Classic Ghost Stories

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Twilight opens in a garden where beauty wears a mask to protect it from the years, and twilight brings regrets and confessions. A young courtier stumbles upon a Duchess at dusk—painted, jewelled, and demanding. She wants him to be her father confessor, but what does Lucrezia Borgia want to confess and why does he run away?

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Publication: First published in God’s Playthings (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1913), under Marjorie Bowen’s principal pseudonym.

Setting and subject: Ferrara; Lucrezia Borgia in her final twilight.

Author: Marjorie Bowen (Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, 1885–1952), prolific British writer of historical and supernatural fiction.

Noted for: Lush atmosphere, moral chiaroscuro, and “twilight tales” that fuse history with the uncanny

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