Classic Ghost Stories

The Pleasure Pilgrims by Ella D’ArcyThe Pleasure Pilgrims can be seen as a love story, a murder tale or a sort of Christmas Story (though it’s not set at Christmas). But most of it all it is a story that lays bare the differences between British and Americans. They speak the same language, but they mean different things and seem incapable of understanding what the other really means.We’ve done another of Ella D’Arcy’s stories on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast: The Villa Lucienne. That too deals with the wealthy elite who skipped around Europe staying in grand houses. There is a ghost in that story, there is one in this too—ultimately.Observations as we go along are that the hosts, the Ritterhausens, and Germans in general don’t make much of an appearance in The Pleasure Pilgrims. They add a little local colour. The setting of a grand old German castle near Hamelin with its pied piper is delightful set-dressing. Ella D’Arcy really brings this out with the snowy train journey, the old bridge choked with ice floes, the German servant in the horse-drawn carriage in his second-best livery. The main character, Campbell is a successful novelist. However, he is a bit of an innocent. He has some funny ideas about the purity of love and we wonder whether he has ever kissed a girl. D’Arch makes two remarks on the British character, one at the beginning when Campbell is forced to share the carriage with the two American girls. They only ride with him out of kindness to the German servant to stop the man making two trips. Campbell is, like most British people, shy, D’Arcy says. Then at the end, when the deed is done, she refers to the ‘cold, complacent British unresponsiveness’. I don’t think this pairing at the beginning and the end is accidental. In fact, the whole story is a study of British versus American character, and the British don’t come out of it so well. Campbell has his cynical second Maynes, who won’t believe a single good thing about Lulie and when Campbell himself starts to relent, Maynes is always there to convince him she’s putting it all on. Campbell comes over was a cold-hearted, vain, prig, and Maynes as simply a monster.D’Arcy gives us a short passage where she explains that Maynes really did think Lulie was putting it on and that he wasn’t just an evil pig. At the end, she also explains that Lulie has led the loveless, homeless life of a poor little rich girl. Rich people are people too, you know in case you are ready to dismiss her suffering as not being as valuable as the suffering of a poor person.  Lulie also has her second, Nannie Dodge who appears to be complicit in Lulie’s shameless seduction. If we believe Maynes’s version of the story.Throughout, Lulie’s ostentation and lack of reserve are emphasised, from her flamboyant and luxurious clothes to her persistent warmth and affection.I was reminded of the case of the English nanny Louise Woodward. There is a great article herehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/11/24/here-and-there-3 (Here and There | The New Yorker)Woodward was never seen to cry. In court she sat, hunched, deferential, submissive, lowered eyes and voice. This was seen apparently by American eyes as indicating her guilt. However, this deference and submission in an English court is exactly what would show her innocence. The writer makes the point that in America if you are telling the truth, you meet your questioners eyes, you throw your shoulders back, you have nothing to hide. The the British Woodward was appropriately modest and self-effacing as she should be in court being judged by a judge, who might well be a lord. In America, she was shifty andSupport the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

A short Christmas Ghost story. A couple move into an old house, a house whose foundations go back centuries. Once in there they begin to suspect it's haunted. A short, sweet ghost story for Christmas where a couple get an opportunity to remember things that have been forgotten.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf 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

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

A man who has lost everything goes to a remote part of the country for Christmas. In that beautiful landscape it seems the air is full of spirits: both of nature and of those long gone. A heart-warming ghost story for Christmas.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf 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

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

Thrawn or Twisted Janet is a tale of devilish possession written in broad Scots. A chilling tale, if you can understand it. My commentary at the end has very little to do with Thrawn Janet, but does go on at length about the sound 'r'. Fascinating.If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereIf 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

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

Sir Gawain & The Green KnightSir Gawain and The Green Knight is the original Christmas Ghost Story. Or technically a supernatural story set at Christmas in the kingdom of Logres ruled by King Arthur. It's pretty gothic.This is a prose translation of a Middle English poem called Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. The translation by Jessie Weston was published in 1898 and though it is certainly not Middle English she has left enough archaic words in to keep that flavour.Jessie Weston herself was born in 1850 in Surrey, England, the daughter of a tea merchant. When she was young the family moved to Bournemouth off England’s south coast and she began writing there. She studied in Hildesheim in Germany and in Paris and at the Crystal Palace School of Art in South London.  She was most famous for her studies of Arthurian romances and the Grail legend where she put forth the ideas that the material was actually pre-Christian and pagan in origin. T S Eliot’s The Wasteland was influenced by Weston’s Arthurian studies. The Green Knight as it stands was composed no later than the end of the 14th Century (the date of the manuscript) and may be much older. The language is Mercian influenced Middle English, probably from Lancashire. The boundary between Mercian and Northumbrian Old English runs through Lancashire and its dialect is influenced by both, but South Lancashire and Cheshire have Midlands’ such as pronouncing the ‘g’ in ‘king’ and ‘thing’.If you’re interested in Old English dialects, check out Simon Roper’s Youtube Channel for a real treat. The poem shows signs of oral storytelling with the rich, detailed descriptions that run in sequences and would probably delight an audience as they were elaborated. The themes are of honour and courage, as befitted the courtly audience, but also of love and fashion, which traditionally interest ladies. Tricky subject these days, but that was the established view for centuries. Things change. I for one embrace change, while I mourn what it lost. I’m a bit like the VoiceOver by Galadriel at the start of the Fellowship of The Ring movie.There are folkloric features which Weston perhaps emphasis because she was interested in them: He bears a holly bough to symbolise life and rebirth. He pole vaults over water as fairies can’t normally cross running water. The bargain is for a year and a day which is in all good fairy tales. The motif of the talking head appears again and again in Celtic stories: Bran the Blessed, and Bricriu’s Feast from the Ulster Cycle where the beheading challenge is seen. Of course the severed head is seen on a platter in the Perceval/Parsifal/Peredur Stories.The old lady in the castle is the famous with Morgana La Fee.“I trow” is “I think” or “I believe”“In sooth” is “truly”, “really” ‘fo sho’“Wit, wot, witen’ are ’to know’ . So “ I wit” is cognate with the German “Ich weiss” or the Dutch “ek weet”“List” is “like” or “please” “As he may list”  “As he pleases”“Welkin” is sky.“Hearken” is “hear, or listen to”Going through the recording as I edit, it strikes me that perhaps the green lace on the axe is the one that Gawain later gets from the lady and transpires to have been the knight’s. It was the magic of this lace that allowed him to survive the blow. Not sure why I didn’t figure that before. This is just what a modern author would be: place an item and bury it in detail so its significance isn’t grasped until much later.It’s mainly showing not telling too. We get some insight into Gawain’s thinking, but mostly the situations are simply described and we infer internal motivations and ruminations from what we hear. Described.I also think it’s Support the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

Harry by Rosemary TimperleyThank you to Steve Cuff for suggesting I read this story. Rosemary Timperley was born in 1920 in North London and died in November 1988. Her father was an architect and her mother a teacher. Timperley went to her local girls school and became a teacher herself. She taught English and History in a state school. Her pupils said she was a very dramatic figure (she ran the drama club) and wore long swirling black dresses with long drop or hoop earrings. While she was a teacher she began to submit her stories to magazine and they began to be accepted. She became a staff writer and agony aunt on the magazine Reveille. She lived in Richmond, Surrey (a well-heeled suburb of London now) for many years. Many of her stories are set in London.During the Second World War she worked at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in Kensington, London. She got married to a. Physics teacher in 1952 and they lived in Essex just outside London. They separated in the early 1960s according to some sources, but they appear to have been officially married until his death in 1968.In 1961 she mentions she is living in an old-fashioned flat and living on coffee, pink-gin and cigarettes. In 1964 she became seriously ill and had a long spell in hospital. I’m not surprised hearing about her diet. She was very prolific and was the author of 66 novels as well as radio plays and short stories. She was also editor of the 5th to the 9th Ghost Books. Harry has been filmed several times. She described herself as a recluseIf 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

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

An Irish story told by Douglas Hyde, first president of Ireland and the craoibhinn aobhinn himself. I thought it was about time we did an Irish story and this is hits all the targets.A wastrel boy compromises the reputation of a local girl and when he goes out on the road to think, he meets a party of the fairy folk and they give him something to carry, and something to bury.Support the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

Gerald KershFirstly, I need to thank Gavin Critchley who commissioned me to record this for his birthday in August and then very generously allowed me to broadcast it to you all on the podcast.Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington (just outside Central London) in 1912. He was born into a poor Jewish family and during his life had to turn his hand to many jobs to survive. These included being a cinema manager, body guard, cook in a fish and chip shop, French teacher, travelling salesman, night club bouncer and professional wrestler. It is said he began to write when he was only eight and did all the other jobs to keep him going while he tried to make a living as a writer. His first book was autobiographical and a family member sued him for libel so he withdrew it. His third novel was his most famous one. This was Night And The City which was published in 1938 and made into a film twice. Robert de Niro played the main role in the 1992 film.Kersh joined the British Army during the Second World War and went into the Coldstream Guards but ended up working for the army film unit. He was discharged from the Army in 1943 after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. While in France, after the liberation that many of his Jewish relatives had died in the Nazi concentration camps.Kersh wrote in a variety of genres after the war and he moved to the USA because he disliked the British tax system which he felt took too much money. He became an American citizen in 1958. He died in New York in 1968.His biography on the Villancourt Books site states:Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age 57 in 1968 of cancer of the throat.Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?This is a story of immortality. If we think of the alchemists who spent their lives, their fortunes, their reputation and their health to find the Elixir of Life and historical figures such as Emperor Rudolf II who, in Prague, funded lots of alchemists to produce such a tincture, then in Whatever Happened To Corporal Cuckoo, we see all of this is turned upon its head.Cuckoo gets the Elixir of Life by accident, it is invented by accident by the French surgeon who treats him. Ambroise Pare was a real military surgeon from this time.After becoming immortal, Cuckoo then spends the rest of eternity looking for get rich quick schemes in order to fund his buying what sounds like a low rent clip joint with girls and booze for low rent customers. He squanders every gift that eternity could have given him, not least by saving a little of his pay (and putting into attacker account as Warren Buffet would have you do). His answer when asked, is that he can’t be anything other than he is. He will do what his character makes him do. This is his dharma. This Indian term means duty but has come in some circles in the West to mean that what you do and can do no other. I often reflect on this these days. Could I be anything other than I am? I think within a limited circle of actions I can change the way I am, but like Cuckoo that is severely limited by my circumstances and my physical, mental and temperamental make up.I ramble about this and more in the audio notes to thisSupport the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

A man driving home on a winter's night thinks he sees a big cat stalking the moor. He crashes his car and then the weirdness really begins. An original story by Northumberland author Rowan Bowman.#audiobook #horror #northumberland #blanchlandFurther notes sent me by Rowan after our discussion:Influences in my writing:Raymond Chandler. He writes as a film director, intent on the reader seeing the view clearly in front of them.Daphne du Maurier. Partly because of her sense of place, but also because of the subtlety of the ghosts in some of her stories, Rebecca in particular, the writing is haunted by the melancholy of the nameless narrator, and the actual haunting, the influence that Rebecca has from beyond the grave, is superbly handled. Mandalay was based on du Maurier's own house. I often set books in or around houses I have known intimately.Shirley Jackson. The best writer of mad protagonists and unreliable witnesses in my opinion.Favourite authorsThe first proper ghost story I ever read was A Christmas Carol, I think that's where a lot of people start. As a teenager I suffered from terrible nightmares and took solace in Poe and Lovecraft and progressed to Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes still gives me the shudders). Then I went on to James Herbert, Shirley Jackson and lots of crime stories and thrillers, anything that confirmed it's normal to be scared and okay not to be okay. Life sorted itself out and I was busy raising my children. The nightmares eased and I read anything I could reach while doing something else. Danielewski's The House of Leaves was the first book in years to actually scare me. I still enjoy Robert Harris thrillers and the Cormoran Strike novels, but I'm back in this stage of my life to seeking out the weird and scary.Dan Simmons is always a good read, I recommend Drood. The atmosphere is intense and like most of his stories the landscapes suck you in. I enjoyed Michelle Paver's Thin Air, but prefer Dark Matter as a supernatural horror, again the landscape is one of the characters, the real horror in Thin Air comes from mundane self-interested cruelty which rather overshadows the supernatural element for me. The landscape in The Loney is brilliantly evoked. There have been several novels since set around the area, but none capture it in the same way.My favourite China Meiville novel is The City and The City, its fantastical landscape is so well drawn that it seems more real than room you are sitting in.The best book I've read since the start of Lockdown has been Piranesi. I loved Johnathon Strange and Mr Norrell; this is very different, but equally good. The reader understands what is going on just before it is revealed, set in a fantasy world that is so well drawn that it's utterly convincing. If you've ever been asked, 'What is wrong with you?' when admitting to a love of the macabre or frightening, then I recommend Noel Carroll's accessible The Philosophy of Horror (1990) and Lovecraft's collection of essays Supernatural Horror in Literature. Hope this may be of some interest.Thank you for reading The Beast of Blanchland. All the best,RowanSupport the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback

The Haunting of Unit 409 is an original horror story by me, Tony Walker and will be part of my forthcoming More Cumbrian Ghost Stories collection. This is a taster, a teaser, an early release. I hope you like it and enjoy your Halloween listening!If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In HereHate watching me? Listen to audio only versions of my podcast:  https://bit.ly/vurbl (https://bit.ly/vurbl)Get my audiobooks at an insane deal. London Horror Stories https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories (https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories)If you want to say thank you for all the stories please don’t buy me a coffee (I’m wired enough), buy a book! Get an ebook here: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-haunting-of-tullabeg (https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-haunting-of-tullabeg)Get a paperback here: https://www.bookdepository.com/Haunting-Tullabeg-Tony-Walker/9798736978946 (https://www.bookdepository.com/Haunting-Tullabeg-Tony-Walker/9798736978946)Join my mailing list and get a download: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)Music By The Heartwood Institutehttps://bit.ly/somecomeback (https://bit.ly/somecomeback)————————Support the show

Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org
Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker
If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud
Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback