A dark fairytale set in the wild moors of the North of England. A foolish girl falls in love with a tall, dark handsome stranger who stepped out of the woods these days. He says he's a fine lord, and she sees his golden sash and his silver sword and his black velvet jacket. An old wise woman warns her not to take a gift from him, nor eat a morsel of his food, nor yet cross running water to stand beside him. But will she listen? Get a great discount on my Horror Stories For Halloween audiobook & ebook bundle https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween #audiobook #horrorpodcast #shortstories #literature *** Merchandise https://my-store-5618003.creator-spring.com (https://my-store-5618003.creator-spring.com) Get my audiobooks at an insane deal. London Horror Stories https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories Buy me a coffee to show appreciation: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker ) You can get a free ebook and audiobook: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire) Listen to audio only versions of my podcast: https://bit.ly/vurbl (https://bit.ly/vurbl) It is all greatly appreciated. #classicghoststories #classicstories #horrorpodcast Support this podcast

Classic Ghost Stories

S02E53 Laura Silver Bell by J Sheridan Le Fanu

In the Backwoods, they do Bad Things. or "Be A Sport, Tessie!"My reading and analysis of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Jackson's 1948 masterpiece of naturalistic horror gone bad. Small town America shows its horrific side. Folk Horror before there was folk horror. The Purge before there was The Purge. Listen, enjoy, understand and come along with me on the journey. Meet Jack too. If you want to download my own audiobooks at an insanely discounted price that ensure no cut goes to the big boys (you know who they are) and you support my work, then check out Horror Stories For Halloween by Tony Walker: https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween By the by, if you want to sign up as a Patreon, that would be good. https://www.patreon.com/barcud If you want to just buy me a coffee to keep me awake (though these days I don't need much help to do that) then hit here: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker Get a free audiobook and ebook here: https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire Support this podcast

SO2E52 The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Get a great discount on my Horror Stories For Halloween audiobook & ebook bundle https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween (https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween) The Pomegranate Seed The pomegranate seed is a reference to the myth of Persephone and Demeter. Winter and Spring and the Lord of the Underworld. In a sense Mother and daughter are the same, and one aspect of the woman spends time in the world of the dead, while the other walks the world of the living. Kenneth disappears to see about ‘their passages.’ It is clear that it is his passage over the river Styx to the underworld that he finally arranges. He has been so attached to the ghost of his late wife, that he cannot escape her as she dominated him in life. He wants to escape, he wants to live with his new wife and have new experiences, but he is simply not strong enough to make it so. Charlotte represents the living, mortal world while Elise Ashby represents death. In that sense it is a story about a choice that all of us have to make: to live in this world and be of it and do what work it sets before us or spend our time dreaming of the underworld whence we came and to which we shall return. Deep for a Monday morning, I feel. However, Wharton’s skill as an observer of human behaviour also shines in this story, and for most of the time it is the skilful chronicle of that commonplace (sadly) or married life—the suspicion that our lover’s heart is tethered elsewhere. Trivial, but profoundly upsetting. Charlotte spends a lot of time arguing this when then that way that her husband is having an affair, trying to convince herself in a way that rings very true. Old Mrs Ashby plays the role of the mother goddess who loses her son in this case to the Underworld. This doesn’t totally fit. But she is on the side of life, despite her age, and she supports Charlotte and regrets her son’s attachment to his late wife. In construction there are four parts. We begin with a scene of Charlotte’s unsettledness, standing at the door. What had been her haven now disquiets her and she finds no comfort in modern New York or inside in her home that she once loved.  She coveted the house when it was Elise’s and of course it has always remained Elises and again this is the story of the second wife who is dutiful and loving but is reminded by the possessions and moments and indeed children that she can never really supplant the first. Iff the first wife had been unfaithful then it would be easier, but by dying while he still loved her this has made the second wife’s job impossible. She can never win. Wharton raises questions throughout: what are the letters? Who are they from? Did he love this other woman? But she lays hints as the tension builds that these are not normal letters, they are grey, the handwriting is androgynous (perhaps because Elise is not a woman but a spirit? And therefore neither male nor female in that vague gray underworld?) But its a slow burn and the tension is that of a story about adultery, until it is revealed at the end to be a story about death’s hold on the living. Depressed now? She uses a lot of Britishisms: holiday for vacation, fortnight for two weeks —I don’t think Edith Wharton played Fortnite. The ending is ambiguous. Wharton prefers subtle hints rather than clear resolutions in her ghost stories, listen to Bewitched or Mr Jones on this channel for that. But it seems to me that both the Old Mrs Ashby and Charlotte are creatures of the daylight world and so they pretend that Kenneth’s disappearance is a daylight occurrence when they know that he has gone down into the night world. Still, they act as is their natures, and call the everyday police. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback... Support this podcast

S02E51 The Pomegranate Seed by Edith Wharton

Towards the end of the American Civil War in north west Arkansas, an old woman is faced with a dilemma. Her son is dead after falling in battle, and her son's wife went missing in the woods on hearing the news. Something happened to her in the woods, something that means the old woman's precious grandson is sick. He's sick, and something is coming over the hill. This story is followed by an interview with the author of the story Dragoon. Get a great discount on my Horror Stories For Halloween audiobook & ebook bundle https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween (https://spirit.ghostpod.org/horror-stories-for-halloween) Support this podcast

S0250 Dragoon by DeWayne Hayes

Well after midnight in a newsroom high up above the city, a strange story comes tip-tapping in down the night wire. John Morgan, the night wire expert, turns the morse code into words and the words reveal a mystery. A town no one has heard of is brought to a standstill by a weird fog. This weird fog rolls right out of the graveyard and in it are seen twisted wailing forms. But this tale is stranger even that that. But you'll have to listen to find out why. This pulp story from 1926 was a favourite of HP Lovecraft. Even its author is an enigma. Or is he? The story inspired Stephen King to write The Mist in 1981 which was made into the 2007 movie of the same name. "H. F. Arnold was an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, ‘The Night Wire’ (1926), first published in Weird Tales, is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story. " Arnold’s only other published stories were The City of Iron Cubes in the March/April 1926 edition of Weird Tales, and When Atlantis Was in the October and December 1937 issues of Amazing Stories.  Who is who is an enigma. The content of The Night Wire suggests he was a newspaper man in a big city in the USA. We have dates for his life as 1902 until 1963, making him 61 at the time of his death, and 24 when The Night Wire was published. How we know  his dates, I’m not certain. If you read most anthologies, we don’t even know if he was really called H F Arnold.  But then someone called William Russo did some research and found out a lot about him. Here’s a link to the full story https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire) It turns out that he was Henry Ferris Arnold who graduated from the Mid-West and went to work in Hollywood working in publicity (we’d call it marketing now) for movies. He started at Goldwyn Studies and became Sam Goldwyn’s Director of Publicity.  There’s something about that night radio DJ thing. Play Misty for me. Other associations are being on night shift.  Film noir.  The Weird Anthology https://amzn.to/3kF1LSr (https://amzn.to/3kF1LSr) The Night Wire read by by E F French https://youtu.be/-SyT6Xga0Eo (YouTube) William Russo’s review on Good Reads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18131763-the-night-wire (The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold) Story suggestions by email please Classicghostpodcast@gmail.com If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

S02E49 The Night Wire by H F Arnold

The First Sheaf is a folk horror story set in the backwaters of rural England. A new vicar goes to a rural parish that has suffered a terrible drought. The local folk shun him and want nothing of his god. He fears they have other gods of their own. Then a young girl goes missing, and the vicar's son must search out the mystery of the round field and pay a terrible price for the knowledge he gains. Think The Wicker Man meets John Barleycorn. Folk horror before they invented the term 'folk horror' Download a my free audiobook https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire (https://bit.ly/dalstonvampire)  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

The First Sheaf by H R Wakefield

Over in the Wild West of Wales, (despite him calling it England, the village is Croes y Ceiliog after all), strange signs appear, a girl disappears and it takes a man from London to work out the evil truth. This is the audio extracted from the edited version of my live reading of the Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen. All the audio is there (some of the live cut out) and it is as polished as well as I can do. There are two microphones in this: the streamed version which is compressed and a little fuzzy and the camera microphone which is tinny. With those warnings, listen if you dare.  PS. An end of summer bargain for you:You can still get my London Horror Stories Full Audiobook plus the Ebook at the insanely discounted price of £2.99, which is not much dollar, and if you buy from my directly, then we don’t give the non-tax paying giants (you know who I mean) their fat cut. https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories (https://mailchi.mp/tonywalker/london-horror-stories) Support this podcast

The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen

In which a writer starts to receive mysterious and increasingly menacing postcards from an apparent stranger. He asks his friends what to do. He goes to the police. And then it all becomes clear. L P Hartley Leslie Poles Harltey was born in Cambridgeshire in England in 1895 and died aged 76 in London England. L P was  educated first at  home and then a Preparatory School before going to  Harrow School–— a private school in North London, where he had won a scholarship.  His father was not particularly high class, he was a solicitor and owned a brickyard.  After Harrow, L P went to Oxford to study (or ‘read’) as they say at Oxbridge, Modern History. This was in 1915. In 1917 he joined the army. I think he was conscripted. He was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment but never saw active service due to having a weak heart. He was a famous hypochondriac in fact and had what we would call these days a health anxiety.  In 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown and soon after this started spending long periods in Venice in Italy where he owned his own gondola. He had a particular male friend David Cecil. And this was in a time when being gay was illegal and punishable by time in prison so gay people did not come out. It was believed that he was gay.  After the war he returned to complete his degree Oxford, and even at that time he had an ambition to be a writer.   His first published work was in Oxford Poetry.  And he became editor of Oxford Outlook. He was a lifelong friend of Cynthia Asquith who, as we know, was a famous author of ghost stories and editor of the Pan Horror series for a while.  He mixed in aristocratic circles after graduation and worked as a book reviewer, but his own work did not initially find success and he was depressed.  In 1924, his first volume Night Fears was published and it was well received critically and his work was supported by many influential writers including Cynthia Asquith. He had moderate to good success with later novels, but his major success was with The Go-Between. He was named after Virginia Woolf’s father. Hartley as a youngster was a fan of Edgar Allen Poe.  He named his influences as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Emily Bronte, but I find his straightforward style different from all of these.  His most famous quote is possibly: The Past Is Another Country. They do things differently there. W S This is a cracking little story and very simple in structure. We have a writer, and like all writers, he is neurotic about his work. He has had some success, but still harbours doubts.  Then he starts getting postcards from someone with the same initials as himself, though he doesn’t notice the initials as being significant at first. The story uses the ticking clock technique of modern thrillers.  Danger is approaching step by step getting closer and closer: think Die Hard. Though if you didn’t know British geography you might not know that Forfar is distant and Coventry close to the West Country town where Walter Streeter lives.  Nevertheless, each postcard brings the doom closer. There is some nice foreshadowing.  The postcard writer keeps promising a hearty handshake and it is only at the end we are told the character William Stainsforth has only one hand.  The comment that the author doesn’t give any depth to his characters is also a piece of foreshadowing. We are told near the end that the character is a policeman in the story.  This is after the policeman has arrived outside to keep guard. The twist is in the phone call from the real police who apologise for not sending an officer. Who then is the policeman outside?  I wonder if it would not have been more effective if we had known that the character was a policeman but it might be hard to include that snippet without giving the game away too early. The secret with a twist is to place the information in Support this podcast

S02E47 W S By L P Hartley

Joan Aiken Joan Delano Aiken was the daughter of Conrad Aiken, whose story Mr Arcularis we read out on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. Her elder sister Jane was a writer and her brother John was a chemist. Her father, being a poet presumably appreciated the para-rhyming of their names. Joan was born while her father was domiciled in England,  on Mermaid Street in Rye in East Sussex in 1924. She died in Petworth West Sussex in 2004. She went to a private school in Oxford but did not go to University. Instead she wrote stories. Her first story appeared on the BBC Children’s Hour in 1941 when she was seventeen.  After the death of her first husband she went to work as an editor on magazines. She is most famous for her children’s fiction, notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea. Her stories have almost a magical realism feel (a term which of course really belongs to South American literature) in that she uses what appear to be genuine historical settings subtly twisted to become fantasy.  Many of her novels have supernatural themes, such as the Shadow Guests and the Haunting of Lamb House. She won many awards for her fiction during her lifetime.  The Lodgers is in her collection of short supernatural stories A Touch of Chill.    Not knowing what to make of it, I went on Good Reads and found it got an average of three stars out of five with most reviewers not being clear about what the story is about. The best I can do is to suggest that this is a mid-20th Century story where small town life is subverted into the weird as people like Robert Aickman were doing. I wonder whether the deliberate cultivation of the irrational is taking place here where the weird is not meant to be understood rationally, but there to create atmosphere. The weird slovenly, drunken Colegates come from the Middle East. They have odd paraphernalia such as the 'collecting jar' which seems to be vaguely occult. The reference to the Egyptians and the black and white pillars put me in mid of the ritual magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It seems that the Colegates collect the souls of children. In the end, I think young Bob's soul flies out of the window and Desmond Colegate pursues it like a butterfly hunter into the graveyard where the exertion gives him a stroke of a heart attack. But I may be wrong. The boy, and the vet's boy who the Colegate also taught games of cards to (the cards seem important -- Tarot???) both die of natural causes. Are the Colegates then a drunken version of the Grim Reaper? They don't cause the death, they are just around to harvest the souls? If you know, tell me! If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here [Become A Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/barcud (https://www.patreon.com/barcud)) For Bonus Stories Or [buy me a coffee](https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker)) , if you’d like to keep me working. [Music](https://bit.ly/somecomeback (https://bit.ly/somecomeback)) by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

S02E46 The Lodgers by Joan Aiken

Edith Bagnold Edith Bagnold, later Lady Jones was born in 1889 in Rochester, Kent and died in 1981 in London . She was most famous for her novel *National Velvet* published in 1935, which was made into a famous film that starred Elizabeth Taylor.   Her father was a Colonel in the  British Army, and she was mainly brought up in Jamaica.  She loved riding horses when she was in Jamaica and that inspired National Velvet.  She went to art school in London and worked for Frank Harris, an Irish-American novelist and had an affair with him. She was very Bohemian and mixed with artists and free-thinkers. During the First World War she became a nurse but was critical of the way the hospitals were won and got sacked. She became a driver for the army in France and wrote a memoir of her time dung that. In 1920 she became the wife of Sir Roderick Jones and therefore became Lady Jones.  they lived on the south coast of England near Brighton. They had a house in London and were neighbours of Winston Churchill and Jacob Epstein. Her great-grand-daughter was Samantha, wife of the recent British Prime Minister, David Cameron.   Virginia Woolf called her ‘a scallywag who married a very rich man.’ Woolf thought that Bagnold had begun as a rebel and Bohemian but ended up being conventionally rich with a butler.  Read this article about Bagnold. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre (Upstairs, downstairs | Margaret Drabble | The Guardian) If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

S02E45 The Amorous Ghost by Enid Bagnold

H G Wells Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent just outside London. He Died aged 79 at his grand house in Regent’s Park in London. He was a scientist by training having got his degree at Imperial College London (the Royal College of Science).  He was a biologist with a strong interest in Darwin and Natural Selection.  His early adult life was one of financial insecurity and job after job teaching and he earned his Bachelor of Science in 1890 through the University of London’s external teaching scheme.  In 1893 while teaching A A Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh) at a school in London, he published a biology text book. By 1895 he was contributing stories and articles to different periodicals.  Politically, he was a Socialist. His mother was a domestic servant and his father had been a servant gardener though later became a professional cricketer for the Kent county team and who had a sports shop which didn’t do very well.   Because his family struggled financially, they put him out as an apprentice as a draper. He worked a thirteen hour day and slept in a dormitory and his later novels Kipps and The History of Mr Polly describe this lower middle class or tradesmen’s life. He suffered from Diabetes and founded the Diabetic Association in 1934. He was a progressive futurist who foresaw many modern developments such as tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons and satellite TV. His books deal with time travel (The Time Machine) and alien invasion (The War of the Worlds). The Door in The Wall by H G Wells The Door in the Wall was first published in The Daily Chronicle in 1906, when he was forty, and reprinted in Wells’s collection The Door In The Wall And Other Stories published in 1911. It is one of Wells’s most well-known stories, and he wrote at least a hundred short stories, mostly in the early part of his career. The story is told to Redmond, and this device of having a story introduced to an otherwise blank hearer, who then learns of the ending of the story and makes his own conclusion, is well known. In fact more Victorian and Edwardian supernatural stories than not begin in this style (e.g. The Turn of The Screw, many stories of M R James) and it was copied by Ray Russell in the 1960s in his Sardonicus series when he wanted to write as if the story were Victorian. The way Wallace recounts the story to Redmond is set out from the beginning as questioning whether Redmond should believe him. He says early on that he does, and at the end confirms this again. On balance, as fabulous as the story is, he chooses to believe Wallace. The hero of the story, is Lionel Wallace a successful politician. And it is this success that is the central theme to the story, which to me is about putting off spiritual contentment in favour of worldly obligations time after time, until in the end, he makes the right, and final choice. Every time he passes by the door and chooses a worldly goal rather that trying the door he is sure in his heart the door is unlocked and only waiting for him to step inside.  The first time he goes in, he is a child. The second time he is a busy schoolboy intent on not being late for school. The third time he is on his way to his Oxford entry exam, the fourth time he is on his way to an important appointment, which seemed to be to be with a lover. There is a long gap and he is finally a successful politician, overworked with a tarnish beginning to spread on this world and he becomes more receptive to the message. He sees the door three times just when he is finding this world burdensome. He is determined that he would go in through the door.  Wallace at this time is around forty years old, which was Wells’s age at the time he wrote the story.  He passes the door on an urgent vote in the House  of Commons which he can’t miss. The next time he was rushing to say goodbye to his father who was dying. The third time was only a week before Wallace... Support this podcast

S02E44 The Door In The Wall by H. G. Wells

The Grey Woman Part 3In which Anna and Amante go on the run, meet some good souls, some bad ones and accomplish miracles with corks and home-made walnut dye, thus saving their lives. Will it all go right in the end? You will have to listen, won't you? Random Notes For Part 3Disguises. Victorians loved disguises. Think of Sherlock Holmes The beautiful Ann breaks one of her front teeth! No one later remarks on this. Amante has corks in her cheeks to alter the shape of her face. A great idea, but did she keep them in all the time? It might make talking tricky. I think Mrs Gaskell got too carried away with the fun of disguises to think about its sustainability In the blacksmith’s smithy, when M. De La Tourelle turns up, he describes his wife as having run off with a base profligate woman from Paris. It’s a good job he didn’t say she was Norman as that would have been more likely to give the game away. Phew. The Countess de Roeder (for it is she) shies away from the common room “full of evil smells and promiscuous company”. I’ve been in pubs like that. We are set up for this by the description of her being a fair-haired young woman speaking German French who had hair that Amante reminds Anna is the same colour as hers used to be before they cut it off and burned it in the stove. The Murder of the Countess De Roeder sets up the fate of M. De La Tourelle as we ultimately find out. However, in a modern novel, or film, it would be urged that the protagonist confronted and brought about the doom of the villain, not some minor character never seen (the Baron de Roeder). We get word of the crooked jeweller a few times just dropped in. I think the subtle hinting at this is very well done “Ainsi le Chauffeurs se vengent” means “Number 1: Thus the Bandits Revenge Themselves” Amante’s father was a tailor in Rouen, but earlier, Mrs Gaskell told us that Amante’s father was a Norman father. And then her complexion goes from roses and lilies to ashen grey. It’s a nice touch that M. De La Tourelle looks up and doesn’t recognise her. This emphasises her unfair transformation into The Grey Woman. I guess the daughter can’t marry Maurice de Poissy because her natural father killed his father? She slips this in at the end as an additional, but arguably unneccesarry other than for the sheer joy readers take in twists. But it also allowed me to finish in true thriller style with a revelatory sentence with a duh-duh-duh rhythm. The way this is written made me narrate it in short rhythmic bursts. I think this is due to her sentence structure. I’ve only been to Heidelberg once, but I liked it immensely and would like to go back. Next week we are reading another listener request. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here...  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

S02E43 The Grey Woman by Elizabeth Gaskell Part Three.

Brief NotesTrusty Amanate is someone she can talk to. The expedition by candlelight through the castle passages The withheld letters She is a prisoner Anna bites out a chunk of her hand to keep her fear from overcoming her while she’s under the table. She later breaks one of her front teeth. She’s rough. The spying servants The Chauffeurs are not drivers but robbers. The gendarmes are gendarmes though. A rollicking boys own story, but for girls because it includes love. Amante is fearless, she can beard Lefebvre, but she is scared of the servants as she knows about them. Her husband buys her gifts and makes her a flower garden. So, he must love her in his own way. I think he probably does, or why entertain her? We find the reason for M. De La Tourelle’s frequent absences. He is not away at some distant estate at all. If You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here  https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus Stories Or  https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working.  https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music)  by The Heartwood Institute Support this podcast

S02E42 The Grey Woman by Mrs Gaskell Part Two

The Grey Woman by Mrs Elizabeth GaskellElizabeth GaskellElizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810 and died in the country in Hampshire in 1865. She was one of the most famous women novelists of the Victorian period. As well as being a novelist, she was a biographer and wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte which was published in 1857. Apparently she did a bit of editing and only put in the nice things in Charlotte Bronte’s biography, judging herself that certain aspects should be left out. Her most famous novels are Cranford, published between 1851 and 1857, North and South between 1854 and 1855, and Wives and Daughters published in 1865—the year of her death. Her father was Keeper of the Treasury Records and she was born in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London which is now a billionaires row and was probably for the well-to-do even in 1810. Her mother was from the North of England which may have prompted her interest in the division between the North of England dominated by the Industrial Revolution and the south of England which did not have the heavy industries of coal and iron extraction. She spent much of her childhood in Cheshire in the North. She also spent time in Newcastle upon Tyne. When she was married she lived in Manchester. She visited Edinburgh and Whitby and then when she visited a house she had both in Hampshire, died suddenly of a heart attack. Unlike some women of her class, she did attend school and was educated privately at Stratford Upon Avon. She read the classics and travelogues sent to her from her brother in the navy. The Grey WomanThis story was published by Mrs Gaskell in 1865 in London in a collection known as *The Grey Woman & Other Tales*. By this time, Mrs Gaskell was a the very famous author of a number of blockbuster novels. This was also the year in which she suddenly died. She was influenced by German literature and travelled in Germany in 1841. A number of her short stories, not just her ghost stories, have a German theme or setting. One of the themes of the story is the difference between the sophisticated and effete French and the simple straightforward Germans and the rivalry and mistrust between them. The first thing that strikes our ear (or our eye) is the vivid descriptions of the mill, the gardens, the scoured dishes, the red-tiled floor and the river Neckar murmuring outside the mill. Gaskell is a great writer of descriptions and talented at the ancient rhetorical art of *enargia*—which is the skill of drawing the listener into a scene by activating each of their senses through well-written description. This description of the rain in the garden of the mill turned cafe strikes me that it might have been lifted from a real incident that happened to Gaskell while she was in Germany and borrowed into her writing. Again we see the distance device. To quote M R James (again) — ghost stories should be distanced from the reader through placing them at a pint in the past far enough away so we can believe things we wouldn’t accept if they were set in our modern world but close enough so that we can still identify with the situations in it —so this story written in the late 1840s say at the earliest has its incident in 1789. Early on we get a little foreshadowing: we are told that the portrait of Anna Scherer shows she was very beautiful, which is important later in the story as explaining how she married the French nobleman, even though only from a miller’s family, and also that in the portrait she is full of colour, but lost that colour due to fright. The details of this fright are not available when they are mentioned. That sets us up for a ghost story. The next mystery is when she returns to the mill and sees her brother Fritz and his evil wife Babette again. They thought her dead. Why? Another little open loop for us. And then Anna begins the story of her early life and it sounds like a German version of The Waltons at the Old Mill. Contrast... Support this podcast

S02E41 The Grey Woman by Elizabeth Gaskell Part One

A comic ghost story from Edwardian London–perfect to relax to and not scary at all. The Lost Tragedy by Denis Mackail Denis Mackail was born in 1892  in London. His mother was the daughter of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.  His father was Scottish, born on the Isle of Bute, and later Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and a specialist in Latin Literature and also President of the British Academy.  His sister was also a novelist. He was more distantly related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, a British prime minister. Denis Mackail was born into some privilege. His most famous novel Greenery Street deals with social manners in the upper-middle class London he knew. As such, this story is interesting as it deals with the doings of lower middle class tradesmen such as book-dealers.  Mackail must have known something of the trade to paint it so well. Mackail suffered from ill-health when he was a young man and though he worked as a stage-set designer in the theatre in London, he was not fit enough to fight in the First World War.  I am not clear what his physical health problems were but he suffered from anxiety himself and had what is called a ‘nervous breakdown.’ Despite his comfortable early start he had some financial troubles and had to write to supplement his income. He published a novel every year from 1920 until 1938. He moved in literary circles and was a friend of A A Milne and P G Wodehouse, both famous for their light-hearted and comic writing.  He wrote the official biography of J M Barrie (the author of Peter Pan) and but after the death of his wife in 1949 he never wrote another thing. Despite that he lived another twenty-two years, dying in London in 1971 at the age of seventy-nine. Genre expectations. Writers can expect to get excoriated if they defy genre expectations. If you write a Romance be that clean or mucky (I don’t really read either to be honest)  or Space Opera that is not huge in scale, or Heaven Forbid ‘LitRPG’ that doesn’t have enough stats in it, then the hard-core genre reader will cut you down to size with a one-star review. I say this because this may be a ghost story, but it is a comic ghost story and that genre has its own tropes and conventions, not least the wise cracking spectre as in the Ben and William show in this story.  I hope listeners were not too disappointed. The Lost Tragedy is a well constructed tale. We have the set up of Shakespeare as someone they recognise but whose name they can’t place, who speaks with a ‘west-country’ accent, which might relate to the Warwickshire accent of Stratford Upon Avon. It is very common for ghost stories to be related as ‘frame stories’ where the events are told to an unconnected person by someone who has first-hand, but now long previous association with the events. It is also in keeping with M R James’s dictum that ghost stories should be removed from the every day by placing them remotely in distance or time in that it happened when Mr Bunstable was a young man. There is a tradition of the comic ghost story. This story reminded me somewhat of the Ghost Ship by Richard Middleton. This humorous tale of a ghostly pirate ship was published in 1912 but as Middleton killed himself in 1911, was written before that. I only mention the date because it was part of a trend of ghost stories with jokey spectres which perhaps began with Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost  published in 1887 and have a noble tradition through Casper The Friendly Ghost who first appeared in 1945 and  the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks 1971. I also liked the description of the bookshop. It reminded me both of Black Books on the TV, the old Foyles I used to know on Charing Cross Road and in a way of Cynthia Asquith’s The Corner Shop (which is another London shop that you dip into out of the London fog).  There is a shop like this in Victoria Walker’s The Winter of Enchantment... Support this podcast

S02E40 The Lost Tragedy by Denis Mackail

Classic Ghost Stories and Weird Tales read by Tony Walker. At least once a week, we broadcast a new classic ghost story or weird tale.

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Classic Ghost Stories

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