula.
In it, we have our nameless hero setting off on a day trip from Munich on Walpurgis Nacht. At the end, we realise that this young man is to be the guest of Dracula who writes from Bistritz in Transylvania.
The hero of this story is obviously Jonathan Harker and Stoker’s publisher obviously saw no need for the first chapter in Munich, so Dracula begins in Bistritz.
The style is very similar to Dracula. The hero does what all heroes in horror stories do, he goes somewhere he shouldn’t. Stoker paints a picture of Central Europe hooching with vampires. Young Mr Harker wanders into the tomb of the vampire countess from Styria (interestingly where Le Fanu (whom Stoker knew) set his story Carmilla — see previous episodes of this podcast. He is pulled out of the tomb by a might grasp, presumably Dracula’s and Dracula presumably blasts the poor vampire countess in her marble tomb with lightning, then sits on him, in the form of a wolf, keeping him warm in the icy cold.
It’s a long way from Transylvania to Munich, but as Stoker reminds us: The Dead Travel Fast.
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Edith Nesbit
Edith Nesbit was an English novelist born in 1858 in Kennington, which was then Surrey and is now part of London. She died in 1924 in the next county from where she was born.
Nesbit is most famous for her children’s books and her most famous work The Railway Children is well beloved. I loved her Five Children and It stories which I read in a Victorian house all decked out for Christmas one year. That was splendid as the owner of the house had a great sense of interior decoration (though she was also rather too fond of a drink as I found out when I grew up)
Like most Victorian novelists she had a dabble in ghost stories. They sold well at the time. This one, Man Sized in Marble appears in a lot of anthologies.
It’s a story that is more impressive on the second reading (or hearing). The first time through you don’t pick up on all the little hints and foreshadowings that something dreadful is going to happen. In fact, Laura’s death wasn’t foreseen by me, which is the sign of a good story.
There is a lot of nice Gothic description of the woods and the moon and the church as well as the house lit by candles and tallow tapers.
I was going to do The Nurse’s Tale this week, but this took precedence. I am going to do The Phantom Coach next week, but I’m itching to do something American again to perfect my accent. I appreciate it may take more than one story to do that.
So, I’m thinking Ambrose Bierce. Any suggestions welcome.
My new book is out. Hard copies arrived today. Very exciting. I’m still doing voiceover and narration work if you need any of that done. I find most people don’t.
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Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer. He was born in 1892 in Austrian Galicia. In those days that part of historical Poland was under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now it is part of Ukraine. His family were well-off traders who owned a dry goods shop. I'm not wholly sure what that is, though I think I knew when I was younger.
After the First World War, Austrian Galicia became part of Poland. Schulz was 26 when that happened. His home town was a drab industrial place, predominantly Jewish, at least until the Holocaust. Schulz lived there most of his life.
Schulz was interested in the arts from his youth and studied design in Lviv. He then went to Vienna to study architecture for two years but returned to his home town to the school he had himself attended and became a teacher of arts and crafts. He is said not to have liked teaching much, but he entertained the pupils by telling them stories.
He was Jewish, and before the Nazi partition of Poland, there was a thriving Jewish community in his hometown. He wrote in Polish but was fluent in German too.
Like many writers, he was inspired to continue writing even though he received little encouragement at first.
He gained success after he went to see a famous Polish novelist, who was reputedly not too keen on seeing him at first, thinking him just another wannabe writer. However, after hearing him read out the first page of his work, she asked him from the manuscript and declared she had discovered a new genius of Polish literature.
His first collection of stories was published in 1934 called The Cinnamon Shops in English though it is often known as The Street of Crocodiles. Three years later he published Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. He illustrated his own books.
In 1936, he translated Franz Kafka (1883-1924)'s The Trial into Polish. Kafka who wrote in German was also Jewish and also from territory that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's Golden Laurel award in 1938.
In 1939 the Nazis came. He was writing a novel at the time, but that is now lost. He died tragically in 1942. He was walking home through the so-called Aryan quarter of his hometown. He'd been to buy a loaf of bread when he was shot dead by a Gestapo officer. The story was that this Gestapo officer had a quarrel with an SS officer. The SS officer had shot the Gestapo officer's Jewish slave, so in return, the Gestapo officer shot Schulz, who had been employed by the SS officer to paint murals.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Reminiscent of the weirdness of Kafka and the bizarreness of Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) (The Green Face, The Golem), there must have been something in the water in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that these three were born in. All three wrote stories which were oneiric. That's a right word, meaning dreamlike.
I just feel like I've watched the third season of Twin Peaks, because like Lynch's work the story, though ostensibly happening in the real world, is dreamlike from the outset.
It seems full of symbols, some of which I struggle to decipher. For example, what's with all these cakes and pastries?
The guard dog and its kennel, the dog that morphs later into a man, and his Father and his mother (Father gets a capital in the story) are more apparent symbols. They could be Freudian or Jungian, and again we must remember that Freud was a child of Austria-Hungary and also Jewish.
In the early part of the 20th Century, there were also the movements of Dadaism and Surrealism, that definitely turned their back on realism. Weirdness was in the air.
Most of the story is mysterious to me. There seems to be something about them sending the carriage to meet him at the station and him missing it, not seeing it at all, but what it means, I don't know.
His father is dead in "his own country", but here in the Sanatorium and its weird landscape, time is turned back, and with the turning back of time, the possibility of a cure is obtained. That's hinted at and not followed up.
They talk about another bed in his father's room, but there is no bed. The staff wear felt slippers. They all snore. The snoring seems significant.
So, I didn't understand it, but I enjoyed it in the same way I might enjoy some dance piece. It has no conventional narrative meaning, but it has meaning nevertheless.
"Are there two fathers?" I have no idea. I wish I was smarter.
Apparently in Polish, the phrase sanatorium alludes to a mortuary, and in fact, I do believe the whole story is a trip into the land of the dead. Perhaps this is what awaits us on the other side?
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Charlotte Riddell
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Charlotte Riddell was born in 1832 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. After she married she moved to London where she lived most of her life and died in Ashford in Kent in 1906. Riddell was a very prolific novelist and well known in the Victorian period. She actually owned and ran a Literary Magazine in the second half of the 19th Century.
The Open Door is considered a classic Victorian ghost story and it reminds me of some of Wilkie Collin’s stories which are more or less contemporary. The Open Door is both a ghost story and not a ghost story. It has elements in it reminiscent of Scooby Doo and if hadn’t been for the pesky sacked insurance clerk, maybe you know who would have got away with it
But for all that the opening of the door does appear to be supernatural. It simply won’t stay shut and breaks of the handle of the gimlet. We don’t use gimlets much these days, but once I looked up what a gimlet was the phrase ‘gimlet eyed’ became more understandable.
And then there is the monstrous figure that appears at the end. This seems to truly be a ghost and the apparition reminds us that the function of ghosts in stories is often a warning and a demand that murder or other outrages be put right and justice be done.
Banquo’s Ghost in MacBeth and Hamlet’s father in Hamlet do much the same. It’s all about revenge.
The story is a pretty straightforward adventure but there are a couple of nice touches. Phil Edlyd’s uncle seems a nice chap. He uses dialect thee and thou, which is a nice homely touch. Another endearing feature is that Phil longs to be a country boy. He loves horses such as old Toddy and he luxuriates over the descriptions of the beautiful summer countryside outside Ladlow Hall. In the end he gets to be a farmer with his beloved Patty.
The Victorian ghost story was an outgrowth of the Gothic novel, a specialist sub-branch if you like. Ladlow Hall functions as the ruined castle/abbey etc of the Gothic novel.
All in all a nice piece. Unpretentious but sweet. Not scary.
But then ghost stories are really scary. They’re not horror stories you know. And besides after the Human Caterpillar there’s not much can scare we moderns anyway.
If you appreciate this podcast, do me a favour and
Music
Music is by the marvellous Heartwood Institute
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August Heat
W F Harvey was a Yorkshireman, born in 1885 and died in 1937. He was a Quaker and suffered from ill health all his life. He joined an ambulance unit in the First World War but then went to work as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He actually won a medal for saving lives but suffered from lung trouble the rest of his life from that rescue, though that didn’t stop him smoking a pipe.
He published his first collection of short stories called The Midnight House in 1910 and his second in 1928 called The Beast with Five Fingers.
The Beast With Five Fingers is a splendid story was was made into a film in 1946 starring Peter Lorre. I remember watching it at home with my parents and being really creeped out. The next time I watched it as an adult, I realised it was a comedy.
This is a short piece of fiction. We’d almost call it Flash Fiction these days. August Heat is strong in its depiction of atmosphere of the hot August weather. The weird coincidence of the two men encapsulating each other in their own particular forms of art is strange. These days, it isn’t really unnerving. And the long established trope of leaving the reader to wonder whether he will actually die that night before midnight - and he’s got less than an hour left, is fun, but wouldn’t satisfy the modern reader.
I’ve tried it and you get one starred into oblivion if you try that kind of trick on Amazon.
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Listen for free to H P Lovecraft’s The Hound on the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
HP Lovecraft was perhaps the most influential writer of horror and weird tales of his generation. That may not have been evident during his life or even for a while after his death, but his work continues to be made into movies The Colour Out of Space was recently released, starring Nicholas Cage which is a based on Lovecraft’s weird tale of the same name.
Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island and died in the same city in 1937 aged only 46 of untreated stomach cancer.
His family was originally wealthy but the fortune was tied to his grandfather and after his death, the money dried up. He was almost a pauper at the time of his death.
Lovecraft’s father was a travelling salesman but it appears that his mother’s family had the money ,
In 1913 he began to get involved in pulp fiction and most of his stories were published in pulp magazines. He was a mentor to younger writers and perhaps the thing which ensured his later fame was his encouraging of other writers to develop his Mythos.
It appears that Lovecraft suffered from mental illness during most of his life, most probably depression.
Lovecraft was very conservative and an Anglophile in his writing. He did not like Americanisms and he uses some deliberately British stylings in his writing.
The Hound
The Hound is Lovecraft’s most clearly Gothic tale, and that’s saying something. When he talks of his hero’s taste for the macabre, we can’t help but feel that Lovecraft is speaking through him. The Hound is like a story by Edgar Allen Poe channeled through Lovecraft’s pen. He never uses a normal word when he can use an outlandish one, and where one adjective would do, he piles on three or four and makes sure they are outlandish and obscure. This makes his style relatively easy to parody with its unspeakable cults and squamous monstrosities not to mention countless eldritch blasphemies on every page.
The story is pretty simple. It concerns two post Baudelaire decadents going grave robbing for kicks. As often happens in Lovecraft’s stories they find an ancient arcane item (a McGuffin in screenwriting terms) and as is often the case it is made of jade. Somehow them moving the token gets the hound to haunt them all the way back to their horrible house in England and when our man ventures back to Holland to put it back (though it is robbed from him before he can do so), there he finds the monstrous hound waiting for him. Or at least that is the sense I made of it, with the addition of a good number of oversized vampire bats for good measure.
In any case, a fun gothic romp, overdone and vulgar no doubt, but great fun to read out.
Music
Beginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous Heartwood Institute . The end music is by MYUU Bad Encounter
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This is another of mine from the Horror Stories From Halloween. In it I get to do American, Australian and French accents…
You can judge my success.
It’s the second story done with sound effects. The underlying music is gifted to me by Dvoynik, alias Michael Romeo.
Check out his Soundcloud here
You can get the Horror Stories For Halloween here
Sound effects are from Freesound.
Samples are from Ghosthack.
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I loves this story, but with some caveats. I would have cut some bits out if I’d been his editor, but the nightmare becoming real motif, is a good one. I’ve used it myself after reading this, and a weird thing that was told to me once…
The sound is a bit dodgy as it was done on my old microphone. Hope it’s acceptable.
Please share on Social Media. Ta. Tony. Tan toc.
Edward Frederic Benson was born in 1867 at Wellington College in Berkshire, England and died in 1940 in London of throat cancer aged 73.
Benson’s father was E W Benson who was Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest office in the Anglican Church and the Anglican version of the Pope! His father had been bishop of Truro in Cornwall and Benson sets some of his horror stories in Cornwall.
Benson’s elder brother wrote the words for that famous English patriotic song: Land of Hope and Glory.
He went to the private Marlborough School and then studied at King’s College in Cambridge. After he graduated in 1892, he went to Athens where he worked for the British School of Archaeology and then in Egypt also engaged in the promotion of archaeology. His elder sister Maggie was an Egyptologist.
He was also a good figure skater, and represented England.
In 1883, he published his first novel which was very successful. He was most famous for his Mapp and Lucia satirical novels.
As well as his Mapp and Lucia novels and his ghost stories, Benson wrote biographies, including of Charlotte Bronte.
Benson was upper class and wealthy and also a confirmed bachelor, meaning he was gay, though not publicly in those days. In his diary he noted he fell in love with Vincent Yorke, a famous cricketer, who apparently did not return his affections. He shared a villa in Capri, Italy for while with another John Ellingham Brooks a pianist who moved to Capri apparently fearing prosecution for being gay.
His lifestyle of leisure; of country house parties and taking shooting lodges in the Scottish Highlands forms the background for many of his stories.
Benson is a good writer of ghost stories and this one, The Room in the Tower, is particularly unnerving. The scene is set by the story of a recurring nightmare, followed by an apparently innocuous invitation to a weekend at a country house, where element after element matches his nightmare, down to repeated phrases.
The tower, where he is set to sleep, is apparently haunted by a vampire; Mrs Stone.
The story has an air of real experience about it and I wonder whether Benson himself had a recurring nightmare, or poached the idea from the real experience of a friend. I was told a similar story by a young woman I met and this dream, and Benson’s story The Room in The Tower were the inspiration for my own story: He Waits
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Edith Wharton, nee Jones, (born New York 1862, died aged 75 in France) was a famous American novelist. Her nickname interestingly was Pussy Jones. She was very high society and was a debutante and socialite. She was also a very good writer.
Wharton wrote best-sellers such as The Age of Innocence, which won the 1921 Pulitzer prize, and Ethan Frome. She also wrote short stories, and among those short stories were several ghost stories.
I think the first scene shows Wharton's mastery of her art. She introduces the three ordinary, taciturn men who are summoned without knowing why to the house of stern mrs Rutledge. She sets the scene: it's an isolated, rural area with primitive customs. Even more isolated at this time of the year because of the snow. Then she introduces the issue of her husband dilly-dallying with a revenant to much consternation and anger. The first scene ends with the dramatic entry of Mr Rutledge, who has precious little to say for himself. The characters are so well drawn and we end with a promise.
The themes of rural isolation and old customs held by primitive folk is echoed throughout the later weird literature with Lovecraft making judicious use of it in the same New England, and then the Folk Horror films of the 1970s do the same in rural Old England (and Scotland for The Wicker Man). We see the same theme of rurality and superstitious ancient customs in this year's folk horror movie Midsommar, set in Sweden.
And then the party breaks up. By chance they go to the scene of the haunting earlier than planned. There, Brand shoots someone in the ruined house (another trope). They've seen footprints on the snow both too light to be human and the snow too cold to be borne by a living person, so that seems to set up the ghost as real. But who does Brand shoot?
Then the ghost's sister dies. Did Brand shoot his own daughter? If he did, then this is no ghost story, but presumably the Rutledge's knew the difference between the dead and living daughter? Unless old Saul Rutledge is just an old dog and knows fine well that the flesh he's enjoying is warm and alive but it suits him to portray it as a haunting...
I don't know. After the funeral, Mrs Rutledge's plain ordinary words seal the community as a coming back to their plan old ordinary ways, the "forbidden things" as the Deacon repeats, put away (but not forgotten)
Next week, I think I'm going to do Lovecraft's Dagon, though I am being pulled towards Le Fanu's Carmilla, which is quite long and would need a couple of episodes.
We shall see.
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I am embarking on uploading the old episodes to Substack. But there are a lot of them, and I sometimes forget which ones I’ve done…. I don’t think I’ve uploaded this one before. This was Episode 3 or so.
Please share.
M R James is known as the father of the English ghost story. He wasn’t the first to write ghost stories, but he was the finest of his generation whose work continues to be published and re-presented as TV shows and radio plays.
He was born in 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent. His father was a clergyman and was rector of Livermere in Suffolk. East Anglia features as the setting of many of M R James’s stories.
James’s ‘proper job’ was as an academic and he had a distinguished academic career at King’s College in Cambridge where he became dead in 1889 and finally provost in 1905. He was awarded a doctorate in literature by Cambridge in 1895 and honorary doctorates by Trinity College Dublin and St. Andrews University in Scotland.
He moved to become provost of the famous Eton College, supplier of many prime ministers of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in 1918. He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1925.
In 1893, James began his tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmas by candlelight to a hushed circle of his colleagues and friends. His geographical background in East Anglia is evident in many of his stories, as well as his bicycling trips to Europe. Many of his heroes are fumbling academics and Latin and old manuscripts and church architecture also features strongly.
He clearly had a knowledge of the occult and demonology, though he was not known to be a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as were other writers of ghost stories such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.
Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad! Is the title of a poem by the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, and James borrowed this title though Burn’s story concerns a jilted lover.
Perhaps he borrowed it because the central item in the story is the ancient whistle found in the sand covered ruins of the old abbey, which when blown, seems to summon the spirit that haunts the narrator.
The Latin inscription: Quis est qui venit? Means ‘Who is this who comes?’ The other inscription around the plus sign, or cross, is a puzzle of a Latin proverb: Fur Flabis Flebis which means, ‘Thief, if you blow; you will weep.” And in one sense, though a finder, our man is a thief, and when he blows, he certainly does weep.
It is the sheer weirdness of the ghost that is unnerving, and James is the master of this disturbing oddness which is not quite the same as Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror in his weird tales or later Robert Aickman’s unnerving unnaturalness in his ghost stories.
The closest parallel I find to James’s inexplicable and disturbing weirdness is in David Lynch’s movies, particularly Inland Empire and the Third Season of Twin Peaks.
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Music
Music is by the marvellous Heartwood Institute
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Do You Like It? Or not…
I am a big fan of Alice Isn’t Dead, the podcast. It’s a fiction Podcast that you may know. They use a lot of sound effects and music under the dialogue, so I wanted to have a play around with the same.
Some people (Sheila) have said that they don’t like it with the sound effects as it’s distracting.
Let me know if you like it. Or not!
Tony
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The Twisted Wood
Well, it's the anniversary of the Podcast! The first episode The Yellow Wallpaper went up a year ago, and what a year it has been. The Podcast has succeeded far more than I ever thought. When I started I just wanted to read the stories I enjoyed. It seems that others enjoy them too.
We have also done some stories by living writers, so here's another. It's mine! This is the first story I've ever put up on the Podcast, and I'm doing it because it's the Podcast's first birthday. Happy Birthday, my friend!
The Twisted Wood is in my new collection Horror Stories for Halloween. Originally, it was going to be a story about the Mothman, but though it contains moths it got rather twisted and turned into a dark fairytale about a conceited community arts manager who is tempted to do a little stealing.
We all know you shouldn't steal from the fairies, and we know even better than you must never ever take anything from fairyland.
It ends with a bit of cannibalism, and I am struck that a number of the stories in Horror Stories for Halloween have a cannibalistic turn. What does that say about me?
The setting is drawn on an actual wood and the floods are those floods which hit my home area over the past decade and flooded me out of house and home not once but twice. I was once flooded out in Wales, so that's three times. And the third time is the charm, as they say.
I was fired by a community arts manager when I was struggling to feed my small children on the basis I didn't "think like we do" which I swear was the reason they fired me. They know who they are. That's over fifteen years ago now, but I've paid him back in a story.
This is one of my favourite stories. I allowed myself to go overboard with ornate language because I thought someone as pompous as his would use overblown language. The truth is I like it too. I've just read a Ray Russell story for the Podcast after all.
So, if you liked my dark fairytale of someone getting their come uppence, check out my Newcastle Fairies which is somewhere around.
I hope you liked my story. I enjoyed writing it, and reading it out!
See you next week.
PS Please share if you did like it!
PPS Please buy my book!
PPPS Send people to tonywalker.substack.com
Music by The Heartwood Institute!
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Part 4 of The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onion starts off with another philosophical discourse by the unseen narrator. I'm not clear whether these are Paul Oleron's thoughts, or the narrator's observations. He talks about a letter dropped, disregarded that lies, and I guess this refers to a letter from a well-wisher, probably Elsie Bengough.
But I'm not sure what these high falutin' reflections add to the story.
I wonder whether Oliver Onions, unlike Paul Oleron was torn between writing popular stories for the paying public, and aiming at literary praise from the high minded for his observations of the human condition.
However, in this musing where we get a description of the telegram boy turning away from the unanswered door, we also have reference to a succubus.
And a succubus as I quote from Google is:
a female demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men.
Though the intercourse in Oleron's case seems to be more a spiritual vampirism.
The Beckoner appears to be a kind of muse gone wrong. A true muse of a male artist is conceived to be female, a personification of his soul, his anima, if you like. But this true muse inspires the artist and becomes a channel through which he brings down wisdom from his soul and puts it in his art. Even this true muse may be jealous, but the Beckoner is wholly wicked. She gives nothing in return for his sick love of her. She merely drains him.
Socrates talked of daemons (an idea taken up by Philip Pullman of course) who are spiritual creates to guard and inspire us. But the Beckoner does neither thing. The closest she gets is to give him dreams of the perfect novels he might write.
Even though Oleron propitiates the Beckoner with flowers, as a man might give his lover, they decay and die. This seems to be a symbol, or a warning. The fact the blinds are red and plunge the room into a red twilight reminiscent blood, also seems a warning of the terrible nature of his transformation.
The next part of XI is of Oleron's ruminations. Mainly he is plunged into hatred of Elsie Bengough, which appears to be the Beckoner's jealousy. He in his turn is jealous of his dead rival, the painter Madley.
Sometimes, he seems to see Elsie as his rescuer. He remembers that she wouldn't leave him. And of course she doesn't. This is a foreshadowing.
It is described vaguely but he hints at his thoughts have enabled and ignited the terrible jealousy of the Beckoner against Elsie.
Part 12, is from the omniscient narrator's point of view and we get relief from Oleron's internal ramblings with a bit of a semi-comic interlude of Mr Barrett going on about the imagined fornication with Elsie. He does this even down to the Christ's quote about the prostitute which Christ meant with love and charity, but Barrett turns to serve his own narrow minded prejudice, and Barrett's sanctimonius refusal to disclose whether his wife saw anything going on as if he was a man who chose to remain silent on moral issues.
Onions paints this picture of the self-righteous religious bigot very well and I enjoyed reading Barrett's lines.
Part 12 is a breath of fresh air as the coppers open the windows. No more interminable introspection but instead we have narrative movement, drama, dialogue and a twist at the end. The story ends well. It could have been cut by two thirds though to its improvement.
So, did Oleron kill Elsie or did the ghost? The ghost seems able to do physical things, like weaken the stairboard and replace the rusty nail. The pudding sized thing (think of a figgy pudding at Christmas, round, about the size of a ball) is probably her heart and it's wrapped in the frieze harp bag that Elise recognised and Oleron found hidden. That's the sign that the Beckoner is responsible, whether she did it herself and pushed her in kitchen cupboard, or whether she got Oleron to do it.
It seems that Elsie, worried that he didn't answer, got the key from the scared-eyed man and then got murdered.
To the outside world, it looks like Oleron murdered his lover, but is that what happened or did the ghost do it? My view is that Onions describes Oleron as being so weak and too scared to go into the kitchen to let us know that it was the Beckoner who killed Elsie.
Then when the police find Elsie's body, it seems that the influence of the Beckoner is lifted from Oleron. He sees almost clearly at last and is bewildered by the mess of dead flowers and the police in his room.
Was Oleron insane, or was he haunted? I guess we shall never know.
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This section comprises parts 8, 9 and 10 of The Beckoning Fair One.
I find the first section of 8 a bit long, and if I'd been his editor, I would have cut it. That's the bit where he muses somewhat abstractly with long words about this and that.
However, the next bit when Elsie comes round and they go on the bus is excellent. Not from a ghost story point of view, but just as a snapshot of an awkward conversation between two former friends.
Elsie comes off by far the better person. He then starts to talk about women who earn their own living and how they sacrifice their womanliness and open themselves to failed love affairs with the men they mix with in a man's world. He even pretends to be understanding of this predicament, but Elsie sees right through him. Oleron becomes increasingly pathetic. She, on the other hand, is pretty magnificent. She is caring and thoughtful, and he's just an idiot.
Onions does this exceptionally well.
Section 9 begins with Oleron's visit to the vicar. From this, he learns that his predecessor Mr Madley died in the house of starvation twelve or so years previously. We infer from this that he too was a victim of that deadly muse, or anti-muse, the Beckoning Fair One.
After that, he goes home and tries to summon the spirit.
From here on in, the ghost begins to look ambiguous. Where it seemed to be clearly a spirit that was jealous and would brook no rival in Elsie Bengough, from here, I can see that readers might think that Oleron is merely going mad. He is now deliberately courting the female spirit that inhabits his house or his mind.
"Whatever it was which he so patiently wooed, it seemed to be both shy and exacting."
He sits and waits for the spirit, but when she doesn't come, he considers making her jealous and even considers sending for Elsie to do that job. It is some slight recommendation of him that even he dismisses that as a wheel to break a butterfly on. He decides to go to the country to teach her a lesson, and from now on sounds increasingly lunatic.
He tries to fool the Beckoner to appear by pretending to go to bed. And then, when he searches for his slippers, he sees her reflection in the glass of a photo frame. She brushes her hair with his old comb. I can't imagine any woman would use my comb to comb her hair, but times were different then, I suppose.
Section 10 paints a picture of him becoming increasingly reclusive. We already had a hint that this is his fate from the fate of the previous tenant, the painter Madley. Oleron is still in love with the spirit. We see that its malign influence grows on him and he becomes agoraphobic. He doesn't even go out for food or flowers any longer and chooses to stay in his house throughout. Onions may have had some experience of agoraphobia because his description of it is spot on.
He calls out "Romilly" as if he thinks the ghost is the heroine of his novel. Either that or the spirit has made him believe that. We now see him increasingly labile in his emotions, happy and sad. Then he thinks he sees Elsie Bengough's skirt in his house. His worry is not for Elsie's safety here, I guess. He says that her being there would have compromised him horribly. I guess he means that the Beckoner would have been jealous and it would have ruined his chances with her.
The mad ranting about this search for the Beckoner being his real work reminded me of Poe or The Yellow Wallpaper or the Horla. This is the standard writerly rendition of a crazy person which I very much enjoy narrating. He finally becomes jealous of Madley and imagines that he is going to marry the Beckoner.
Elsie comes on her last desperate mission to rescue Oleron from the Beckoner. I thought this part, both Elsie's attempt and Oleron's sneering dismissal of Elsie's care was very well done. He is by now, totally mad. He burns his novel while Elsie waits outside, Elsie, who is the prototype of the original and best Romilly. The Beckoner has won. The Elsie "the pestering creature" is allowed to go and Oleron now expects the Beckoner to show herself as a reward for him destroying Romilly/Elsie.
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The first part of section five of The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions has him sitting in the house listening to the noises and from nowhere he begins to muse that someone in the future might have an impression of a ghost that was started by his presence. This section achieves two things; firstly it sets up the ghost, and secondly it strengthen's the idea that the house itself has a personality and a life. That only becomes more evident as the story progresses.
As I read, listen and edit, I am struck again by how hollow are the claims of those critics who say this is not a ghost story.
This is a ghost story indeed! My evidence is first; the nail that scratches Elsie Bengough's arm. Oleron knows he took all the nails out.
And after this incident, he looks at her and realises for the first time, that she is in love with him. What an idiot! But then, he is a man and many men aren't very sensitive about these things. But then, I should probably only speak for myself on this.
The Beckoning Fair One is as much a love story as it is a ghost story. We saw this mixture of love and monsters in The Yellow Sign.
However, the realisation that she loves him creates a mixed emotion in Oleron. I like to think this represents a war between the real Oleron, when he feels compassion and pity, and almost love for Elsie, and the spirit of the house that's invading him and making him resentful of Elsie. Either way, both his compassion that she should not suffer more from unrequited love, and the prompting of the jealous house join together in his resolution to encourage Elsie not to come back. The house woman is winning.
When Elise can't keep away, she puts her foot through the stair. Oleron is clear that the woodwork was old but fine. It's the ghost again striking out to hurt Elsie.
Elsie's comment is that she's getting fat. For me, that really humanises her. She's an ordinary, flawed woman, not some dream of a spirit woman. I often think that men would do well to take this lesson on board. They spend their lives running after dream women and spurn real women.
Elsie says, "Let me go, I'm not wanted!"
Neither by Oleron, nor the house. Then he tries to tell her how dear she is to him. Quite rightly she tells him not to patronize her.
We get an insight into the narrow-minded Christianity of Barret, very quick to misunderstand and condemn without asking any questions about this. I suppose that this is a hot topic for me now because I just listened to a podcast episode with Damien Echols how he served 18 years on death row in Arkansas for a crime he didn't commit because he was alternative and different in his small, narrow-minded town. It's a good listen
Elsie goes, Oleron decides he won't even sit down if she comes to visit, in order to get her to leave quickly. And then, he becomes anxious for her physical safety. This ghost is mean, and he knows it. At this point, he is far from seduced by the Beckoning Fair One. However, he does let himself down. When he imagines her suicide, his first thought it that he might get blamed! And then he thinks he an't marry her because she's ugly! What a cad.
the silkly rustle and the brushing sound must surely be a ghost!
The noise scares him to death and he goes the pub, acting out of character, but the brandy and the human contact serve to ground him a little. He decided he will go back and not be chased out of the house by the ghost. I think this incident is his last chance. This would have been his opportunity to escape, and he nearly manages it.
I'm trying to narrate more slowly given a couple of reviews that talk about me narrating too fast. I do pretty much everything too fast.
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The Beckoning Fair One By Oliver Onions
Because this story is actually a novella, I am splitting it into four episodes much as I did for Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu.
I'm doing The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions for a couple of reasons. Firstly, of course it is a classic ghost story and has been described as a 'cut above' the standard ghost story.
This episode represents sections 1-4 of the story.
We have done an Oliver Onions story before: The Cigarette Case Episode 36
Onions is a lyrical writer and this story is a slow burn. He gives some lovely descriptions of his new flat and the life of the square outside with its school children, cats and dogs and occasional mandolin player.
He actually reminds me of Proust. Now, if I was to read out Proust, I'd be at it for the rest of my life.
Oliver conjoures Elsie Bengough and is not wholly kind about her. She's a bloomy, pink, moist, lady. In fact, she turns out to the voice of reason, but that's for future episodes.
I note again Onions's hidden Welshness. Apart from the fact he's got a Welsh surname: Ab Enion; he has intimate knowledge of a Meirionethshire accent, which I enjoyed doing. I have friends from Meirionydd, you see. And he calls Elsie, Elsie Bengough, which is clearly Welsh, Bengoch, red head; even though she's not ginger.
The ghostly influence is wonderfully subtle. We see it at first changing his taste. He furnishes and paints the flat at first elder-flower pale, but then gets strange ideas about introducing more colour. We wonder where these promptings come from.
Then he can't work. Ultimately, he dislikes his life's work novel Romilly Bishop. The Reason he doesn't like it is because the main character Romilly is based on Elsie Bengough, his sort-of long-term girlfriend. Is the ghost trying to oust him out?
Then he finds a piece of material which he can't identify, but which Elsie Bengough tells him is a harp cover.
Then the dripping tap subtly insinuates a tune into his head which he begins to hum and Mrs Barrett recognses as The Beckoning Fair One.
Critics have called this the best classic ghost story ever and other say it isn't a ghost story; much like The Yellow Wallpaper or The Horla.
However, personally, I do think it's a ghost story. The build up is too deliberate for it all to be chance: the changes in his taste, the artefacts he finds; the harp case for example. For me these carry the energy of The Beckoning Fair One, and she's out to ensnare him.
Then there's Elsie Bengough's prescient comment just before the end of Section 3: Who else lives here? She's had an intuition that the house is not deserted; that there's someone or something living there with him. Elsie also has the intuition that the ghost will never allow Oleron to finish Romilly Bishop in that house. She won't because she's jealous that the heroine of Romillyis modelled on Elsie Bengough and the ghost is jealous.
It is during the subtle dripping of the tap; the dripping that he later realises introduced the tune of The Beckoning Fair One that he starts to criticise Elsie Bengough so sharply in tones he has never entertained before. I think Onions intends all of this. Oleron is being hypnotised, in my opinion, by the spirit of the house
Who is this Beckoning Fair One and what does she want of him?
You'll have to keep listening to find out.
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Robert W. Chambers
Robert William Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1865 and died in New York in 1933, aged 68.
He was born to a well-off family; his father was a corporate lawyer with his own firm which did very well.
Robert’s early love was art and of course this is evident in the story, The Yellow Sign. He first studied art in New York and then aged 21 went to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. When he returned to New York, he sold his illustrations to well-known magazines such as Vogue, but in 1887, while he was in Munich, Germany, he completed his first novel and then he began writing weird tales.
At that time, the most prominent art movement was the Art Nouveau with its lines and curls drawn from plants and nature. His best known collection is The King in Yellow, from which this story The Yellow Sign, is drawn.
This idea of a book that sends you mad is found in Lovecraft with his Necromicon but also in a story that I will read out one day, about Michael Scott the Scottish Wizard from the 12th Century whose book was kept in Wolsty Castle’s library suspended on an iron spike for fear of the occult knowledge it contained.
And of course, books have been banned, notably by the Catholic Church with its famous Index, because of the dangerous information they are thought to contain.
Chambers was admired by Lovecraft and perhaps because of that, has not been forgotten like some of his contemporaries.
This story: The Yellow Sign, was one of my favourites. In reviews elsewhere they say that Tessie was a prostitute. She was not a prostitute: she was a nude model, which is not the same thing! Though she would have been looked down on by polite society in New York. Though she loves the painter Mr Scott, they can never marry because of her status, but she can be his mistress. I didn’t find Scott an unsympathetic character.
I am not sure how much the story needed the love interest in fact, and it was when Chambers was exploring that theme that my interest flagged a little.
I thought it was about time I did another American story. I enjoyed doing the accent and I also enjoyed doing the Cockney accent of the bell boy, but the best thing about the story for me was the Yellow Sign.
First of all, we have the horrible watcher, and then the gruesome details from the bell boy that confirm his unnaturalness. There is a great comparison with a soft fat coffin worm, that is quite horrid.
The occult sign that Tessie finds and gives to Scott seems destined for him and in fact there is a sense on an inexorable destiny that cannot be avoided.
Some evil intelligence has planned all of this — brought the Yellow Sign to Scott and planted the King in Yellow Book in his library.
And then, as the end comes, I think the approach of the King in Yellow — if that is who it is — is done very well. Very sensory and paced like a slow drum beat as the thing comes ever closer.
So, this is a weird tale and a horror story, but I did say that I would be reading weird tales as well as specifically ghost stories.
Let me know what you think!
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M R James is known as the father of the English ghost story. He wasn’t the first to write ghost stories, but he was the finest of his generation whose work continues to be published and re-presented as TV shows and radio plays.
He was born in 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent. His father was a clergyman and was rector of Livermere in Suffolk. East Anglia features as the setting of many of M R James’s stories.
James’s ‘proper job’ was as an academic and he had a distinguished academic career at King’s College in Cambridge where he became dead in 1889 and finally provost in 1905. He was awarded a doctorate in literature by Cambridge in 1895 and honorary doctorates by Trinity College Dublin and St. Andrews University in Scotland.
He moved to become provost of the famous Eton College, supplier of many prime ministers of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in 1918. He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1925.
In 1893, James began his tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmas by candlelight to a hushed circle of his colleagues and friends. His geographical background in East Anglia is evident in many of his stories, as well as his bicycling trips to Europe. Many of his heroes are fumbling academics and Latin and old manuscripts and church architecture also features strongly.
He clearly had a knowledge of the occult and demonology, though he was not known to be a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as were other writers of ghost stories such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.
Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad! Is the title of a poem by the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, and James borrowed this title though Burn’s story concerns a jilted lover.
Perhaps he borrowed it because the central item in the story is the ancient whistle found in the sand covered ruins of the old abbey, which when blown, seems to summon the spirit that haunts the narrator.
The Latin inscription: Quis est qui venit? Means ‘Who is this who comes?’ The other inscription around the plus sign, or cross, is a puzzle of a Latin proverb: Fur Flabis Flebis which means, ‘Thief, if you blow; you will weep.” And in one sense, though a finder, our man is a thief, and when he blows, he certainly does weep.
It is the sheer weirdness of the ghost that is unnerving, and James is the master of this disturbing oddness which is not quite the same as Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror in his weird tales or later Robert Aickman’s unnerving unnaturalness in his ghost stories.
The closest parallel I find to James’s inexplicable and disturbing weirdness is in David Lynch’s movies, particularly Inland Empire and the Third Season of Twin Peaks.
Music
Music is by the marvellous Heartwood Institute
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M R James
This is the third story we've done by M R James, previous ones being The Experiment and Episode 3: Whistle and I'll Come to You.
We talked about James the man there. In a nutshell, he was an academic who had jobs at Eton College and Cambridge University. The heroes of his stories tend to be dusty old academics like himself. He is considered the godfather of the English ghost story, credited for moving the genre from the Gothic to a more modern incarnation.
The Mezzotint
The Mezzotint was published in 1904 as part of James's collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The story is a simple one. An academic, Mr Williams, has a job of collecting prints of English country houses and such scenes for his University college. This is such a narrow and particular job it's a wonder to think that anyone had some a restricted role. He receives a catalogue from his dealer with a suggestion that he might like this particular mezzotint with a price tag of two guineas which seems exorbitant for such an amateur work. But as different people look at the mezzotint, it improves in quality and seems to be playing out a story. This leads to a detective investigation to find out where it is and the history of the place portrayed. So, there are two streams to the story: the rational detective work and the supernatural events unfolding in the picture which are quite demonic. James is famous for eschewing the cosy ghost story. He wanted his stories to be nasty. He has a real gift for introducing odd and jarring elements into his story which are disintinctly unnerving. There is something about the description of the figure, whose face is obscured apart from a domed forehead and some straggling hairs.And of course the theft of a child. Children coming to harm is always a nasty element. When the real-world investigation turns up the story of Francis having the poacher Gawdy hung and Gawdy promising revenge, it seems that the only explanation is that Gawdy returned after his death to exact his revenge. The other delightful aspect of the story is the series of in-jokes. James used to read his stories aloud to his colleagues, and so the in jokes about their obsession with golf and the snobby comments of the Sadducean Professor of Ophiology probably got some laughs. Some other features may not be familiar to the modern reader who has not been to Oxford of Cambridge, so the references to 'sporting' doors and 'skips' and 'Hall' are an insight into a world now gone outside these august establishments.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, nee Charlotte Perkins, was born in 1860 in Hartford, Conneticut. Sadly, she committed suicide in 1935 in Pasadena California. Her father’s family was relatively well connected, but her father left the family when she was young, leaving her mother to bring up the two children. Her mother was forced to move around a lot to find work and Charlotte’s education suffered because of that.
Perhaps because of her challenging childhood, Charlotte became a social reformer and feminist and was interested in furthering the political interests of women. She founded a feminist journal The Forerunner from 1909.
The Yellow Wallpaper is her best known story and was published in 1892. She also wrote non-fiction most notably, Women and Economics which was published in 1898. The Yellow Wallpaper was actually Episode 1 of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.
Her first marriage was to an artist called Charles Stetson in 1884 at the age of 24. The marriage was not happy and she suffered from depression. It is said that this illness provided much of the material for The Yellow Wallpaper, and if she was suffering from depression with psychotic features, this would tie in very well with the bizzarre delusions about the wallpaper and the things in it. This is reminiscent of The Horla by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, which is Episode 35 of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. The Horla was published in 1887, but there is no evidence that Charlotte was familiar with The Horla, and the earliest translation into English that I can find is 1903.
She married her cousin George Gilman in 1900 and stayed with him until 1934. In that year she discovered she had terminal breast cancer. She committed suicide after that.
The story is a double play: is it the story of a woman going mad, or a woman possessed by something evil? We begin to suspect that the narrator’s apparently caring husband John, may not be as caring as she thinks. Is he trying to control her? We know that Charlotte was much concerned with the emancipation of women and them achieving financial independence, so is the character of John an echo of this?
The horror in the story revolves around the Yellow Wallpaper and like many of us, she sees to have seen patterns in the abstract wallpaper that eventually evolve into characters. She ultimately can enter the wallpaper and more disturbingly, the woman from the wallpaper can come out into her room. The bizarreness of the crouching, creeping figures serves to unnerve the reader.
Music
Music is by the marvellous Heartwood Institute
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Blind Man's Buff By Herbert Russell Wakefield
H R Wakefield was born in 1888 in Sandgate, Kent, England and died 1964. He was the son of the Bishop of Birmingham. He was educated at the prestigious Marlborough College and then went to Oxford University where he studied history and played cricket, golf, hockey and football. He was secretary to Viscount Northcliffe and served with the Royal Scots Fusiliers when the First World War broke out and was promoted to Captain. After 1920 he settled in London and worked as chief editor in a publishing house.
His wife was American, Barbara Standish Waldo, and he met her when she was in London as her family were wealthy and took a house in London each year for the season. He divorced her in 1936 and married again in 1946. Older now, during the Second World War he served as an air-raid warden.
H R's brother Gilbert was a successful playwright.
Wakefield was famous for his ghost stories during his life. He published seven volumes of ghost stories during his life. His work was appreciated by August Derleth, H P Lovecraft's disciple and some of his stories were published in Weird Tales. His main influences were M R James and Algernon Blackwood (both of whom we have featured on the podcast.)
The poet laureate John Betjeman considered Wakefield in the second rank of ghost story writers after M R James, which was praise indeed. However, M R James wasn't as fond of Wakefield's work. H P Lovecraft on the other hand showered Wakefield in praise and said he reached the heights of horror.
Wakefield strongly believed in the paranormal, and it is perhaps because of this he was drawn to write in this field. He claimed to have had personal experiences of supernatural phenomena.
This story, Blind Man's Buff, plays on the primal fear of the dark and what might lurk within. In that play on phobia it struck me that it was similar to Marghatina Laski's The Tower, which we read as Episode 13
Tony's Ghost Story Books
My latest book, London Horror Stories is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US. Ghost and horror stories with a sense of place.
It's available free for Patrons.
It's doing moderately well and the audiobook will be coming in stream soon through Author's Republic, which you'll be able to get on Audible.
If you've read it and like it, could you please leave a review on Amazon?
All purchases, recommendations and support of London Horror Stories is massively helpful to me.
Music by The Heartwood Institute
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The Fall Of The House Of Usher
- Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done a Poe story before: [The Tell-Tale Heart (Episode 12)] and that was fine, but the Fall of the House of Usher is, in my humble opinion, finer.
Poe 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. It was long overdue that we did another of his stories
The Fall of the House of Usher was published in 1839, when grave-robbing was still a thing. He makes a play on the word 'house' which can mean both a lineage and a building. This is a rhetorical usage known as a syllepsis.
The story is a fine Gothic thing. We have dismal setting with the rotting trees and the stagnant tarn (which is a small lake) the gloomy castle, the sickly and neurotic hero, the storm and generally dreadful weather, the mysterious and sinister chatelaine, Madeline. It is quasi-Medieval also, though not set in Medieval times, it might as well be and at the end they read from some Arthurian legend to make even more Medieval.
The remoteness of the house, the lack of modern communications (even for the 1830s), the terrible weather and the vague dream time of no specific location and no specific time trap us in the legend. The house haunts the characters as much as their wraith-like dream forms haunt its halls. Roderick never leaves the house and I doubt Madeline of Usher was much of a gad-about either.
Poe never says anything clearly in a few words when he can draw it out over several obscure sentences with multiple clauses and hints rather than statements. We love him for it, indeed that's why we read him.
Old Roderick decides to entomb Madeline in the deep dungeon, because it is hinted that the medical men would seek to dig her up and use her for research, given the obscurity of her illness. This was a thing in Poe's days or just before.
The hint of the blush on dead Madeline's face is suggestive that she may be a vampire, and Poe, I think was encouraging this, but it is in fact, as it later transpires in a nice twist (nice?) that poor Madeline was not in fact dead, and furthermore, her brother suspected this.
Poe's stories are populated by the deeply neurotic and this, for me, is his masterpiece. I love the Gothic prolixity of it, I love the funereal sombreness and I am struck how much influence Poe had on Lovecraft in his vocabulary. Now, it may be an American usage, but, outside these two, I've never come across the word "litten" for "lit" as in red-litten, for red-lit, and my autocorrect dislikes it also. Also reminiscent of Lovecraft, is the long list of obscure books, mostly not in English; a favourite device of the Cthulhu Mythos.
What Poe does wonderfully in this story, I think, is identify the building with the family themselves and make the house a living thing. The fortunes of the House of Usher, as he says, is reflected in both the fabric of the ancient castle and the health of the living line. When the people die, the house dies also.
Shirley Jackson does this in her story, The Visit (Episode 52)
The co-mingling of story and actuality happens in the reading of the Arthurian legend where the breaking in of Ethelred, has its counterpart in the breaking out of the dying Madeline. In a sense this also mirrors the identity of the living Ushers with the symbol of the ancient building.
The purpose of the narrator is merely to give us a window into the goings on, for he does nothing active in the story. I love the image of the blood-red moon rising over the tarn at the end as the house (and its inhabitants) fall into the dark waters. We are reminded that the first image (nearly) is of the House of Usher reflected upside down in the waters of the tarn, and now at the end the tarn swallows it up forever.
Music
Some Come Back, Witch Phase 4, and Powers of Darkness by The Heartwood Institute. Tell Jonathan I sent you!
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Branch Line to Benceston by Sir Andrew Caldecott
Branch Line to Benceston was published in the collection Not Exactly Ghosts in 1947. He turned to writing after retirement from the Malaysian Civil Service, again like many of our ghost story writers, he had a career in the Colonial Civil Service of the British Empire. Sadly, he didn’t live long after retirement and died aged 65.
Sir Andrew Caldecott (1884–1951) was born in Kent. He was educated at Uppingham School and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he became an Honorary Fellow in 1948. His father was a clergyman. Spooky how this happens so much.
He had a very distinguished career in the Colonial Service and was Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) from 1937 until 1944 (so during the Second World War), and before that Governor of Hong Kong (1935–1937). He also worked in Malaya and Singapore and there is a station named after him in Singapore.
He had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and, as is evident from his two volumes of supernatural tales, he was an accomplished writer, but it wasn’t until after his retirement in 1944 that he published his first volume of ghost stories. Not Exactly Ghosts was published in 1947 by Edward Arnold & Co. It contains twelve tales. Interestingly, features of Caldecott’s own interests, such as playing the piano, crop up in his stories and I suppose that is true for most writers, hence my frequent mentions of Hawkwind.
In ‘Branch Line to Benceston’, Adrian Frent, a railway enthusiast and herbalist, is the first tenant of ‘Brentside’, the newly-built house next to the narrator’s own house in Brensham. Frent is a partner in a firm of music publishers, but he hates the other partner with a vengeance, feeling that the man has messed up his life stence since they were boys. He wishes his partner dead, and then when he does die, things turn weird. But the story is not exactly a ghost story. Caldecott does a couple of things wonderfully. Firstly; this story is a portrait of Metroland, the area outside London that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century with the benefit of faster rail connections to allow the middle classes, to have the benefits of living in a suburbia that appeared and was sold as being the English countryside, while still able to travel easily into London to their day jobs. Vast swathes of the Home Counties were gobbled up and railways proliferated. John Betjeman, the English poet laureate captured all of this in his film entitled: Metroland and much of his poetry is set in this half-and-half land bathed in the sunlight of the English dream.
The second thing I think Caldecott does well is the set up of the story. The death of the Dachshunds and the herbalism and poison seems to be a red-herring. Though giving his great enemy Paul Saxon one of the tinctures he makes reminds Frent of his wish to kill Paul, and thus his sin, he does not actually poison the man. This is a misdirection, I think: a red herring.
However, the real set-up is the trap-door. We have already been told how Frent tends to go off half-cocked, but after a brief mention of this trap-door, Caldecott leaves it. This is subtle and I didn’t get that until the end. Caldecott is a great wit and his comment about the coroner’s view that these houses are death-traps being ignored as normal with coroner’s comments reflects his own professional experience, I am sure, and is a bit of a joke because we are going to ignore this clue too, at least I did. Caldecott even flags this clue up saying he has recorded it for a reason that will become clear later. This to me is a great example of burying the obvious, and doing it well.
The picture of Frent’s fire escape being one you swarm down a rope on, hand over hand, like you did at prep school is hilarious and worthy of P G Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh. I began to suspect something about the clock when it was mentioned it was set five minutes fast.
Caldecott sets up all the railway stuff too with the model and the magazines, and mentions this branch line to Benceston which only exists in dreams; a line that was imagined but never happened, much like the murder of Paul Saxon by Adrian Frent, but dreams have an impact on reality and Caldecott refers to Jesus’s famous saying (roughly paraphrased) that if you imaging doing a sin, you are 11as guilty as if you had really done it.
Caldecott sets the motive for a murder up like it was a detective story, but of course the twist is that Frent never actually did it in reality, but in his dreamworld, he was guilty of the sin and executed for it. 1I also enjoyed the narrator Johnson’s snobbish and wry comments about Frent and his taste, his mismatched religious pictures and his interest in railways. Frent’s cousin Gilbert is also a portrait of the no-nonsense rugger bugger Caldecott clearly recognised.
I laughed at his comments about filthy jazz, and about the idea patients being ones who sleep, ask no questions and do what they are told, and about Jameson having to get Hasterton on the case. Hasterton is presumably the psychiatrist. I never met a psychiatrist who wasn’t crazy, and I’ve met plenty.
For a man who spent much of his time in the Orient, apart from the Hindu and Buddhist pictures on Frent’s wall, there is no trace of anything other than the quintessentially English, and English home-counties at that. Amateur carpentry and unseasoned wood, a fatal combination!
Other Ventures And Future Of The Podcast
I have made a momentous decision. Every week the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast gets about 4000 downloads and that is growing. We have 18 patrons on Patreon and a cloud of about ten doughty folk who support the Podcast with donations on Ko-Fi.
I was sitting with Sheila one day in the sun on the clifftops overlooking the sea having a cup of tea from the bamboo reusable mugs we got at Inverarary when I decided to move the Podcast to Substack.
This will mean that three out of every four podcast episodes are for paid subscribers only while one in four will remain free.
The aim is to build the core of patrons up from 18 on Patreon to a hundred on Substack at $5 a month to better support the effort spent creating the Podcast.
As such, I am going to suggest that Patreons close their Patreon pledges and move to this Substack account at www.tonywalker.substack.com
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tonywalker.substack.com/subscribe