The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

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 house.Saki understood that the old country — the country before the parishes and the property lines — was never entirely tamed. The animals there talk.

"Gabriel-Ernest" was first published in 1909 in the Westminster Gazette, and later collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910).

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), a writer of savage wit and supernatural unease. He was killed on the Western Front in the closing months of the Somme campaign.

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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 its history of sorrow and disaster, he has found exactly the conditions he needs. His neighbour, a novelist, finds himself drawn into Averaud's orbit. 

Clark Ashton Smith's The Devotee of Evil is a quiet story. It does not rush. It thinks. And what it thinks about has been troubling philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. 

The Devotee of Evil was first published in Smith's self-produced chapbook The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies in 1933, after failing to find a commercial publisher. It reappeared in Stirring Science Stories in February 1941. 

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a California poet, painter, sculptor and writer of weird fiction, one of the central figures of the Weird Tales circle alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with whom he maintained a long correspondence.

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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

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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 in 1893. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is best remembered today as the author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It, but she was also a prolific and accomplished writer of supernatural fiction, whose ghost stories combine suburban ordinariness with genuine dread to unsettling effect.

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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

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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, or on the nature of what follows, is a question the story leaves carefully unanswered. *

"To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt"* was first published in the Christmas 1865 edition of *All the Year Round*, Dickens's own literary journal, as part of a collection entitled *Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions*. It was later republished under the titles *The Trial for Murder* and *The Thirteenth Man*.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Portsmouth and is widely regarded as the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era. He was also one of the finest writers of ghost stories in the language, and this story was considered the definitive English ghost story for decades, before M.R. James arrived to claim that title.

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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

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A Walk in the Park by William Bundy
There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the moonlight, patient as stone, returning with 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.
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*A Walk in the Park* is published on William Bundy's Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, where you'll find more of his writing in the same vein.
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William Bundy is a UK-based writer of dark and supernatural fiction whose work spans short stories, essays, and film. Find his writing at williambundy.com, his Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, his film work on Instagram at instagram.com/redsaidfilms, and all his links gathered in one place at linktr.ee/williambundy.

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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

 To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

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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