Classic Ghost Stories

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 shoulder. Something she had put away so completely she'd almost convinced herself it was never real. A half-remembered thing from childhood, stirring now in the middle of the night. She stops sleeping. She starts watching the dark corners of rooms. Her doctor is kind, practical, entirely unworried. Nerves, he tells her — the heat, nothing more. What she needs is rest, and quiet, and a change of scene. A little village on the East Anglian coast, away from London, away for a while even from her husband. Somewhere she can put it all behind her. She goes because she means to get well. E.F. Benson's The Face. *Publication: "The Face" first appeared in Hutchinson's Magazine in February 1924, and was collected four years later in E.F. Benson's Spook Stories* (Hutchinson & Co., 1928). *About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories — his own term for them was "spook stories" — placed regularly in magazines like Pearson's and The Illustrated London News*. I now have an archive where you can find stories more easily. https://www.classicghost.com/the-archive/ Find Stories More Easily

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 remembers, and what it does to those who are told to stay away, and don't. Published anonymously in 1878, later reprinted with the tag "by the author of Freda." Modern editors tentatively attribute it to novelist Elizabeth Anna Hart, though the evidence remains circumstantial. Elizabeth Anna Hart (1822–1890) was a London-born novelist and poet, cousin to Lewis Carroll, best remembered for her children's classic The Runaway and the novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal. ⭐ Join my Patreon ⭐ https://patreon.com/barcud 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

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 to Pierre. Something in the way he asks after the crucifix. Something in the reason he will not be going with them. The Werewolf Howls was first published in Weird Tales, November 1941. It is the final story Clifford Ball published before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps. Ball was born in New York City in 1908 and wrote just six stories, all for Weird Tales, between 1937 and 1941. He drowned accidentally in Baltimore in January 1947, aged thirty-eight.

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 story asks, without sentimentality and without resolution, what we leave behind us when we refuse an honest encounter — and whether what we leave behind stays left. A Ghost of the Sea was first published in 1893 in Prevost's collection Rust of Gold, issued by Ward and Lock, London. Francis Prevost was the pen name of Harry Francis Prevost Battersby (1862–1949), soldier, war correspondent, novelist, and lifelong investigator of psychical phenomena. Get the London Fae for $5! https://payhip.com/b/ryqKP 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 paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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 *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder

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 street. Something is in that house. It has been seen. And the ones who have seen it cannot say what it was. They cannot say anything at all, after. Rhoda Broughton published this story in 1873. It has barely aged a day. Publication details: "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth" was first published in Belgravia: A London Magazine, Volume 21, 1873, and later collected in Broughton's Tales for Christmas Eve (1873), subsequently reissued as Twilight Stories (1879). Author biography: Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920) was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, witty fiction made her one of the most widely read and controversial writers of the Victorian era. She outlived her own scandalous reputation, remarking late in life that she had begun as Zola and ended as Miss Yonge. 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 paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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 *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder

Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on in ways that are difficult to explain. Edith Wharton set this story not in her usual territory of New York drawing rooms, but somewhere in North Africa, in a crumbling pile of Crusader stonework and Arab plasterwork, where the palms rattle like rain above an ancient well, and the desert stretches out in every direction, golden and merciless. She wrote it without a single ghost. She didn't need one. First published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1926 under the title "A Bottle of Evian," the story was collected in Certain People (1930) and later reprinted in Wharton's posthumous ghost story anthology Ghosts (1937). Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She published more than forty books across four decades. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

In an old private chapel attached to a country house, a trusted servant keeps night watch beside the ancient altar, alone behind a locked door. By morning he is found dead, a dagger from the chapel’s peculiar mechanism driven clean through his heart—though no human hand should have been able to strike the blow. No tracks, no witnesses, only the oppressive sense that something in that dim, little sanctuary has moved unseen. As Thomas Carnacki retraces the dead man’s final hours and tests the chapel’s sinister contrivance for himself, the silence around the altar begins to sound like an answer of its own. First published in the 1909 collection The Ghost Pirates, A Chaunty, and Another Story, “The Thing Invisible” later appeared in The New Magazine (January 1912) before being collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913). The story is in the public domain. William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English writer of sea stories, supernatural fiction, and weird horror. He is best known for his visionary novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, as well as his stories featuring the occult detective Carnacki. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast