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The Monkey’s Paw was written by an English author W W Jacobs and published in 1902 in his collection The Lady of the Barge. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey%27s_Paw (The Monkey's Paw)""The Lady of the Barge""Bill's Paper Chase""The Well""Cupboard Love""In the Library""Captain Rogers""A Tiger's Skin""A Mixed Proposal""An Adulteration Act""A Golden Venture""Three at Table"The Monkey's Paw is the only one to have survived. It seems to have caught the public's imagination and that is perhaps because it is an archetypal morality tale and has themes of not tempting fate and being too proud, themes that go back to Ancient Greek theatre.Jacobs was born in London in 1863 and died in London during the Second World War in 1943. He was most known as a comedy writer in his time, but he also wrote #horror stories#, the most famous of which is this one: The Monkey’s Paw.As we seem to have some interest in the political views of our writers, we note that his wife was a Suffragette (votes for women in the UK) and he had left wing views as a young man but as an older man described himself as ‘conservative and individualistic’The Monkey’s Paw has been made into a film a number of times, first in in 1915, 1923, 1933, and in 2016. In 1928 it was made into a radio play and again 1988 which was rebroadcast in 1993 and then another version read by Christopher Lee was made in 2004! It’s a classic morality tale: don’t trust genies or other supernatural agents who promise you wishes, because it will all go wrong. Usually it’s because the wish twists things in a malevolent way like in this one, or the Genie or Mephistopheles takes you at your literal word. They’re always out to trick you, don't you know.https://amzn.to/2LhO9vy (The Monkey's Paw on Amazon)https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Ambrose Bierce was a prominent American author in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He is most famous for his Devil’s Dictionary. He served in the Union Army in the American Civil War and his military experience forms the background of many of his stories.He was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. His ancestors were English puritans. By trade he began as a printer and he was later a journalist. He was a controversial figure often mired in argument and litigation. At the age of 71, heading for a tour of his old Civil War battlefields, Bierce disappeared. He wrote a letter from Chihuahua, then he disappeared. He was never found.Bierce published the Moonlit Road in 1907. This was just about the start of the literary and artistic movement known as Modernism, though its roots can be traced a little further back. While other classic ghost story authors are distinctly Victorian, the heyday of the ghost story, arguably, Bierce appears far more Modern, or even Modernist.In the Moonlit Road, for example, Bierce uses multiple narrators giving overlapping, but distinct viewpoints of the same event. He uses this technique in other stories. It’s only through the composite that we see what has (may have) really happened, and even then, there are things missing.There are three narrators to this story, the son, the father (gone mad and forgetful of his true identity) and the mother (now dead as a mournful ghost). The three together give us a fairly clear view of what has happened, but the fourth narrator is missing. Who is the mysterious figure leaving the house by the back door? It’s this figure that drives the husband into a jealous rage, leading him to kill his wife. And his wife is unaware that it is her husband that killed her. He thinks the figure is her lover. She thinks the figure is some monster. Why does the figure hesitate to come in and leave without encountering the wife?Is the figure a real man? A thief? Or the personification of Death himself — soon to visit Mrs Hetman. The leaving out of the fourth witness to the tragedy is masterful, but then so much of Bierce is masterful.https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Mary Elizabeth BraddonAnother accomplished woman novelist of the Victorian period. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in 1835 in London and died in Richmond, Surrey (now part of London) in 1915.She wrote more than eighty novels, one of which, Lady Audley's Secret, was a great success. A number of her stories have supernatural themes, and she lived in the heyday of the ghost story so that is not surprising.When she was 25 she moved in with a publisher whose wife was locked away in an Irish mental asylum. She lived with the man and was stepmother to his existing children, marrying him finally in 1874, fourteen years after she first moved in, now allowable because his wife had passed away. She had six children by him.Her husband was also a property developer and a number of the streets in Richmond are named after characters from her novels.The Cold EmbraceThe Cold Embrace was published in is a very accomplished story both in form and in prosody. It has the feel of a folk-tale and its theme surely is that promises made in love should be kept and that the flighty and arrogant will be punished for breaking them.It was a delight to read because of the use of formal rhetorical forms like the repeated use on anaphora where the beginning of a sentence is repeated, usually three times to create a tricolon. Often an ascending tricolon where each phrase is longer building towards a climax.It almost reminded me of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride in its atmosphere. The final masked ball with the young lady on his arm who fades slowly into the corpse bride.We the readers are aware that the boisterous gaiety he feels at the ball, which he mistakes for his old light-heartedness is a return of the fever that will, this time, kill him.And the picture of stage coaches (the diligence) and hordes of labourers walking across Germany with their meerschaum pipes and dogs was like scenes out of Goethe, or William Wordsworth's account of his traipsing across Europe at a similar time. Braddon herself was born later than this, so this is historical fiction and we have the device that M R James endorses too: set the ghost story in the past, not too distant past, but enough that there is a mist of history which allows us to suspend our disbelief (although that phrase belongs to Tolkein). Music byhttps://bit.ly/somecomeback (The Heartwood Institute)The last track with the lovely violin is Under The Rose by https://bit.ly/midnighfolk (The Hare & The Moon,) whose lead performer is Grey MalkinWe also feature music by Michael Romeo of https://bit.ly/dvoykinbandcamp (Dvoynik)Support the Podcast Any Way You Can!http://bit.ly/ghostiest (Buy the thirsty, hyperactive podcaster a cup of Java)Sign up For Exclusive Stuff and Early Bird Exposures on http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon)Get the https://bit.ly/substacklanding (Substack Newsletter) with ExclusivesMy Ghost StoriesGet my free audiobook download, The Dalston Vampire https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (here), and you may consider purchasing my https://bit.ly/HorrorStoriesForHalloween (Horror Stories For Halloween), which is now long past.Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Marjorie BowenMarjorie Bowen was the nom de plume of Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, born Campbell. Marjorie Bowen was born in 1885 in Hampshire, England, and lived a very interesting life, especially in a time when women were generally expected to be confined to the kitchen or other minor supporting roles.Unfortunately her father was an alcoholic and abandoned the family and the was eventually found dead on the street in London. There must've been some money in the family, and those of us who are English are ever conscious to subtle indicators of social class. For example, working-class Englishwomen are never called ‘Gabrielle Vere Long’. Another clue to the fact that she came of refined stock was the fact that she studied at the Slade School of Art and later in Paris. I was about to say that working-class people did not study at fine art schools when I remembered my own grandfather ,who was an Irish immigrant, in fact went to an art school in Edinburgh just after the First World War.In any case, Bowen was a talented writer. Even though she married a Sicilian (who died of tuberculosis) and then in Englishman named Long (who survived) , it was Bowen who supported the family through her writing. Her first novel The Viper of Milan was published in 1906. Her work was prolific and she produced over 150 published items and she seems to have liked lurid subject matters such as black magic and murder. All praise to her for that say I. Women have been expected to write stories about love and domestic situations and while that is well and good, why can't they write about murder andblack magic as well!This story that I've just read: The Housekeeper is from a collection called The Bishop of Hell. Although I love the title ‘The Bishop of Hell’, I prefer this story. Like the Bishop of Hell it's a period story set in a historical epoch that was on her own and Bowen makes a good job of creating authentic sounding dialogue. I think she also is brilliant at conjuring characters; and though neither Beau Sekforde, his evil wife the Countess, or even the ghost Jane Sekforde, come out very sympathetically, they may not be sympathetic but they are strong and memorable.In constructing the story we see how she drops the scar on the ghost’s cheek early on when The Countess sees the ghost and doesn’t know who she is, and neither do we at that point, and then then explains the scar at the end causing us we as readers give a gasp of final understanding! Nothing suggests until the end that Beau Sekforde murdered his wife, but when we find out that there is a bottle of poison that the ghost has significantly tidied up, we are not surprised, and we marry that with our prior assessment of Beau Sekforde as a bounder and a cad and are not surprised to find him a murderer.The ghost does what ghosts often do and sets the moral order straight, and murderer is punished I think Marjorie Bowen writes very well. Her prose is strong, her characters vivid, her dialogue convincing, and her story construction is admirable, but in this as in other stories in the anthology the Bishop of Hell I think the weak point is actually the supernatural elementEven so, I hope I enjoyed reading the story very much, and I hope you enjoyed listening to it.LinksWebsitehttps://ghostpod.org (https://ghostpod.org)Musichttps://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute)Patronage & Supporthttps://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (Donate a Coffee)https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become a Patreon)https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomebackLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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August HeatW F Harvey was a Yorkshireman, born in 1885 and died in 1937. He was a Quaker and suffered from ill health all his life. He joined an ambulance unit in the First World War but then went to work as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He actually won a medal for saving lives but suffered from lung trouble the rest of his life from that rescue, though that didn’t stop him smoking a pipe.He published his first collection of short stories called The Midnight House in 1910 and his second in 1928 called The Beast with Five Fingers.The Beast With Five Fingers is a splendid story was was made into a film in 1946 starring Peter Lorre. I remember watching it at home with my parents and being really creeped out. The next time I watched it as an adult, I realised it was a comedy.This is a short piece of fiction. We’d almost call it Flash Fiction these days. August Heat is strong in its depiction of atmosphere of the hot August weather. The weird coincidence of the two men encapsulating each other in their own particular forms of art is strange. These days, it isn’t really unnerving. And the long established trope of leaving the reader to wonder whether he will actually die that night before midnight - and he’s got less than an hour left, is fun, but wouldn’t satisfy the modern reader.I’ve tried it and you get one starred into oblivion if you try that kind of trick on Amazon.I would be most grateful for any shares, ratings or reviews on the Podcast Channels and if you would like to, there are links to support the show through a small donationhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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The Spider by Basil Copper@stuieburley on Twitter put me onto Basil Copper. He had recommended the Janissaries of Emilion. I'd never heard of Basil so I got a Kindle Edition of The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper which includes that story. However, it is long. I may do it another time, but for this week I selected a shorter story. But it's a good one.Basil Copper was born in 1924 and lived until 2013 when he died aged 89! He was born in London, England.His first story was published in March 1938, the Magazine of the Tonbridge Senior Boys School. Tonbridge is in Kent, and when I was a boy we went on an exchange visit to Kent. Most schools in England went to foreign countries but the trip from Cumberland to Kent, England's most northwesterly county to England most southeasterly county, was enough of a culture shock for us.He is most famous for his stories featuring the character Solar Pons. This character was created by August Derleth, H P Lovecraft's protege, and is very much in the Lovecraftian tradition of authors sharing worlds and characters between their stories. Copper was published by the Arkham House publishing house, run by August Derleth. Many of Copper's stories feature the Cthulhu Mythos. Despite his links with the Cthulhu Mythos, Copper admitted that his influences were M R James and Edgar Allan Poe and he was interested in Gothic literature. The Spider is a phobia story. It's very cleverly written, neat and effective. In that it reminds me of Marghatina Laski's The Tower where the phobia is vertigo. Here it is arachnophobia. Turns out that the landlord of the wayside auberge just south of Paris has a skin for picking up on a visitor's fears and killing the visitor via heart attack by inducing the phobia. The insect horror theme is of course featured in Boomerang by Oscar Cook.This story appears in the 1964 Pan Book of Horror Stories. He was paid £10 for the story. Copper lived at Sevenoaks in Kent and founded the Tunbridge Wells Vintage Film Society. He was a movie buff and a member of several societies related to films. His wife was French and he is clearly familiar with the county in which The Spider is set. Apparently the story idea came from a spider that was in a room in a hotel he and his wife stayed in while on holiday in Paris. He met his wife and married in her in 1960 when she was in England learning English.His first novel was actually a detective storyCopper was very prolific and in addition to his weird tales and novels he wrote 58 detective novels set in LA. When he wrote the first novels, he had never visited the city and used maps and films to provide background. He worked as a journalist, running a county paper at the age of 17. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and took part in the D-Day landings. Music byhttps://bit.ly/somecomeback (The Heartwood Institute)The final tune is by Michael Romeo of https://bit.ly/dvoykinbandcamp (Dvoynik)Support the Podcast Any Way You Can!http://bit.ly/ghostiest (Buy the thirsty, hyperactive podcaster a cup of Java)Sign up For Exclusive Stuff and Early Bird Exposures on http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon)Get the https://bit.ly/substacklanding (Substack Newsletter) with ExclusivesMy Ghost StoriesGet my free audiobook download, The Dalston Vampire https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (here), and you may consider purchasing my https://bit.ly/HorrorStoriesForHalloween (Horror Stories For Halloween), which is now long past.Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Consistently rated as one of top scary stories ever...#Marghanita Laski# was an English journalist and author, born in Manchester to a family of Jewish intellectuals. She herself was an atheist and an advocate of nuclear disarmament. She was very intelligent and went to Oxford. She died in 1988 aged 67. She later lived in London at Hampstead (where I’d like to live if I lived in London: the home of psychoanalysts and left-wing intellectuals). Though popular and highly regarded in her day, a lot of Laski’s work is now out of print. This story: The Tower is consistently rated as one of the most ferrying ever written, even though it is pretty short.Because of that, I had to hunt down a copy and read it.I wasn’t terrified. There may be something I’m missing here. The story is well-written and the prose elegant. She conjures the picture of the upper middle class family life of a British Council official in Italy with only a few brush strokes.I read the story alone and late at night. I’d just watched a recent horror movie #A Dark Song#, which is about #black magic# and a lot scarier, but even so, with book and movie added together I slept like a baby.I get the issue about the number of steps, but still, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m missing something. I get that she’s like Giovanna and she had fallen into the clutches of the evil black magician Niccolo and that like Giovanna: she is lost, she is damned as she descended into presumably hell…However, it did remind me of a scary episode I had. Once I was at https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186632-d215173-Reviews-Charleville_Castle-Tullamore_County_Offaly.html (#Charleville Castle# )in Co. Offaly, #Ireland. I went there a lot of times on ghost hunts and horror events to be honest, but they had this ruined tower in the castle. I decided to climb up the spiral stone stair that went to the ruined top to see how far I could get. There was no hand rail, just a drop and the steps were stone slabs coming out from the walls. One or two of them had come away, but you could step to the next. The the tower seemed to slope in and the slabs got narrower and narrower and the wall pressed in on me. Unlike Caroline, I realised I needed to turn back before I got to the top. So I turned and looked back at the narrow stone slabs and the huge drop and the missing steps and I panicked.But, like Caroline, I realised I just had to go down. No question about it. So, bricking it, as we say, I descended and got to the bottom. Not to hell. I believe I had a nice glass of wine after that. I quite fancy one now, but we’ve no alcohol in the house.If you figure out what’s so scary about The Tower, let me knowIf you were helpful enough to do some or any of these following things for me, I would be immensely grateful. I swear down I would.————————Share the Podcast to your friendsRate the Podcast on Apple or elsewhereBuy me a coffee via https://paypal.me/gospatric (Paypal)Sign up as a Patron for $1 a month to keep me going on http://www.patreon.com/barcud (Patreon) https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Edward Frederic Benson was born in 1867 at Wellington College in Berkshire, England and died in 1940 in London of throat cancer aged 73. Benson’s father was E W Benson who was Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest office in the Anglican Church and the Anglican version of the Pope! His father had been bishop of Truro in Cornwall and Benson sets some of his horror stories in Cornwall.Benson’s elder brother wrote the words for that famous English patriotic song: Land of Hope and Glory. He went to the private Marlborough School and then studied at King’s College in Cambridge. After he graduated in 1892, he went to Athens where he worked for the British School of Archaeology and then in Egypt also engaged in the promotion of archaeology. His elder sister Maggie was an Egyptologist.He was also a good figure skater, and represented England.In 1883, he published his first novel which was very successful. He was most famous for his Mapp and Lucia satirical novels. As well as his Mapp and Lucia novels and his ghost stories, Benson wrote biographies, including of Charlotte Bronte.Benson was upper class and wealthy and also a confirmed bachelor, meaning he was gay, though not publicly in those days. In his diary he noted he fell in love with Vincent Yorke, a famous cricketer, who apparently did not return his affections. He shared a villa in Capri, Italy for while with another John Ellingham Brooks a pianist who moved to Capri apparently fearing prosecution for being gay.His lifestyle of leisure; of country house parties and taking shooting lodges in the Scottish Highlands forms the background for many of his stories.Benson is a good writer of ghost stories and this one, The Room in the Tower, is particularly unnerving. The scene is set by the story of a recurring nightmare, followed by an apparently innocuous invitation to a weekend at a country house, where element after element matches his nightmare, down to repeated phrases. The tower, where he is set to sleep, is apparently haunted by a vampire; Mrs Stone.The story has an air of real experience about it and I wonder whether Benson himself had a recurring nightmare, or poached the idea from the real experience of a friend. I was told a similar story by a young woman I met and this dream, and Benson’s story The Room in The Tower were the inspiration for my own story: He WaitsMusic is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) Download Charles Dickens The Signalman Free Mp3 https://bit.ly/dickenssignalman (Subscribe to our list and keep in touch with the podcast. Learn of new episodes and bonus Content. )Support our work PLUS you get a free story right now!(The Story Link is in the Thank You Email)Show Your Support With A Coffee!https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (Buy the thirsty podcaster a coffee...)Final Request: The SurveyI want to know what you want. If you have three minutes, I'd be grateful to know what you think of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.https://my.captivate.fm/Click%20here%20to%20go%20to%20the%20Survey (Click here to go to the Survey)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Edith BagnoldEdith Bagnold, later Lady Jones was born in 1889 in Rochester, Kent and died in 1981 in London . She was most famous for her novel *National Velvet* published in 1935, which was made into a famous film that starred Elizabeth Taylor. Her father was a Colonel in the British Army, and she was mainly brought up in Jamaica. She loved riding horses when she was in Jamaica and that inspired National Velvet. She went to art school in London and worked for Frank Harris, an Irish-American novelist and had an affair with him. She was very Bohemian and mixed with artists and free-thinkers.During the First World War she became a nurse but was critical of the way the hospitals were won and got sacked. She became a driver for the army in France and wrote a memoir of her time dung that. In 1920 she became the wife of Sir Roderick Jones and therefore became Lady Jones. they lived on the south coast of England near Brighton. They had a house in London and were neighbours of Winston Churchill and Jacob Epstein.Her great-grand-daughter was Samantha, wife of the recent British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Virginia Woolf called her ‘a scallywag who married a very rich man.’ Woolf thought that Bagnold had begun as a rebel and Bohemian but ended up being conventionally rich with a butler. Read this article about Bagnold.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre (Upstairs, downstairs | Margaret Drabble | The Guardian)If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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https://tonywalker.substack.com/about (Subscribe For All Episodes!)Charlotte Perkins Gilman, nee Charlotte Perkins, was born in 1860 in Hartford, Conneticut. Sadly, she committed suicide in 1935 in Pasadena California. Her father’s family was relatively well connected, but her father left the family when she was young, leaving her mother to bring up the two children. Her mother was forced to move around a lot to find work and Charlotte’s education suffered because of that. Perhaps because of her challenging childhood, Charlotte became a social reformer and feminist and was interested in furthering the political interests of women. She founded a feminist journal The Forerunner from 1909.The Yellow Wallpaper is her best known story and was published in 1892. She also wrote non-fiction most notably, Women and Economics which was published in 1898. The Yellow Wallpaper was actually Episode 1 of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.Her first marriage was to an artist called Charles Stetson in 1884 at the age of 24. The marriage was not happy and she suffered from depression. It is said that this illness provided much of the material for The Yellow Wallpaper, and if she was suffering from depression with psychotic features, this would tie in very well with the bizzarre delusions about the wallpaper and the things in it. This is reminiscent of The Horla by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, which is Episode 35 of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. The Horla was published in 1887, but there is no evidence that Charlotte was familiar with The Horla, and the earliest translation into English that I can find is 1903.She married her cousin George Gilman in 1900 and stayed with him until 1934. In that year she discovered she had terminal breast cancer. She committed suicide after that.The story is a double play: is it the story of a woman going mad, or a woman possessed by something evil? We begin to suspect that the narrator’s apparently caring husband John, may not be as caring as she thinks. Is he trying to control her? We know that Charlotte was much concerned with the emancipation of women and them achieving financial independence, so is the character of John an echo of this?The horror in the story revolves around the Yellow Wallpaper and like many of us, she sees to have seen patterns in the abstract wallpaper that eventually evolve into characters. She ultimately can enter the wallpaper and more disturbingly, the woman from the wallpaper can come out into her room. The bizarreness of the crouching, creeping figures serves to unnerve the reader.MusicMusic is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute)Download Charles Dickens The Signalman Free Mp3 https://bit.ly/dickenssignalman (Subscribe to our list and keep in touch with the podcast. Learn of new episodes and bonus Content. )Support our work PLUS you get a free story right now!(The Story Link is in the Thank You Email)Show Your Support With A Coffee!https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (Buy the thirsty podcaster a coffee...)Final Request: The SurveyI want to know what you want. If you have three minutes, I'd be grateful to know what you think of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.https://my.captivate.fm/Click%20here%20to%20go%20to%20the%20Survey (Click here to go to the Survey)Support the show
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M R James is known as the father of the English ghost story. He wasn’t the first to write ghost stories, but he was the finest of his generation whose work continues to be published and re-presented as TV shows and radio plays.He was born in 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent. His father was a clergyman and was rector of Livermere in Suffolk. East Anglia features as the setting of many of M R James’s stories. James’s ‘proper job’ was as an academic and he had a distinguished academic career at King’s College in Cambridge where he became dead in 1889 and finally provost in 1905. He was awarded a doctorate in literature by Cambridge in 1895 and honorary doctorates by Trinity College Dublin and St. Andrews University in Scotland.He moved to become provost of the famous Eton College, supplier of many prime ministers of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in 1918. He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1925.In 1893, James began his tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmas by candlelight to a hushed circle of his colleagues and friends. His geographical background in East Anglia is evident in many of his stories, as well as his bicycling trips to Europe. Many of his heroes are fumbling academics and Latin and old manuscripts and church architecture also features strongly.He clearly had a knowledge of the occult and demonology, though he was not known to be a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as were other writers of ghost stories such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad! Is the title of a poem by the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, and James borrowed this title though Burn’s story concerns a jilted lover. Perhaps he borrowed it because the central item in the story is the ancient whistle found in the sand covered ruins of the old abbey, which when blown, seems to summon the spirit that haunts the narrator.The Latin inscription: Quis est qui venit? Means ‘Who is this who comes?’ The other inscription around the plus sign, or cross, is a puzzle of a Latin proverb: Fur Flabis Flebis which means, ‘Thief, if you blow; you will weep.” And in one sense, though a finder, our man is a thief, and when he blows, he certainly does weep.It is the sheer weirdness of the ghost that is unnerving, and James is the master of this disturbing oddness which is not quite the same as Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror in his weird tales or later Robert Aickman’s unnerving unnaturalness in his ghost stories.The closest parallel I find to James’s inexplicable and disturbing weirdness is in David Lynch’s movies, particularly Inland Empire and the Third Season of Twin Peaks.Support Us!https://tonywalker.substack.com/about (Subscribe For All Episodes!)MusicMusic is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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#Ray Bradbury# Is the most modern author we’ve read so far in the #Classic Ghost Story# podcast. He was born in Illinois in 1920 and died in 2012 in Los Angeles.His most famous book is Fahrenheit 451 which he wrote as a young man in 1953. This story is set in a Dystopian future where books are burned and the fireman set any alight they find. The title is due to the temperature at which paper will catch fire.Bradbury hinted that Farenheit 451 was a warning against totalitarian states and state censorship. He wrote it during the McCarthy era. Otherwise Bradbury seems to have had pretty reactionary views.But we digress. He also wrote #horror stories# and The October Game features in a collection called The October Country. This is in fact a horror story. There’s nothing much supernatural about it but it is much anthologised in dark fiction collections. We suspect pretty soon what’s going to happen (though maybe not its full extent) and Bradbury has the skill to draw us in as spectators to the inexorable train wreck that we can see but not stop.The narrator is pretty much wholly unpleasant. Sure, he didn’t get a son but even that play for our sympathy soon palls when we begin to suspect what monstrous horror he is going to enact against an innocent just to pay back his vile rage and sense of entitled injustice. No, I didn’t like him. Even so it was only when they were in the cellar I began to suspect just how appalling his act was going to be.The story structure is masterful. It drives from beginning to end on one track. It never deviates, just builds up the fascinated appalled concentration on The Husband.Yuk. I’ll read something nicer next week. In fact I already have, but I wanted to make sure you had this horror for Halloween.If you were helpful enough to do some or any of these following things for me, I would be immensely grateful. I swear down I would.————————Share the Podcast to your friendsRate the Podcast on Apple or elsewhereBuy me a coffee via https://paypal.me/gospatric (Paypal)Sign up as a Patron for $1 a month to keep me going on http://www.patreon.com/barcud (Patreon) https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Support the show) (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Branch Line to Benceston by Sir Andrew CaldecottBranch Line to Benceston was published in the collection Not Exactly Ghosts in 1947. He turned to writing after retirement from the Malaysian Civil Service, again like many of our ghost story writers, he had a career in the Colonial Civil Service of the British Empire. Sadly, he didn’t live long after retirement and died aged 65.Sir Andrew Caldecott (1884–1951) was born in Kent. He was educated at Uppingham School and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he became an Honorary Fellow in 1948. His father was a clergyman. Spooky. how this happens so much.He had a very distinguished career in the Colonial Service and was Governor of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) from 1937 until 1944 (so during the Second World War), and before that Governor of Hong Kong (1935–1937). He also worked in Malaya and Singapore and there is a station named after him in Singapore.He had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and, as is evident from his two volumes of supernatural tales, he was an accomplished writer, but it wasn’t until after his retirement in 1944 that he published his first volume of ghost stories. Not Exactly Ghosts was published in 1947 by Edward Arnold & Co. It contains twelve tales. Interestingly, features of Caldecott’s own interests, such as playing the piano, crop up in his stories and I suppose that is true for most writers, hence my frequent mentions of Hawkwind.In ‘Branch Line to Benceston’, Adrian Frent, a railway enthusiast and herbalist, is the first tenant of ‘Brentside’, the newly-built house next to the narrator’s own house in Brensham. Frent is a partner in a firm of music publishers, but he hates the other partner with a vengeance, feeling that the man has messed up his life stence since they were boys. He wishes his partner dead, and then when he does die, things turn weird. But the story is not exactly a ghost story. C aldecott does a couple of things wonderfully. Firstly; this story is a portrait of Metroland, the area outside London that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century with the benefit of faster rail connections to allow the middle classes, to have the benefits of living in a suburbia that appeared and was sold as being the English countryside, while still able to travel easily into London to their day jobs. Vast swathes of the Home Counties were gobbled up and railways proliferated. John Betjeman, the English poet laureate captured all of this in his film entitled: Metroland and much of his poetry is set in this half-and-half land bathed in the sunlight of the English dream.The second thing I think Caldecott does well is the set up of the story. The death of the Dachshunds and the herbalism and poison seems to be a red-herring. Though giving his great enemy Paul Saxon one of the tinctures he makes reminds Frent of his wish to kill Paul, and thus his sin, he does not actually poison the man. This is a misdirection, I think: a red herring.However, the real set-up is the trap-door. We have already been told how Frent tends to go off half-cocked, but after a brief mention of this trap-door, Caldecott leaves it. This is subtle and I didn’t get that until the end. Caldecott is a great wit and his comment about the coroner’s view that these houses are death-traps being ignored as normal with coroner’s comments reflects his own professional experience, I am sure, and is a bit of a joke because we are going to ignore this clue too, at least I did. Caldecott even flags this clue up saying he has recorded it for a reason that will become clear later. This to me is a great example of burying the obvious, and doing it well.The pSupport the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomebackLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Record summer temperature’s take their toll on both our physical and mental health. Extreme weather has been known to bring about strange and often dangerous behavior among those suffering its effects. How strange, I’ll let you be the judge in our special summer tale, August Heat.
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Charlotte Riddell was born in 1832 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. After she married she moved to London where she lived most of her life and died in Ashford in Kent in 1906. Riddell was a very prolific novelist and well known in the Victorian period. She actually owned and ran a Literary Magazine in the second half of the 19th Century. The Open Door is considered a classic Victorian ghost story and it reminds me of some of Wilkie Collin’s stories which are more or less contemporary. The Open Door is both a ghost story and not a ghost story. It has elements in it reminiscent of Scooby Doo and if hadn’t been for the pesky sacked insurance clerk, maybe you know who would have got away with itBut for all that the opening of the door does appear to be supernatural. It simply won’t stay shut and breaks of the handle of the gimlet. We don’t use gimlets much these days, but once I looked up what a gimlet was the phrase ‘gimlet eyed’ became more understandable.And then there is the monstrous figure that appears at the end. This seems to truly be a ghost and the apparition reminds us that the function of ghosts in stories is often a warning and a demand that murder or other outrages be put right and justice be done.Banquo’s Ghost in MacBeth and Hamlet’s father in Hamlet do much the same. It’s all about revenge.The story is a pretty straightforward adventure but there are a couple of nice touches. Phil Edlyd’s uncle seems a nice chap. He uses dialect thee and thou, which is a nice homely touch. Another endearing feature is that Phil longs to be a country boy. He loves horses such as old Toddy and he luxuriates over the descriptions of the beautiful summer countryside outside Ladlow Hall. In the end he gets to be a farmer with his beloved Patty.The Victorian ghost story was an outgrowth of the Gothic novel, a specialist sub-branch if you like. Ladlow Hall functions as the ruined castle/abbey etc of the Gothic novel.All in all a nice piece. Unpretentious but sweet. Not scary.But then ghost stories are really scary. They’re not horror stories you know. And besides after the Human Caterpillar there’s not much can scare we moderns anyway.Support Us!https://tonywalker.substack.com/about (Subscribe For All Episodes!)MusicMusic is by the marvellous https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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Joan AikenJoan Delano Aiken was the daughter of Conrad Aiken, whose story Mr Arcularis we read out on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. Her elder sister Jane was a writer and her brother John was a chemist. Her father, being a poet presumably appreciated the para-rhyming of their names.Joan was born while her father was domiciled in England, on Mermaid Street in Rye in East Sussex in 1924. She died in Petworth West Sussex in 2004.She went to a private school in Oxford but did not go to University. Instead she wrote stories. Her first story appeared on the BBC Children’s Hour in 1941 when she was seventeen. After the death of her first husband she went to work as an editor on magazines.She is most famous for her children’s fiction, notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea. Her stories have almost a magical realism feel (a term which of course really belongs to South American literature) in that she uses what appear to be genuine historical settings subtly twisted to become fantasy. Many of her novels have supernatural themes, such as the Shadow Guests and the Haunting of Lamb House.She won many awards for her fiction during her lifetime. The Lodgers is in her collection of short supernatural stories A Touch of Chill. Not knowing what to make of it, I went on Good Reads and found it got an average of three stars out of five with most reviewers not being clear about what the story is about.The best I can do is to suggest that this is a mid-20th Century story where small town life is subverted into the weird as people like Robert Aickman were doing. I wonder whether the deliberate cultivation of the irrational is taking place here where the weird is not meant to be understood rationally, but there to create atmosphere.The weird slovenly, drunken Colegates come from the Middle East. They have odd paraphernalia such as the 'collecting jar' which seems to be vaguely occult. The reference to the Egyptians and the black and white pillars put me in mid of the ritual magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It seems that the Colegates collect the souls of children. In the end, I think young Bob's soul flies out of the window and Desmond Colegate pursues it like a butterfly hunter into the graveyard where the exertion gives him a stroke of a heart attack. But I may be wrong. The boy, and the vet's boy who the Colegate also taught games of cards to (the cards seem important -- Tarot???) both die of natural causes. Are the Colegates then a drunken version of the Grim Reaper? They don't cause the death, they are just around to harvest the souls?If you know, tell me!If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here [Become A Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)) For Bonus StoriesOr [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)) , if you’d like to keep me working. [Music](https://bit.ly/somecomeback (https://bit.ly/somecomeback)) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback
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