Classic Ghost Stories

Mr Jones by Edith WhartonThis is the second Edith Wharton story we've read, the first being https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/7696635d-86ff-42d2-a2cf-317694d891d6/1747150-episode-4-bewitched-by-edith-wharton.mp3 (Bewitched which was Episode 4). Wharton was an American of course but she spent time in England and set a number of her ghost stories there. This story is the third of a series of stories where the house is a major character. In this story of course, the house is inhabited by the ghost of Mr Jones as we learn. As normal with Wharton there is incredible craft in the shaping of this story. It is at least in part a mystery story and we are familiar with the mystery ghost story where the ghost is debunked at the end, not least in Scooby Doo, but also in Wilkie Collin's The Woman in White. We have the mystery of the house with the strange old servants. We realise early on that Mrs Clemm has something to hide and her niece Georgina who is portrayed as a clumsy idiot is actually the one whose information ties up the tale.We have locked room, conniving housekeepers, blind gardeners and a historical tragedy to boot. The poor deaf and dumb Juliana, locked up in the house by the evil Mr Jones on the orders of her philandering husband is a Gothic staple and Wharton knew this of course and probably drew the character knowingly with a nod to gothic tradition. Wharton does a bit of foreshadowing that you might not get at first listen, but early on in the story when she is impressed with Bells, she muses about her ancestors who lived and died there and adds, unknowingly that to some of them, it may have been a prison! We later learn that it was indeed.Then when Lady Jane asks Mrs Clemm to take her to Mr Jones, Mrs Clemm agrees that he's not well; "He's between life and death as it were." This is in fact the literal truth but we don't understand that at this point and take from some figurative description. In fact, Mrs Clemm tells the exact truth: "He'd know you, my lady, but you wouldn't know him." "He's in no state for you to see him." Wharton must have had fun writing that.I think that the posh lady guests breaking off to crush over the Tempeltonia Recusa rare plant by the wall is probably an in joke that Wharton's friends may have recognised as a reference to their mutual acquaintances.She sees Mr Jones only once, when she enters the Blue Room to retrieve her friend's lost handbag. Her friend Stramer doesn't notice him, but Mr Jones is messing about in the citron desk where the incriminating papers are later found. We learn slowly, detail by detail that this Blue Room had been the prison of Juliana the poor shut-away wife.The first clue is the tomb of old Peregrine who died at Aleppo of the Plague and 'Also His Wife' unnamed. Things move on and we don't get another clue for a while.Then the next clue is them finding her portrait and Lady Jane mentioning that she might look so miserable because she was an inconsolable at his death. Stramer, a bright chap, says that they didn't dress like that as late as Peregrine's death so she was clearly miserable before he died.They identify the poor woman as Lady Juliana. Stramer is a font of knowledge. Not only does he know about fashion, but he remarks that they clearly used the Blue Parlour in those days, even in winter. She's leaning on the citron desk: it's here the secret of her fate is of course, though we don't know that at this point. And Stramer then mentions the family archives, which Lady Jane hasn't thought of yet. She only knows Mr Jones won't allow her access to them because the key is lost. Hmm. Convenient. Stramer says that in Mrs Clemm's Support the show

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John Buchan: John Buchan, officially 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in 1875 in Perth, Scotland and died in 1940 aged only 64 in Montreal, Canada. He was Governor General of Canada until he died in office. His father was a minister of the Church of Scotland. Many of our ghost story writers are children of clergymen. He studied Classics at the University of Glasgow and then moved to Oxford University. After that he went to South Africa where he was private secretary to the High Commissioner of South Africa. Like Kipling, who we read last week, Buchan was a conservative son of the British Empire. He was a bit of a softie for a conservative though because later when MP for Peebles just south of Edinburgh, he supported votes for women, national health insurance for the poor and curtailing the power of the House of Lords.Though a Scot, he was not a Scottish Nationalist, and in common with many Scots of his class and time, he though Scotland was best off within the British Empire.When he returned from South Africa, he was called to the English Bar as a barrister (an advocate in Scotland). He was also editor of the still existing conservative magazine: The Spectator.In 1916, Buchan went to the Western Front, attached to the Intelligence Corps. Just before this he had just published his famous spy story The 39 Steps. In 1935, Buchan went as Governor General to Canada. He had always liked Canada, written about it as a journalist and fought alongside Canadian troops in the First World War. He encouraged a distinct Canadian identity and nationality. He hosted King George VI on the king's tour of Canada. He suffered a stroke at Rideau Hall and then a head injury as he fell. He was treated by the famous neurologist Wilder Penfield. I wonder at Buchan's favouring the rather gloomy, death-fearing folk he contrasts with the happy builder of Fullcircle with his Catholic/Pagan sensibilities. Technical DifficultiesI had very strange technical difficulties in recording this story. The recording kept skipping, parts disappeared, parts recorded on the same track. Of course, it could be the new version of Reaper, or it could be that the story is haunted!There are some weird clicks and bumps that I've tried to get rid of, but I think some remain.FullcircleAgain, the house is the main character in this story, the house of the ghost behind it: Lord Carteron.The first clue that he haunts the house is in the history where Leithen tells our narrator Peckwether that Lord Carteron's soul is in the house Fullcircle. Leithan talks about his own house Borrowby and how the Ancient England knew death. He talks of the restoration of the monarchy and the Merry Monarch Charles II after the English Civil War and how the Restoration brought paganism to England and those pagan types were able to live in a bland happiness. That's Leithen's big complaint against Full Circle and the easy, lazy happiness it produces in the people who live there and the ghost of Lord Carteron who moulds them in his easy going image. Personally, I'm quite keen on happiness bland or otherwise, but Buchan seems to look down his nose at it. The man who built Fullcircle, Leithen says, knew have to live: 'The trouble was, they didn't know how to die.'. He accuses them in their paganess to trying magic and never becoming true Catholics, just going to Catholicism because of its ritual. Leithan is a bit miserable. He tells Giffen that the paradaisical countryside in June makes him sad. Giffen now converted from socialism to paganism can't understand him! Leithen says the Cotswold countryside in June is too perfect a thing for fallen humanity. Giffen thinks him morSupport the show

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Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was the great poet of British Imperialism. He was born in 1865 in Mumbai (then Bombay) British India. He died in London, England in 1936 aged 70.He was named Rudyard because that was the place his parents had met and courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England. Kipling was well-connected. HIs cousin was a conservative prime minister and two of his aunts were married to famous painters, one the great pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-JonesHe was immensely successful and you will have heard of The Jungle Book via Disney if nowhere else, but also his books Kim, Gunga Dinand his famous poems (at least to British schoolboys of my generation) Mandalay and I imagine the world-famous poem If is familiar to most peopl.eHe actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Henry James thought he was a literary genius. Kipling has the ability to write wonderful prose that puts us right in the scene, whether that me the lush English countryside, dusty India or a grand old haunted house.It is worth saying also that Kipling also evidenced great affection for India and the Indians. He had a nanny or 'ayah' when he was small, but went back to England for his education. Interestling, after he finished at his military school, which he found a little rough, at the age of 17, it was decided he wasn't smart enough to go to Oxford University so he sailed back to India, where he became a journalist. To him, landing back in India was a home coming. He published a collection of short stories set in British India in 1886; Plain Tales from the Hills, these had previously been released over a period of two years in a Lahore magazine. He travelled back to England in 1889, via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and San Francisco. He travelled around the USA and Canada before going back to London, spending time in the Pacific North West at Portland, Seattle, British Columbia then going east via Alberta to the Yellowstone National park, Omaha, Chicago, Washington DC, New York and Boston. He met Mark Twain and was very impressed with him. At that time, Twain had published Tom Sawyer and was writing Huckleberry Finn. He then took ship to Liverpool from whence he went to London to great literary acclaimHe went back to America for his honeymoon and it was in Vermont that he got the idea of The Jungle Book. He stayed in New England for a whle and was visited by Arthur Conan Doyle and met Theodore Roosevelt.He visited South Africa each winter and then in 1897, settled in rural Sussex and he lived there until his death in 1897 in a great house called Batemans.TheyThey was first published in Scribner's Magazine for August 1904 and then collected in Traffics and Discoveries in the same year. The 'house beautiful' that it describes is thought to be modelled on his own house in Sussex. I hadn't picked up on this, but some reviewers infer that the visitor's own child has died, and this makes sense of the passage where he says he never sees the faces of his own dead in his dreams. The butler has also lost a child who is now walking in the wood. The butler won't accept a tip for setting the visitor back on his way, which may indicate some commonality of feeling and loss. The girl's kiss on his hand at the end which breaks the spell, is the special kiss of his own dead daughter, and it is only at this point he realises (though we had this figured much earlier) that the children are ghosts of the children who have died. The point is that Miss Florence has never borne a child so she can never see them. In this sense her blindness is symbolic. He can see them and ultimately feel them because he liSupport the show

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Megan TaylorMegan is a British author, who has four novels, the latest being https://amzn.to/2z94akj (We Wait) UK link and https://amzn.to/2XQOFI1 (We Wait) USA LinkMegan lives in Nottingham, England. She teaches Creative Writing workshops has published four novels: We Wait (the latest, which is a haunted house story), The Woman Under the Ground which is a collection of short stories, The Lives of Ghosts and **The Dawning. They are all very well reviewed and there is great praise for the writing.In the interview we talked about a love for the short story form and for ghost stories in general, though not all of Megan's work is in the ghost/horror genre.The Dining Room GhostIt was good being able to talk to the author about what she intended in the story rather than me guessing what long dead writers meant in theirs. The Dining Room Ghost was partly inspired by Megan half-seeing something when overtired coming down the stairs with her young baby. We talked about the silent woman ghosts, often with long hair, sometimes drowned that keep cropping up in horror but she said she wanted the ghost to be the silence and quiet in a house of screaming babies and the busy head of the young mother. The mother seems to want silence and peace above all, and there is just one way to get it!There is ambiguity about the ghost: is it a ghost or is it a post natal psychosis? In that there is a strong pedigree of ghost stories with unreliable narrators; The Yellow Wallpaper being one and The Horlaanother among the stories we have read out. This is a theme in our culture as a whole -- are people who see ghosts simply mad, or do they reveal a whole other realm by their seeing what the rest of us cannot?We talked about a Freudian interpretation where the ghost is a dissociated part of the narrator -- her Shadow if you like (though that is a Jungian term that Freud would not have liked!). The emotions embodied in the ghost, murderous waiting amongst them, belong properly to the narrator, but she cannot tolerate them so she splits this desire to destroy the baby (and thus have quiet) off from herself and creates this spirit.It occurred to me that her standing by the patiently ticking clock introduced a kind of inevitability to the ending which we did not at first suspect, but given the clock was there all along as a kind of hint, perhaps we should have known that the time of silence would finally come.Quite a disturbing story then. Authors!Writers of ghost stories, weird tales, folk horror and other sorts of unnerving fiction, feel free to contact me through the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast Facebook page/direct message if you would like your story read out and to be interviewed on a future episode of the podcast.Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a  http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Facebook GroupWhy not join Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on https://www.facebook.com/classicghoststories/ (Facebook) for the lastest news?MusicBeginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous  https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) . The end music is by MYUU Bad EncounterSupport the show

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Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde Themes"As we think in our hearts, so are we."(Proverbs, 23.7)The TwinsMost cultures have a fascination with the phenomenon of twins. Jekyll and Hyde can be understood to be a strange type of twin. Castor and Pollux were twins in Classical Mythology, both had the same mother (as would be expected): Leda, but each had a different father. Castor’s father was Leda’s mortal husband and was thus mortal, while Pollux was the son of Zeus, and thus an immortal. When push came to shove and Castor was killed, Pollux shared half his immortality with his twin. We see in Tolkien, the half-elf brothers Elrond and Elros choose their kindred, Elrond to be an elf and thus immortal and Elros to be human and thus to die. In fact the symbol of the twins runs through our culture: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Osiris and Set. Very often one is bad and the other good. Most often, stories about twins involve a moral choice. The psychologist Carl Jung felt this motif revealed an archetype in human nature itself. Jung (Collected Works XX, 217n) mentions the old apocryphal legend that Jesus (the believer) was twin to Thomas (the doubter). Chevalier and Gheerbrant (trans. John Buchanan-Brown) in their Dictionary of Symbols (1994, p1047) talk about different pairings of twins; one dark, the other light, one good, the other evil, and they say that they represent the contradictions in a person’s nature and his or her moral struggle to overcome them. Stevenson’s discussion of this theme addresses the morality, but as well as being philosophical, he manages to demonstrate it through its human and dramatic aspect and show the suffering that such a struggle within a person’s nature can bring.It is not so simple as good fighting against bad. Jekyll wants to be both evil and good at the same time and to enjoy his evil with no penalty. His solution is to create, or more correctly, liberate Mr Hyde. Jekyll gets away with his guilty, but tempting pleasures while he can, but when he fears that Hyde will cause him to be punished, he tries to do away with Hyde, but he has fed the beast too much and it has grown too strong, and in the end, it is Hyde’s evil that proves the stronger. Rather than sharing his immortality as Pollux does for Castor, Jekyll chooses to share his death with Hyde, killing himself and thus killing them both.The idea is that in each of us is a mortal and an immortal part. They are always together but never completely one. We see this in Castor and Pollux but also in Jesus and the Christ, who were both man and god in the same body. We see a version of it where Jekyll is the mixed man, very mortal, fond of both his sensual pleasures and his pious reputation, and Hyde who is uncombined, younger, more vital, his senses sharper, but wholly made of shadow. The ElixirStevenson’s Tincture that changes colour and foams and bubbles has been portrayed many times on the television and movie screens. You can even get your own alcoholic version in The Alchemist bar in Manchester and now elsewhere.It does seem to link back to the Elixir of Life of the Medieval and Renaissance alchemists, which they also called a ’tincture’ in that it is transformative. The Elixir of the alchemists could reputedly turn lead into gold, bring that which was dead alive once more and transform man into god.Jekyll’s elixir turns man into monster. It is also interesting that in an old Irish story, the druids gave the great warrior Cú Chulainn an elixir of forgetfulness so he would forget his love for a woman who was not his wife and therefore not fall into sin. In a sense, Jekyll’s elixir allows him to forget his moral natureSupport the show

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Robert Louis StevensonR L Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenons in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died aged only 44 in Samoa. He was phenomenally successful in his time and is still remembered for such classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and of course The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.Robert Louis (he changed his name from Robert Lewis Balfour when he was around 18) was an only child. His father Thomas Stevenson was a famous lighthouse engineer, from a line of lighthouse designers. His grandfather Robert Stevenson and his uncles were in the same line of work. R L Stevenson's mother Margaret Balfour came from a line of landowners from Fife, but her father was a Church of Scotland minister. Stevenson suffered from respiratory problems as a child, an ailment he shared with his mother and maternal grandfather. He never fully recovered from his chest problems. After school, he went to Edinburgh University to study engineering. He used to go to the family engineering works in the summer and accompanied his father on a tour of lighthouses in Orkney and Shetland on 1868.By 1871, Robert Louis told his father he didn't want to be an engineer but wanted to pursue a career as a writer. His family took it relatively well but suggested he change to studying Law at University to give him some security. He was 21, and in common with many 21 year olds, he became more Bohemian, taking to wearing his hair long and sporting a velveteen jacket. In 1873, he went to stay on the French Riviera for the good of his health for a year but came back to Edinburgh and was admitted to the Scottish Bar in 1875.He met and fell in love with an American woman called Fanny Van de Grift Osborne from Indianopolis who had come with her children to study art in France. She was married but her husband was multiply unfaithful so they separated. She retured to the USA after they had spent over a year together and eventually in 1878, he travelled to meet her in San Francisco. He wrote about his journey across America, but it ruined his health. He was reputedly almost dead when he arrived in Monterey, California. By December 1879, he was well enough to travel on to San Francisco. He described the time as being 'All alone on forty-five cents a day and sometimes less'He met up again with Fanny in San Francisco. She was divorced by that time, but by the winter of 1879, he was at death's door again and Fanny came to nurse him. They married in 1840 and travelled to the Napa Valley for their honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp on Mouth Saint Helena. In August that year, he sailed back to Liverpool in England. Because of his failing health, Stevenson looked for suitable places to live, staying on the south coast of England, to France and in places in Scotland. After Stevenson's father died, he went to live in Colorado. By 1888 he chartered a yacht in San Francisco and decided to set ail for the east and central Pacific, stopping in Hawaii, Tahiti, the Gilbert Island and New Zealand. He ended up in Sydney, Australia, and in 1890 set out on another voyage and arrived at Vailima in Samoa where he bought land and became part of the local community. He was to die of a stroke in 1894 while opening a bottle of wine.The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'Jekyll and Hyde' was published in 1886. Stevenson finished it in six days during a period of illness and gave it to his wife who didn't like it. It is written a little like a mystery where Mr Utterson the lawyer is the detective. The truth of what happens is actually more or less laid out in the first section for those who have eyes to see. We see the evil Mr Hyde draw Support the show

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Alex BoastAlex Boast is a young British writer, born in Ipswich, raised in Surrey and living in London. He has an MA in Creative Writing and is constantly improving his skills by writing on https://medium.com/@boastalex (Medium) and https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-M-Boast (Quora) as well as doing Master Class courses and attending writing courses by the British writing school The https://www.arvon.org/ (Arvon Foundation).He has a love of ghost stories and references H P Lovecraft and Stephen King as influences as well as J R R Tolkein.Alex had been working in health marketing which necessitated frequent global travel and due to the Coronavirus epidemic, he was laid off. Fortunately that made him focus more on his writing, so every cloud has a silver lining. He has just been commissioned to write a horror movie script based on the Irish legends of the Banshee. This is only the second interview Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done with a living author, but we figure there are more of you out there, so if you write ghost stories and want to have them appear in Classic Ghost Stories Podcast then get in touch.If you want to read Alex's story, you can get it from Amazon https://amzn.to/2xKaWMO (here)The Men in the SnowInevitablly when you read a new story, you try to catalogue it with others you have read. On the podcast now we have read a wide range of stories written by authors born in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and soon the 21st centuries. Styles change of courseWhen I read the Men in the Snow, I was struck by the weirdness of it. We don't know if the perceptions of the young girl narrator can be relied on. Some of them seem distinctly odd; her father sitting reading the paper in the kitchen who never moves and never speaks. Her mother who yells at her to stop shaking and later disappears. The newts in the pond, her only friends. So it starts off as purporting to be a naturalistic, realistic story, but then gets shunted off into the odd.This is something I find with https://amzn.to/3dRE05z (Robert Aickman) too. His settings are ordinary, mundane almost, and seem to be naturalistic, but he injects the unnervingly odd into them.The other story that popped into my mind was https://amzn.to/3dTK6Cx (The House of Leaves) by Mark Z. Danielewski. This was because the house in The Men in the Snow changes size. If you don't know the House of Leaves you should read it. In fact, our narrator is growing larger, the house isn't shrinking!And as for the advancing angry eyes...So, it was great to have a modern story and greater still to interview Alex. I hoped you liked it as much as I did.And finally,By the time this episode of the Podcast goes out, we should finally be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel of the Coronavirus epidemic. I hope you and yours (and me and mine) all come through it safely. Take careTonySupport Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a  http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Facebook GroupWhy not join Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on https://www.facebook.com/classicghoststories/ (Facebook) for the lastest news?MusicBeginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous  https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) . The end music is by MYUU Bad EncounterDarkworldsI’ve just launched a new podcast of my book Darkworlds, a horror sci-fi story set in a virtual reality 1927 London.https://darkSupport the show

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L T C RoltLionel Thomas Caswall Rolt, was an English writer born in 1910 and who died in 1974, therefore for us, he's a recent writer! He was a prolific writer who had an interest in engineering and that shows in this story in his description of the tunnels and the knowledge of ventilation shafts which are integral to the plot of the story. In keeping with this love of engineering, he wrote biographies of major engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. He had a major enthusiasm for vintage cars, heritage railways and was a pioneer of the canal cruising industry. Write what you know, they say, and he did.His father was a bit of a pioneer and had worked on an Australian cattle station s well as a plantation in India and being part of the Yukon gold rush in 1898.Rolt's father and uncle were interested in engineering and machines and his uncle had a horse drawn canal boat which he fitted with a steam engine and then a petrol engine.From 1936, Rolt decided he wanted a life afloat and he converted his uncle's old boat Cressy into a boat he could live in and spent his time mooching up and down the canals of England.During the Second World War, he went to work for Rolls Royce and made Spitfire engines, the Royal Airforce's legendary fighter plan. After the war, Rolt teamed up with Robert Aickman, another major ghost story writer to form the Inland Waterways Association to promote the use of the canals and restore them. Bosworth Summit LockAs noted, Rolt was a friend of Robert Aickman, author and editor, due to their shared love of canals. Kai Roberts, compares their work and finds Aickman's work quite radical (it is very unnerving) where Rolt's ghost stories are more traditional.Rolt set a number of his stories on the railways and canals. What I particularly, loved about this story, Bosworth Pound Lock, is the setting. As well as traditionally moral ghost story; boy messes with girl beneath his station, gets girl pregnant, boy kills girl by dumping her down a ventilation shaft into a canal tunnel, girl gets revenge as a ghost by dragging boy into canal with her, girl and boy are happily reuninted in the grave.But as well as this we have a lovely description of him fishing on his canal boat on a golden May evening, with the fresh leaves, the birds, the gentle flow of the water. It's just what we need in times like this.Of course, the victim's mother is a Gypsy with second sight and she sees the boys murder as a marriage with her daughter.Another little synchronicity (or not) is that I am reading The Stopping Places by Damien Le Bas, which is a book about Damien revisiting the places his Romany family used to stop as they travelled around the country. That's another book which is balm to the soul in these times of Corona Virus when we can't get out.Check out:https://amzn.to/2JpQbsq (The Stopping Places US Link) https://amzn.to/3bDTQyF (The Stopping Places UK Link)http://imbolcfire.blogspot.com/2010/01/some-thoughts-on-weird-fiction-of-ltc.html (Kai Robert's article on Rolt is here)And finally,I hope you are well, and bearing up. We shall overcome. What is really lovely to me is that the world is united against this enemy. I really hope this sense of unity will remain and that we can then turn to deal with the disasters that seem to be caused by global warming and fix that problem before it's too late!Take care, all.TonySupport Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a  http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) Support the show

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Guy BoothbyGuy Boothby was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1867 and died in Bournemouth, England in 1905. At the time of his birth South Australia was a recently established British colony and his father's family were important administrators and legislators of the colony. Boothby's mother was English and she separated from his father when he was only seven, and took him back to England where he was educated at Salisbury.He returned to Australia aged sixteen and entered the colonial administration where he was secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, but he didn't like the work. He began writing lyrics for light operas aged 23, in which he acted. The Australian colonies suffered an economic collapse in 1890 and he took ship for London. However, he didn't have enough money for the full passage and disembarked in Colombo, Sri Lanka and made his way back to Australia. He worked in various ventures across south east Asia, working on ships, stoking furnaces, becoming a ruby miner, working in an opium den in Singapore, acting, being a cowherd and even as a prize fighter. He was even a pearl diver for a while in Queensland before making his way back to Adelaide.He did manage to reach London eventually and wrote a book about his adventures. When his travel memoir was successful, he wrote a series of novel and was so prolific he ended up writing around six novels a year. He was only 38 when he died in 1905, officially of flu, but no doubt worn out by the hard and adventurous life he had led. He is buried in Bournemouth.A Strange GoldfieldI think the merit of A Strange Goldfield is particularly how it gives us an insight into Australia during the early days of European settlement there. We have a picture of adventurers wandering the huge continent searching for riches among and putting up with incredibly hard conditions. It has echoes of the goldrush in California and the Yukon but it's set against the burning Australian desert.In that, it has echoes of Victorian stories of explorers and novels suggesting that strange things are to be discovered in distant and difficult to get to lands, such as in Rider Haggard's She stories and all the interest there was among the British at home in the tales of explorers in Africa such as Livingstone, or even Scott of the Antarctic. It is in essence a boy's own adventure yarn as much as a ghost story. Though ghost story it is with the ghosts of the goldfield being forced to toil after death. There is an echo of morality here perhaps. Are they being punished for their greed? Was the destroying angel of typhoid sent to punish them for that and are they kept at the goldfield still as some kind of purgatory for the sin of venality.Strange TimesI'm writing this on 18th March. We were supposed to be going to York for my birthday tomorrow, but that's been cancelled due to the Coronavirus precautions. By the time this episode airs, it will be early April and who knows what will have happened? There might be light at the end of the tunnel or there might not. I have no idea. All I can do, is keep on reading stories like I have done for the past six months in the hope that it gives some entertaintment for those of you locked in by the coronavirus. Keep well and safe.Support Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a  http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Websitehttp://bit.ly/ClassicGhostStoriesPodcast (Classic Ghost Stories Podcast)MusicBegSupport the show

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Sir Arthur Conan DoyleOr to give him his full name, Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh in Scotland and he died in Crowborough, Sussex, England aged 71. His family name was just Doyle and Conan was his middle name but taking Ignatius and Conan together with the surname Doyle, he could hardly be anything other than of Irish Catholic heritage. His mother was Irish and though his father was born in England, he was of Irish family. He was born in Edinburgh and his father Charles was an alcoholic and that caused the family to fall apart. His father ended up in the famous Crichton Royal psychiatric hospital just outside Dumfries. Because his father could not support him, Doyle’s wealthy uncles sent him to a large Catholic school in Lancashire, which I stumbled upon one sunny night several years ago when out for a walk. Then aged 16, he went to another Catholic school at Feldkirch in Austria. Despite his Catholic upbringing, Doyle renounced Catholicism and became an ardent believer and supporter of spiritualism. He was a member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research and the Society for Psychical Research in London.After his time in Austria, he went back to Edinburgh where he trained as a doctor. After graduating he worked in the south of England, setting up a practice in Southsea. Incredible as it sounds, he didn’t make money and had to become a writer to support himself. He also became the goalkeeper of the Portsmouth Association Football club when he was at Southsea. He also played cricket form Marylebone Cricket Club in London and then as part of the Authors XI with J M Barrie, P G Woodhouse and A A Milne. He was also a keen golfer!He was a big supporter of vaccination. He went to study ophthalmology in Vienna but found the German too hard (though he had been a school student in Austria off course). While he was in Vienna he mainly spent his time ice skating and writing fiction.He was a prolific writer and his first short story was published in 1879 when he was 20. He wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story when he was 27 and struggled to find a publisher for it. By the time he had written several stories he was tired of Holmes. Doyle was interested in many things and it is said that he wasn’t considered a great writer because he kept changing the focus of his enthusiasms, from writing to medicine, to golf to psychical research and many other subjectsThe Ring of ThothGiven what we’ve just said about Doyle’s wandering enthusiasms, it is interesting to note that is the same criticism he makes of the John Vansittart Smith hero of the Ring of Thoth. The observation adds little to the story, and has the ring of a personal anecdote. The Vansittarts were a noble English family of Dutch descent, and Doyle would probably have heard of them.The Ring of Thoth was published in 1890 in the Cornhill Magazine. The Ring of Thoth was the first mummy story. If we think of our Gothic Horror and especially of our Hammer Horror tradition, we have mummies, werewolves and vampires; in some movies they even meet up and do battle!I remember the Matell glow in the dark mummy, wolf man and other figures. My memory is hazy about the others. A friend of mine had a glow in the dark mummy and I wanted it. And Boris Karloff’s role in The Mummy from 1932 owes it all to The Ring of Thoth. As stories go it’s fairly straightforward. We have the learned man delving too deeply into things that should not be delved into, a little anyway. He’s not as bad as some of M R James or H P Lovecraft’s protagonists who mess with the really bad stuff. I think that’s a quote from Phil Lynott, by the way (if yousSupport the show

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