Classic Ghost Stories

Basil Netherby is a masterpiece of brooding supernatural fiction. This unabridged audio book style story narrates a ghost story or a story of possession. 

Basil Netherby has many of the elements of gothic literature. It was written by Arthur or A.C. Benson, the brother of E. F. Benson. It has elements of M. R. James, who was a personal friend of A C Benson and is even reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft at times in the idea of immense supernatural forces that cannot be beaten. Or can they?

#ClassicHorror #SupernaturalFiction #HorrorAudiobook #ArthurChristopherBenson #GothicHorror #GhostStory #OccultLiterature #shortStory #GothicLiterature

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Brickett Bottom by Amyas Northcote is about a mysterious house deep in the woods that no one but lonely young girls can see. There is a dark secret to this house in the forest, as you will discover.

Amyas Northcote was the son of an English aristocratic family. This story was published in his one collection of ghost stories: "Ghostly Company". Though it was published in 1921, I think there is something genuinely eerie and even scary about the fate of the girl.

Northcote has been compared to M R James but this story reminded me more of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood's The Man Whom The Trees Loved.

Brickett Bottom by Amyas Northcote

Jay Rothermel’s blog Easily Distracted

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This story by Nugent Barker comes from his anthology Written By My Left Hand, which I guess is a pointer to the fact that they deal with things that emerge from the night side of the mind, the subconscious. It is a story about the Devouring Mother told in a dream-like way. It's horror for sure. It's short and leaves you scratching your head, yet it is told in a familiar way from ghost stories where gentlemen are sitting in their study around a blazing fire sipping whiskey toddies while they swap scary stories. The content of the story is less than straightforward though. You have the benefit of my thoughts afterwards.

Just for you, here's a link to this whole book online as a PDF

https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/B/Barker%20-%20Written%20With%20My%20Left%20Hand.pdf

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The story is reminiscent of Robert Aickman or Bruno Schulz for its uncanny unnerving weirdness.

#freeaudiobooks #weirdtales #horror 

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The Birds by Daphne du Maurier was adapted into the 1963 horror thriller movie The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Daphne du Maurier wrote horror and mystery and crime stories and the birds can be considered science fiction. She was a master of storytelling and character building in English literature. The Birds concerns a bird attack in a horror story version of the near future when nature has been twisted by humankind – a kind of pandemic. 

Her two other most famous stories which were made into films were Rebecca (also directed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Don't Look Now by Nicolas Roeg

This unabridged audio book version is narrated by Tony Walker of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast with an analysis and summary at the end. #AudioDrama #RadioDrama #TheBirds 

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The Outcast by E F Benson

First we are introduced to Mrs Bertha Acres through the eyes of Tony and his wife Madge. The initial incident is her husband shooting himself due to detesting her. That is the first sign we have that this lady is to be the subject of the story and it is enough to make us prick up our ears and raise questions about her. 

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We next have the description of the domestic scene in the little home and little village and here we see the wit of the humorist of upper middle-class social situations that came to the fore in the famous Mapp and Lucia series that made his name. 

The theme of reincarnation is set by the brother-in-law Sir Charles Alington, particularly that a reincarnated spirit  can inhabit a male or female body.

Then we are told the evil history of the Gate House and that one brother betrayed his brother for being a Catholic and then repented. Remember the end takes place around Easter, Judas Iscariot is mentioned. Benson’s father was a vicar and his brother a priest. Are these hearkenings to the Easter story: betrayal, sin and reincarnation an intentional inversion?   The body is in the water three days (note three, surely not a coincidence?) and no corruption has come to it.  It’s like an antichrist or Judas figure.    

The end, the purging by fire may represent the expiation of the sin of betrayal by this spirit who was forced to live again and again and wander without rest. The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew.  

In terms of style, it seemed to me that the story is made up of two. There is the witty social commentary (that we also find in The Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen) poking fun at the haut bourgeois, and then a masterfully creepy horror story. Benson is unequalled I think it writing these scenes. First the body in the sack that tumbles over and follows Made (though that was reminiscent of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You) 

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Pallinghurst Barrow by Grant Allen

A horror story about spirits who linger in old places in the English countryisde. Published 1892. Suggested by Susan Tudor-Coulson
 
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Grant Allen

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen was born in 1848 on Wolfe Island in Ontario in Ca nada and died in Haselmere in Surrey aged 51. His father was from Dublin and he was a protestant minister. He was educated at home and then when he was 13, his family moved to the USA, then to France then to Britain. He was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham (where Tolkien later went amongst other famous alumni) and then at Merton College in Oxford. He went to teach in Brighton and in Jamaica. He returned to Britain from Jamaica and began to write professionally. He was most famous for his scientific essays. But he also wrote science fiction. 

He was an atheist and socialist. He was married twice. He died of liver cancer in 1899. He was a friend and neighbour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Chanctonbury Ring, Old Weird Albion

The Old Weird Albion | Justin Hopper || Landscape, Memory & Myth

I mention how much I enjoy the work of Justin Hopper.  Chanctonbury Rings – a spoke word and music album made with folk artist Sharron Kraus and Ghost Box Records co-founder The Belbury Poly (Ghost Box). 

Long Barrows were the product of a late Stone Age civilisation with additions from Bronze Age folk. They are particularly to be found in Wessex and the south and west of England. But of course megalithic structures of similar types can be found all over Atlantic Europe. Nobody would suggest that the so-called Picts created them.

Theosophists & Madam Blavatsky

The Theosophical Society was created mainly by Madame Helena Blavatsky who had a background in Spiritualism. This was a time of religious change with a huge upsurge in Spiritualism. The first lodge was in Scotland. There were influences from western Occultism, but also Hinduism and Buddhism and they talked about the ascended masters. These ascended masters included Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Jesus but also the Buddha, Confucious and Lao Tzu but also Mesmer, Bohme and Cagliostro.  Theosophy has evolved into the New Age.

Mrs Bruce (the esoteric Buddhist) seems to be one of these.

Ghosts

The story reports that we only see the ghosts from periods within our knowledge.  But of course this is not true. Many ghosts are not really identifiable at all. 

Flint and iron

This is an old piece of folklore

Cannabis Indica

Indeed. No wonder he saw visions.

Fiddlers Green, Clint Marsh

Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine

I love this 'zine. As the Clint Marsh says,
*Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine was born of a languid afternoon of conversation on a sunny tavern lawn. Taking its name from the pleasant afterlife dreamed into being by sailors, cavalrymen, and other adventu

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The Doll by Daphne du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning was born in 1907 in London in 1931 and died in 1989 in Cornwall. She is a famous novelist with such best-sellers as Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, The Birds and the novella Don’t Look Now. This story is taken from a collection of short stories written before her famous novels. She was clearly fond of the name Rebecca for the dark-spirited anima-like femme fatale.

I did a recording of Don’t Look Now, which has proved to be my most popular recording on Youtube.

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Her father was an actor and theatre manager who was knighted for her services to the arts.  Her mother Muriel Beaumont was also an actress.   Daphne’s sister Angela was also an author and an actress and her other sister Jeanne who was part of the painter colony in St Ives Cornwall.  Daphne and her sister Jeanne look very like their mother in the photographs on the internet.  Their cousins were the inspiration for the children in J M Barrie’s Peter Pan.  Her great-great-grandmother was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany. 

She was born when the family were living in a rather grand house on Cumberland Terrace on the eastern side of Regent’s Park in a house that is now a grade I listed building designed by the famous architect John Nash. Her father’s success made this possible. 

She was born in a house Daphne du Maurier became more reclusive as she got more famous and spent her time n her beloved Cornwall. As she grew, the family had two houses — one in Hampstead, north London ( a grade II listed building from 1720) and a house in Fowey, Cornwall, where they lived exclusively during the Second World War.  She got married to a prominent soldier and had three children, of whom both girls married prominent soldiers. 

The Wiki notes that her marriage was somewhat chilly and she herself could be distant from her children. Her husband died in 1965, when she was 34.  She moved permanently to Kilmarth, Cornwall. She was made a dame (equivalent of a knight) in 1969 but was very reticent about mentioning it and never made much of it. After she died in 1989, biographers discussed whether she was a lesbian. Her sister Jeanne had a close relationship with another woman. She notes that her father always wanted a son and so she was a tomboy. Her children denied that she was a lesbian. When she died of heart failure aged 81, her body was privately cremated.  In her obituary, Kate Kellaway said: “Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers’ minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings.”

The Doll

This story was published in 1937, that is two years after the death of her husband, and one year before the publication of Rebecca.   Apparently she was only 21 when she wrote The Doll. 

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A Pair of Muddy Shoes by Lennox Robinson

Lennox Robinson was an Irish author, poet, dramatist and theatre produce who was born in Westgrove, County Cork, Ireland in 1886 the son of a Protestant clergyman, who had previously been a stockbroker. Lennox (fully Esme Stuart Lennox Robinson) was often ill as a child and educated by private tutor and at a Church of Ireland (that is the Protestant Anglican Church) School.  He became interested in drama when he saw a production by W B Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin when he was 21.

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His play Cross Roads was produced at the Abbey in 1909 and he became manager there the same year. He resigned in 1914 after a poorly reviewed tour of the USA, but came back in 1919 and was appointed to the theatre’s boar din 1923 and served there until his death in 1958. It is said that he was an alcoholic and often depressed.   

He was Anglo-Irish but was committed to the Irish nationalist cause (like Yeats and Lady Gregory). 

His wife’s mother was a spiritualist. 

A Pair of Muddy Shoes is written in a very naturalistic, conversational style which was fun to read and very different from some of the other things we’ve been reading out recently (Poe, I’m looking at you).  It’s all fun, and I like both styles.

The story is written from an Irish woman’s voice and I read it as an English man. You will know I debate with myself whether I should do accents (which I enjoy) or read a woman ’s voice. The second I have few problems with to be honest, the first is more of a problem because though I enjoy doing the accent there is always someone who’s ear is so finely tuned that it jars and spoils the story.  So, I decided to do this in my native voice. 

The story is about a possession but it’s unusual and fresh in its setting in rural Ireland (I thought of Craggy Island and the big priests’ house looming up from the middle of a bare field, no garden, no path, no nothing leading to it). The spirit of the murderer remains very wicked and his pleasure in the crime infects the shy young woman who is speaking.

There is something about weird juxtapositions like the white cat with the narrator’s face and then when she goes into the house, the victim says that she has the face of a girl, but the hands of a rough man. 

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The Ghost Ship by Richard Barham Middleton

Richard Barham Middleton was born in 1882 in Staines then in Middlesex, but since 1965 part of Surrey. It calls itself Staines upon Thames now.  I checked the 1864 map and then it was a small town surrounded by fields and woods. Even now looking at the satellite, though I see is is a much bigger urbanisation there is still some nice green land around it. But I digress. He died in 1911 in Brussels by suicide

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He was educated at Cranbrook school and then went to work as a bank clerk between 1901 and 1907 but lived, the Wiki says ‘affected’ a Bohemian lifestyle at night and joined a club called The New Bohemians. He knew Arthur Machen who much admired his work and wrote a preface to the collection of stories in which I found The Ghost Ship. It’s available on Gutenberg for free. He became a magazine editor but really wanted to be a poet. He met Raymond Chandler who was put off writing almost because Middleton was so talented and he thought he’d never match it. His most famous poem is The Bathing Boy which is a paean to a beautiful young man swimming. 

He made very little money as a writer and lived in poverty. He moved to Brussels and aged only 29, he killed himself by drinking chloroform just after his birthday. 

We have done his winter ghost story, On Brighton Road which is short but good. The Ghost Ship is his most famous ghost story and, unlike On Brighton Road is humorous.  In his biography by Henry Savage, Middleton is said to have claimed he had a pirate for an ancestor who was hanged at Port Royal. But Savage notes that Middleton was not diligent with facts.

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The Milk-White Child of Ravenglass by Tony Walker, is one of mine. As I explain in the notes, this is one of my More Cumbrian Ghost Stories book. You can purchase the full book or audiobook (just saying, if you were so inclined, and you liked this one, well maybe you'd like the rest?)Check out the Ko-Fi link. I think it's there. I'm giving you this because I'm off on my hols soon so I will schedule this to come out while I'm away.Yes, there's a Romantic theme to it. Yes it includes the good people. So I'd been reading Wordsworth and Arthur Machen at the time. I was all Romanticked up. I like stories of the fey, fae, whatever you call them. Do I believe in them? That would be telling.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereYou could buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)Become a Patronhttps://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)And you can join my mailing list and get a  free audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback*** (https://bit.ly/somecomeback***)Support the show

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