Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

A man walks the London streets, thin as a shadow, his eyes open but unseeing. He has no destination, yet something leads him — as if by an unseen hand — to a quiet room where the ordinary will no longer hold. What follows is not terror in the usual sense, but a slow unravelling, as if the familiar fabric of life has been touched by something that should have remained at rest.

The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke first appeared in Collier’s on 14 October 1933, and was later collected in Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales (Constable, 1935).

Thomas Burke (1886–1945) was a British author best known for his tales of London’s hidden quarters, especially Limehouse. He wrote across fiction, essays, and poetry, blending realism with the uncanny.

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City of Dancing Horses is the third book in the trilogy that began with Unreal City and City of Light. It is 1925. Rosa Oderberg lives in Vienna, moving through rooms thick with silence, her grief dulled but never soothed. Wilhelm has returned from Paris, where he and his confederates were nearly undone by the clan of the Secondborn — a hermetic brood of vampiric beings, neither real nor unreal, more contagion than creature, whose presence lingers like an infection of the soul. Now, in the dripping streets of Vienna, Rosa senses that her own hauntings are only beginning.

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A narrowboat moors in Eastwick, a village cut off by time and road. Among its postcards and memories stands an ancient stone — and in every image, a shadow that should not be there. When George Middleton takes his own photograph, the shadow moves closer.

This is one of my own stories — and this time, I’m out to scare you. Let’s see if I manage to.

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At Brinton-on-Sea, the summer passed in gentle rhythms. Mariella and her young fiancé read side by side on the beach, swam together in the quiet sea, while her parents looked on from their chairs. Nothing seemed amiss. But something was. She said nothing, yet her smiles grew thinner, her sleep unsettled. Her eyes lingered too long on nothing at all. And in the evenings, the air inside the house felt changed—thickened, as if it held its breath. Whatever troubled her was unseen, but it was growing.

Publication details:“Old Man’s Beard” was first published in Old Man’s Beard: Fifteen Disturbing Tales by Geoffrey Bles in 1929.

Author biography:H. R. Wakefield (1888–1964) was a British writer and publisher, known for ghost stories that marry restrained supernatural suggestion with psychological unease. He brought the Edwardian tale into the modern world with quiet menace.

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A letter arrives—calm in tone, almost conversational. But beneath its surface, something unsettles. A favour once done, a house long locked, a memory that won’t quite settle. There are impressions that can’t be explained, and a sense—quiet, persistent—that something was not as it should have been.

The Clock first appeared in W. F. Harvey’s 1928 collection The Beast with Five Fingers, published by J. M. Dent & Sons. It has since been reprinted in several major ghost story anthologies.

William Fryer Harvey (1885–1937) was a Yorkshire-born writer and Quaker, best known for his concise and unsettling tales of the supernatural. A former naval surgeon, he was awarded the Albert Medal for Lifesaving during the First World War.

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On a wet and foggy evening in post-war London, a man arrives at a modest hotel carrying the calm assurance of wealth and distance. But something else arrives that night too—quietly, without fuss, with a newspaper clipping and a request for a room. In the lounge, the sounds of unseen children drift through the walls. In his sleep, the man dreams of trees and dead branches. And outside, the fog thickens.

*“A Visitor from Down Under” first appeared in *The London Magazine* and was later collected in *The Travelling Grave and Other Stories* (1948). It was included in *The Collected Macabre Stories of L. P. Hartley* (Tartarus Press, 2001).*

L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) was an English novelist and short story writer, best known for *The Go-Between*. Though celebrated for his novels, his ghost stories reveal a quieter, colder kind of terror.

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She was flawless. A model of grace and stillness, prized by every artist who worked with her. But beneath the surface of the painter’s studio—amid the heat, the charcoal dust, and the careful posing—something else lingered.

“Rose Rose” by Barry Pain was first published in Stories in Grey (T. Werner Laurie, 1911). It is now in the public domain.

Barry Eric Odell Pain (1864–1928) was a British humorist and writer of uncanny fiction. H.P. Lovecraft cited him as an influence, and Robert Louis Stevenson compared him to Maupassant.

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Seen from a passing stagecoach, you might think that Gylingden Hall is not the sort of place where the dead rest easily. The chimneys are cold, the gallery echoes with no human tread, and the great trees that line the avenue whisper of old wrongs and buried fury. In the shadow of the ruined chapel and beneath the rot-black timbers of the house, something lingers—a grief curdled into malice, a legacy neither signed nor forgotten. *Squire Toby’s Will* is not a tale of ghosts who startle, but of the slow, relentless suffocation of guilt, and of the strange things a man will refuse to see, even when they’re clawing at the door.

Published anonymously in *Temple Bar* magazine, Volume XXII, in 1868. Later attributed to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and often compared to his novel *The Wyvern Mystery*, written around the same time.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic fiction and supernatural tales, widely praised for his subtle and psychologically charged ghost stories. A master of atmosphere and ambiguity, he was admired by M. R. James and influenced the shape of modern horror fiction.

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In H.G. Wells's "The Red Room," a young man, confident in his rationality, seeks to debunk the supernatural in a reputedly haunted chamber. He is certain that his experience will be defined by logic and reason. But the air within the castle walls is heavy with unspoken dread, and as the candles dwindle, something shifts. Is it the room itself, or something within him, that begins to unravel? "The Red Room" was first published in The Idler magazine in March of 1896. H.G. Wells (1866-1946), a visionary of science fiction and social commentary, explored the depths of human experience with unparalleled skill.

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Returning home to England after the American Revolutionary War, General Browne, a soldier hardened by war and governed by reason, accepts an invitation to the castle of his old school-friend, Lord Woodville. The place has only lately been inherited and is undergoing tasteful restoration, its mediaeval past slowly yielding to Georgian elegance. But not all traces of the past have been swept away.

One chamber remains veiled in its former splendour—its faded tapestry concealing more than just stone walls. It is this room that is given to the General to stay in overnight.

The Tapestried Chamber was written by Sir Walter Scott and published in The Keepsake for 1829, during the final years of his life, when he was writing under intense pressure in an effort to repay heavy debts.

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