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Classic Ghost Stories

A weekly podcast that reads out ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales every week. Classic stories from the pens of the masters Occasionally, we feature living authors, but the majority are dead. Some perhaps are undead. We go from cosy Edwardian ghost stories (E. F. Benson, Walter De La Mare) to Victorian supernatural mysteries (M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and Charles Dickens) to 20th-century Weird Tales (Robert Aickman, Fritz Lieber, Clark Ashton-Smith, and H. P

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All Episodes

92:09

The Residence at Whitminster by M R James

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/10/01

Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!The prebendal residence at Whitminster stands in the shadow of its great collegiate church, solid, respectable, and comfortable. A young Irish lord came to lodge there once, in the 1730s, and his guardian noted his odd habits with mild concern. He grew more concerned as time went on. By the time he understood what the boy had been doing in the garden at night, it was already too late. M. R. James tells this story the way a scholar reconstructs a

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65:59

The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E Wilkins Freeman

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/09/24

An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.Nobody in Ford Village will say anything. And then there's the rose-bush that flutters when there is no wind. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, better known for her hard-eyed portraits of small-town New England households, turns that same unsparing eye on a relationship that prizes respectability over truth. What starts as

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67:51

The Mummy's Foot by Theophile Gautier

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/09/18

In a quiet curiosity shop in Paris, a shelf holds a collection of objects from another time. Our protagonist notices a small object that at first appears to be the broken foot of a Greek statue. The antiques dealer, however, explains that it is the mummified foot of a pharaoh’s daughter. The absurdity of a once royal foot now serving as a paperweight strikes them both. The dealer warns that the old pharaoh will not be pleased.First published in 1840 as "Le Pied de momie" in Le Chroniqueur de

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47:12

Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse by Lousia May...

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/09/11

A young woman sits for a portrait, turning over a small gold box while her fiancé paints. Inside: three scarlet seeds, brought back from a place he'd rather forget. He warns her the story behind them will haunt her. She only laughs — she likes weird tales, and they never trouble her. But something was disturbed in that pyramid, something bound by an old promise to whoever broke her rest. The seeds are waiting. So is the curse.Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse first appeared in Frank

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112:23

Lot 249 by Arthur Conan Doyle

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/09/04

This was a request, but fitted in with my current interest in mummies.Read my full notes on the history of the Egyptian Mummy in Horror here: https://www.classicghost.com/blog/the-egyptian-mummy-in-horror/ Old College, Oxford, in the last years of the nineteenth century. A young medical student named Abercrombie Smith shares a stair with a fellow he barely knows — a brilliant scholar of Eastern languages, whose rooms are crowded with the relics of a dead civilisation, and whose company he has

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56:07

The Haunted Dolls House by M R James

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/08/21

Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses...A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable block, a drawer of tiny embroidered clothes. He spends a happy evening setting its rooms in order, delighted with his find. There's no clock within earshot — none on the stair, none in the stable, none in the

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66:33

The Face by E F Benson

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/08/14

London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate.And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should — she has never had cause to wish for anything else, and she is grateful for it, in the quiet, unshowy way of someone who has never really been tested. Until something from very long ago reaches forward and taps her on the

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76:49

A Professor of Egyptology by Guy Boothby

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/08/07

Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other — a man treated with strange deference by those who know him best, a man whose knowledge of the dead seems to run deeper than any book could teach. She will walk beside him through moonlit halls where the pharaohs sleep in glass cases, "A Professor of Egyptology" first appeared in The Graphic on 10 December 1904, and was collected that same

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55:50

The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/31

A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go. He goes anyway. There are things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs. Something in the gallery, after dark, when the fire burns low and the talk runs out. Those who see it together are marked by it, in ways that take a year to come due. This is the story of what a house

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89:35

The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/24

A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed somewhere else, by someone else, for reasons the walls should know nothing about. The question is not what haunts the house. The question is what was done to the dead. "The House Surgeon" was first published

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54:31

The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/16

In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, master of the estate, has heard enough. He is a rational man. He does not believe in werewolves. He has moulded the silver bullets himself, in the cellar, as a concession to superstition — nothing more. Tonight his sons will go out into the moonlight and put an end to it. But there is something in the way he says goodbye

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30:12

Gabriel Ernest by Saki

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/09

Something is wrong in the woods. The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone. It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, is a boy with light brown eyes that hold something tigerish in them, lying in the sun with an ease that belongs to no child he has ever met. The aunt will find him charming. The dog will not stay in the

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71:49

The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/03

There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil, not sin, not the ordinary darkness of human nature, but evil as a cosmic force, a radiation from a black sun somewhere in the depths of space. And he has come with a purpose. In the old Larcom house, with

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103:04

A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own conclusions. The exception is a story he has told no one: a woman he met in Cairo, a wrong he did her, and something that has followed him across the water ever since. Not threatening. Not reproachful. Simply there, at the edge of the known world, in a light that has no name in any spectrum the living can account for. Prevost's 1893

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35:48

Hertford O'Donnells Warning by Charlotte Riddell

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

Gerard Street, Soho. A winter's night. A surgeon sits alone by his fire, a practical man — a man who has cut through flesh and bone without flinching, who has long since made his peace with whatever comes after death. And then something comes through the darkness. Not a dream. Not imagination. Something older than London, older than reason, that has followed him across the water. Charlotte Riddell's "Hertford O'Donnell's Warning" is a ghost story rooted not in haunted houses or rattling chains,

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28:49

The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth...

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he has noticed it for four years, and he does not like to say it aloud. What happens inside that house comes to us through letters. Two women writing to each other in the warm, confiding way of close friends — about curtains, about dinner guests, about the peculiar mercy of a low rent in a good

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9:22

The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, the key in her pocket. But the almanack on the mantelpiece read the 21st of October. And it was May. --- *"The Mystery of the Semi-Detached"* was first published in Edith Nesbit's collection *Grim Tales*

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31:38

To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count his fellow jurymen, there there should be twelve, he counts thirteen... Dickens wrote this story with a title that is itself a warning. Whether you take that warning as a comment on the narrator, on the law,

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67:56

A Walk in the Park by William Bundy

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the moonlight, patient as stone, returning with every full moon whether it is wanted or not. William Bundy's *A Walk in the Park* is a story about inheritance — the kind you don't choose. *A Walk in the Park* is published on William Bundy's Substack at

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45:32

My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

Classic Ghost Stories ·

2026/07/01

A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that won't start. He does what anyone would do. He helps. He offers whisky. He thinks nothing of it. But there is something not quite right about her. Something in the way she watches the road behind her. Something

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