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The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker
  • 4.9 (568)
  • Science Fiction
  • Updated Weekly

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! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support.

  1. Gabriel Ernest Episode by Saki

    9h ago

    Gabriel Ernest Episode by Saki

    Something is wrong in the woods.The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone.It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here:https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here:payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    28 min
  2. The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

    3d ago

    The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

    There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil, 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    1h 10m
  3. The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

    May 24

    The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

    A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    9 min
  4. To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens

    May 15

    To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens

    A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    30 min
  5. A Walk In The Park by William Bundy

    May 14

    A Walk In The Park by William Bundy

    A Walk in the Park by William Bundy There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the 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 redsaidwrites.substack.com, where you'll find more of his writing in the same vein. --- 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    1h 6m
  6. My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

    May 8

    My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

    A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that 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 in the way she keeps to the shadows. "My Adventure in Norfolk" by A.J. Alan, first collected in Good Evening, Everyone!, published by Hutchinson in 1928. The story was originally broadcast live on the BBC in the mid-1920s. A.J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert, a senior intelligence officer who worked at Bletchley Park and served as Vice-President of the Magic Circle. He broadcast only a handful of stories each year and never revealed his true identity to the public during his lifetime.  The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    43 min
  7. The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield

    Apr 30

    The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield

    This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post. In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a long line, watches her companion, Amelia, wither into a gaunt and listless shadow. Amelia is the sixth companion; three before her never left these walls alive. Amidst the rattle of mountain rain, thin, high screams echo through the stone-vaulted halls. Is it the onset of madness, or is the house reclaiming a brutal, hidden history? As the light fades, the only certainty is the tightening grip of a terror that will have its say. The Triumph of Death first appeared in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949. It was later collected in Strayers from Sheol (1961) and The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield (1978). H. Russell Wakefield (1888--1964) was an English writer best known for his unsettling ghost stories. Drawing on clerical, military, and publishing-world experience, he brought a sharp psychological edge to the classic British supernatural tale. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support. *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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  *Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

    38 min
  8. The London Stone by Tony Walker

    Apr 18 • Special Editions Only

    The London Stone by Tony Walker

    A woman who cannot sleep descends into the London Underground before dawn. She is a qi gong practitioner, trained to read the energy of places the way a doctor reads a pulse — and something in the body of this city is deeply wrong. The tube lines spread beneath her like the meridian channels of a living organism. The stations pulse. The tunnels remember every anxious commuter who ever passed through them. And somewhere to the east, something ancient is waiting behind glass, patient as limestone, old as the island itself. Lu Wei has fled from city to city, never finding home. But London's hidden anatomy is speaking to her in a language she was trained to understand — and what it reveals will change how she sees the city, the land beneath it, and the wound she carries in herself. 'The London Stone' appears in The London Fae, a novel-in-stories by Tony Walker, published 2026. The London Stone is a real object, mounted on Cannon Street in the City of London, whose origin and original purpose remain unknown. Tony Walker is a narrator and author based in Cumbria, England. He hosts the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast and writes fiction exploring the places where folklore, landscape, and the uncanny intersect. A story from the London Fae book which will be forthcoming. We have one more story to record then I can publish the paperback. This story, is not really a horror story at all. It is not scary. It is the final story in the London Fae book, and again gives more hints as to what the fae in my conception are. It sort of sets out my philosophy I suppose and those of you who followed my journey to the temple of Nodens at Lydney will get what I am saying. It builds on The Silent Folk and The Haunted Bookshop, and I suppose also the Frost Fair and Thames Halloween Dark Ale in a way. They are all in the book. The final story is A Crow In The Chimney which I hope to get done before too long. Anyway, not for everyone I don't think, but here it is. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

    55 min
See All (453)

4.9
out of 5
568 Ratings

About

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! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support.

Information

  • Creator
    Tony Walker
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    453
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Tony Walker
  • Show Website
    The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast
  • Provider
    The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

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