A neglected Georgian house, shutters still, poplars trees surround it, whispering. Downstairs is a row of servant bells to call servants. One has a mysterious name and is reputed to ring when no one is there. Rumour speaks of a hooded figure and an owl; the corridors mutter with sounds of pipes, disconnected wires, and something harder to dismiss. By night, faces seem to change in the mirror; but by day, the rooms are ordinary. Servants won't stay there and then the owner organises an investigation, a ghost hunt, if you like. A society of guest who are to keep their counsel until Twelfth Night, listening for what remains and for the presence that speaks when the house is empty.
First published as the Christmas number of All the Year Round (December 1859), a collaborative sequence framed and partly written by Charles Dickens.
This reading includes Dickens’s chapters: “The Mortals in the House” and “The Ghost in Master B.’s Room.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a British novelist and social critic, author of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.
He edited Household Words and All the Year Round, helping to make the Victorian Christmas ghost story a tradition.
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1:40:10
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1:40:10
Hawley Bank Foundry by L T C Rolt
Beneath the soot and iron of England’s industrial heart, a foundry lies silent. Its furnaces once roared for empire, but the men are gone, the machinery rusted, the sand floor undisturbed. When war comes and the living return to wake it, something else stirs too—something that remembers.In the stillness of metal and dust, the past is waiting to be poured once more.
“Hawley Bank Foundry” was first published in L. T. C. Rolt’s collection Sleep No More (1948), a landmark of twentieth-century British ghost fiction.
L. T. C. Rolt (1910–1974) was an engineer, historian, and writer whose love of canals and craftsmanship gave his supernatural tales their distinctive sense of industrial melancholy and moral gravity.
P S I've just had my Classic Detective Podcast demonetised by YouTube for some spurious reason, probably decided by a bot. So, if you're reading this and enjoying it please consider becoming a patreon
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1:28:59
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1:28:59
The Dunwich Horror by H P Lovecraft
A remote New England village. Dark rumours swirl among its lonely hills. Whispers of strange rites, of a family line touched by shadows, haunt the woods and starlit nights. Something stirs where the old stones lie, and the boundary between the known and the unseen begins to thin. In my Halloween tradition, the tale chosen is “The Dunwich Horror”—a story rich in mystery, and alive with Lovecraft’s trademark unease.
First published in Weird Tales, April 1929.
Collected in "The Outsider and Others" by Arkham House, 1939.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer whose cosmic horror stories explored the limits of knowledge and the fragility of sanity. His influenced echoes through horror, science fiction, and popular culture to this day.
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2:00:37
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2:00:37
Twilight by Marjorie Bowen
Twilight opens in a garden where beauty wears a mask to protect it from the years, and twilight brings regrets and confessions. A young courtier stumbles upon a Duchess at dusk—painted, jewelled, and demanding. She wants him to be her father confessor, but what does Lucrezia Borgia want to confess and why does he run away?
My first video podcast on Spotify...
Publication: First published in God’s Playthings (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1913), under Marjorie Bowen’s principal pseudonym.
Setting and subject: Ferrara; Lucrezia Borgia in her final twilight.
Author: Marjorie Bowen (Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, 1885–1952), prolific British writer of historical and supernatural fiction.
Noted for: Lush atmosphere, moral chiaroscuro, and “twilight tales” that fuse history with the uncanny
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Halloween Dark Ale by Tony Walker
A northern lad takes a cheap room above a Wapping pub in ’87, where the Thames presses at the windows like weather. He wants to be a journalist not a barman, but he needs the money... He learns. that the cellar has secrets and that the beer is popular. Especially the Thames Halloween Dark Ale.
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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. Lovecraft) and wander from the Gothic to the Odd, even to the Literary, and then back again.
Each episode is followed by Tony's take on the story, its author, its content and any literary considerations, which may be useful to students!
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