Something is wrong in the woods.The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone.It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, is a boy with light brown eyes that hold something tigerish in them, lying in the sun with an ease that belongs to no child he has ever met.The aunt will find him charming. The dog will not stay in the house.Saki understood that the old country — the country before the parishes and the property lines — was never entirely tamed. The animals there talk.

"Gabriel-Ernest" was first published in 1909 in the Westminster Gazette, and later collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910).

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), a writer of savage wit and supernatural unease. He was killed on the Western Front in the closing months of the Somme campaign.

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There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman who watches him with eyes full of something between devotion and dread. He has come with a theory about evil — not the Devil, not sin, not the ordinary darkness of human nature, but evil as a cosmic force, a radiation from a black sun somewhere in the depths of space.

And he has come with a purpose. In the old Larcom house, with its history of sorrow and disaster, he has found exactly the conditions he needs. His neighbour, a novelist, finds himself drawn into Averaud's orbit. 

Clark Ashton Smith's The Devotee of Evil is a quiet story. It does not rush. It thinks. And what it thinks about has been troubling philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. 

The Devotee of Evil was first published in Smith's self-produced chapbook The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies in 1933, after failing to find a commercial publisher. It reappeared in Stirring Science Stories in February 1941. 

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a California poet, painter, sculptor and writer of weird fiction, one of the central figures of the Weird Tales circle alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with whom he maintained a long correspondence.

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A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, the key in her pocket.

But the almanack on the mantelpiece read the 21st of October.

And it was May. 

"The Mystery of the Semi-Detached" was first published in Edith Nesbit's collection Grim Tales in 1893. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is best remembered today as the author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It, but she was also a prolific and accomplished writer of supernatural fiction, whose ghost stories combine suburban ordinariness with genuine dread to unsettling effect.

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A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count his fellow jurymen, there there should be twelve, he counts thirteen...

Dickens wrote this story with a title that is itself a warning. Whether you take that warning as a comment on the narrator, on the law, or on the nature of what follows, is a question the story leaves carefully unanswered. *

"To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt"* was first published in the Christmas 1865 edition of *All the Year Round*, Dickens's own literary journal, as part of a collection entitled *Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions*. It was later republished under the titles *The Trial for Murder* and *The Thirteenth Man*.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Portsmouth and is widely regarded as the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era. He was also one of the finest writers of ghost stories in the language, and this story was considered the definitive English ghost story for decades, before M.R. James arrived to claim that title.

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A Walk in the Park by William Bundy
There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many years. A boy watches from a window. Dreams come. And something waits outside in the moonlight, patient as stone, returning with every full moon whether it is wanted or not.
William Bundy's *A Walk in the Park* is a story about inheritance — the kind you don't choose.
---
*A Walk in the Park* is published on William Bundy's Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, where you'll find more of his writing in the same vein.
---
William Bundy is a UK-based writer of dark and supernatural fiction whose work spans short stories, essays, and film. Find his writing at williambundy.com, his Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com, his film work on Instagram at instagram.com/redsaidfilms, and all his links gathered in one place at linktr.ee/williambundy.


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A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that won't start. He does what anyone would do.

He helps. He offers whisky. He thinks nothing of it. 

But there is something not quite right about her. Something in the way she watches the road behind her. Something in the way she keeps to the shadows.

"My Adventure in Norfolk" by A.J. Alan, first collected in Good Evening, Everyone!, published by Hutchinson in 1928. The story was originally broadcast live on the BBC in the mid-1920s.

A.J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert, a senior intelligence officer who worked at Bletchley Park and served as Vice-President of the Magic Circle. He broadcast only a handful of stories each year and never revealed his true identity to the public during his lifetime. 

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This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post. In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a long line, watches her companion, Amelia, wither into a gaunt and listless shadow. Amelia is the sixth companion; three before her never left these walls alive. Amidst the rattle of mountain rain, thin, high screams echo through the stone-vaulted halls. Is it the onset of madness, or is the house reclaiming a brutal, hidden history? As the light fades, the only certainty is the tightening grip of a terror that will have its say. The Triumph of Death first appeared in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949. It was later collected in Strayers from Sheol (1961) and The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield (1978). H. Russell Wakefield (1888--1964) was an English writer best known for his unsettling ghost stories. Drawing on clerical, military, and publishing-world experience, he brought a sharp psychological edge to the classic British supernatural tale. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in return. There is nothing unusual in that either. What is unusual is what keeps happening to the white linen. His first wife Gloriana has been dead for four years. She asked only one thing of him before she died — a small, strange, domestic request — and he honoured it. He made no promises. He is bound by nothing. And yet. H. D. Everett's "The Death Mask" is a ghost story about what we owe the dead, and about the debts that accumulate, unnoticed, in the ordinary fabric of a marriage. The fabric, in this case, is quite literal. --- "The Death Mask" was first published in 1920 as the title story of *The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts* (London: Philip Allan, Quality Court, Chancery Lane), issued under the name Mrs. H. D. Everett. Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was an English writer of supernatural fiction and historical novels who published her first book at the age of forty-four under the male pseudonym Theo Douglas, and whose ghost stories drew admiring notice from both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft. ⭐ Join my Patreon ⭐ https://patreon.com/barcud Go here for a library of ad-free stories, a monthly members only story and early access to the regular stories I put out.  You can choose to have ghost stories only, or detective stories or classic literature, or all of them for either $5 or $10 a month.  Many hundreds of hours of stories. Who needs Audible? Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936) Join my patreon: https://patreon.com/barcud There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable. M. R. James wrote this story in 1895. His erudition encompassed the respectable and the less so, and he knew the darker currents of the archive as well as any man alive. Something — or someone — has been waiting in that house. Waiting, with considerable patience, for the third. "Lost Hearts" was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895, and collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904. Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval manuscript scholar, Provost of King's College Cambridge and later of Eton, and the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade places, and the question of who is watching whom will not stay safely inside the story. First published in The London Mercury in November 1935; later collected in the volume The Sun Cure (1936). Now widely reprinted in anthologies of supernatural and psychological horror, where it has earned a reputation as a minor classic. Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was a British poet and prose writer, best known for poems such as “The Highwayman”. Alongside his popular verse, he wrote a small but influential body of uncanny fiction, of which “Midnight Express” is the most celebrated. Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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