It's Boxing Night in Bruddersford and the pantomime's a disaster waiting to happen. The company's second-rate, the theatre's half empty, and the actor playing the Demon King hasn't turned up. Then he does—and suddenly everything changes. The performance takes on an authority it never had in rehearsal. The comedy gets sharper, the villain more convincing, and by the end something has happened that nobody can quite explain.

Priestley wrote this in 1931, drawing on his Bradford theatre days and the tradition of the pantomime devil who enters from stage left. The BBC adapted it for radio in 1962 with Ian Wallace, adding Radiophonic Workshop effects to a story that's as much about provincial theatre life as it is about the supernatural.

First published 1931. BBC Home Service radio adaptation December 1962.

Author: J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), Bradford-born novelist and playwright. Best known for The Good Companions, Angel Pavement, and An Inspector Calls. During the war his BBC radio talks reached audiences of 16 million.

Listen to a 24/7 Stream of Classic Ghost Stories Ad Free here:

www.gravenheim.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Christmas Day, two sisters in a remote farmhouse in the middle of the Romney Marshes, have a dream. The snow begins to fall heavily and they are isolated miles away from any help. But a dream is just a dream, isn't it?

Written by E F Benson

Why not try my cost free, ad free new Ghost Stories Radio? Listen to it here: www.gravenheim.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teaser Script

Christmas at Abingdale Hall. The great house decked in festive greenery, servants bustling, family gathering from across the country. And in the entrance hall, a magnificent Scots Pine—ten feet of perfect symmetry, branches heavy with the promise of celebration.

But the tree came from Lucky's Grove.

The estate manager is new. He doesn't know the local warnings. He doesn't know that some groves have been sacred since before Christianity reached these shores. He doesn't know that when you take a tree from such a place, something comes with it.

The guests arrive. The children play in the snow. The fires are lit, the table laid. Everything proceeds as it should. Almost.

There are accidents. Small things at first. A workman injured. Strange dreams that leave everyone unsettled at breakfast. A boy builds a snowman with a wolf's head and cannot explain why.

The gods of Lucky's Grove are patient. They have waited centuries. They can wait until Christmas Day.

Publication Details

"Lucky's Grove" by H. Russell Wakefield was first published in The Clock Strikes Twelve (Herbert Jenkins, 1940), later expanded by Arkham House in 1946.

Author Biography

Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888–1964) was an English writer whose atmospheric ghost stories earned him comparison to M. R. James. His fiction insisted on the reality of the supernatural, presenting hauntings with clinical precision and iron control over dread.

⭐ 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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christmas at Colonel and Lady Garrison’s house is all warmth, laughter, and parlour games, until the evening’s “entertainment” arrives: a small, shabby medium with disconcertingly sharp eyes.

The guests settle round the table for an amusing bit of spiritualism. As the lights dim and the control takes over, the party games curdle into something closer to an inquest, and the most unwelcome of visitors finds its way back.

First published in The Sphere on 20 November 1935, “The Man Who Came Back” was collected in The Floating Café and Other Stories (Jarrolds, 1936). It has since reappeared in several modern anthologies of seasonal supernatural tales, including the British Library’s Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights (2021).

Margery Harriet Lawrence (1889–1969) was an English writer who moved with ease between ghost stories, occult fiction, romance, and crime, and whose work was widely read in the inter-war decades. She is now best remembered for her Club of the Round Table tales and for Dr Miles Pennoyer, her “psychic doctor” occult detective, whose cases draw heavily on the spiritualist beliefs she embraced in later life.

Buy My Christmas Ghost Stories Paperback as a Gift for Someone!?

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=MxXXCglWV2Uu4L9ArK8eIz8rexI8huhrBketkRcyMfh

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Four-Fifteen Express, a Christmas Ghost Story by Amelia B. Edwards

A fantastic story by the very competent Victorian writer, Amelia B. Edwards. This story was published in the 1866 Christmas number of Charles Dickens's magazine All The Year Round. It's set against the railway investment bubble of the 1860s and has a ghost, a mystery, a crime and a cigar case. What more could you want?

I need you to support me. Join my Patreon.com/barcud even as a free member and it will help

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A dollmaker works late into the evening to repair a broken doll. Outside, London's fog presses against the windows. Inside, in the dim workshop light, something moves among the shelves—something that shouldn't move at all.

"The Doll's Ghost" first appeared in The Undesired Princess collection (1897), later included in Wandering Ghosts (1911).

F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909): American novelist resident in Italy, author of historical romances and supernatural tales praised by M.R. James for their atmospheric restraint.

Christmas Presents! Buy my Christmas Ghost Stories as a paperback as a present for some who likes Christmas ghost stories, or who might be persuaded.

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=MxXXCglWV2Uu4L9ArK8eIz8rexI8huhrBketkRcyMfh

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ireland, a newly purchased castle unsettles its American owner. He is wealthy, engaged to a local woman, and certain that jealous countrymen mean him harm. What truly threatens the household is a particular room that fills at night with a dangerous, sustained whistling that rises and falls like breath. Doors quiver; servants keep away. Carnacki is summoned with his lamps, his electric scepticism and his knowledge of spirit manifestations. He investigates, seals the room, warns no one to enter and admits himself stumped. At least at first!

“The Whistling Room” was first published in 1910 and later collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913).
UK publisher: Eveleigh Nash.

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English writer of sea horrors and visionary weird fiction.
A former merchant sailor, he served in the First World War and was killed near Ypres.

Here is my ebook and audiobook store

payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

For 33% discount - use coupon 33OFFGHOSTPOD

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

Join Our Podia Community for 100s of Ad Free Ghost Stories

www.classicghost.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

https://patreon.com/barcud

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

Join Our Podia Community for 100s of Ad Free Ghost Stories

www.classicghost.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices