Classic Ghost Stories

Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the fire that claimed a child's life twelve years ago. For Claude Halyard, it is an earthly paradise reclaimed. For his wife Laura, it is a home that seems to cast a spell—lovely, peaceful, and somehow waiting.

Their daughter Hyacinth finds the old day nursery and makes it her own. She plays alone there for hours, running invisible races, laughing at jokes only she can hear. She is never lonely, she insists. She has a friend.

Laura begins to notice small impossibilities: a rocking horse galloping in an empty room, its stirrups held forward. Candles lit on a Christmas tree when no one has been near. The faint sound of a child's gramophone playing "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play."

Claude grows tense, strained, building walls of silence his wife cannot penetrate. He speaks of leaving. He cannot say why.

But Hyacinth has made a promise to her playmate. And some promises, once given, cannot be broken—even when the one who waits to claim them has been dead for twelve years.

"The Playfellow" by Lady Cynthia Asquith was first published in This Mortal Coil (Arkham House, 1947), later reissued in the UK as What Dreams May Come (Rich & Cowan, 1951).

Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) was J. M. Barrie's secretary, a distinguished memoirist and biographer, and editor of the influential Ghost Book series. Her own supernatural fiction is characterized by restraint, psychological insight, and civilized unease.

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Let's go Gothick. Get your pitchfork. Get your burning brand. We're off to the castle to see the count.

The Skeleton Count; or, The Vampire Mistress

In the shadowed corridors of a remote castle, Count Rodolph has made a bargain that no mortal should contemplate. The price of eternal life is high, and the methods by which it is secured are terrible beyond imagining.

When the corpse of the beautiful Bertha is carried from her grave to his study, something moves beneath the burial shroud. Eyes that had closed in death open once more, fixed upon the Count with a gaze both empty and aware. She will be his companion through the centuries—but what hungers might stir in one recalled from the tomb? What thoughts take root in a mind that has crossed the threshold between this world and the next?

The villagers whisper of strange lights in the tower. A child is found pale and trembling in the night. And in the castle, two beings who should not exist learn what it means to be neither living nor dead.

First published in 1828 in the English periodical The Casket, this early vampire tale predates both Carmilla and Dracula, exploring the dark territory between necromancy and vampirism.

The story has been attributed to Elizabeth Caroline Grey, though both the authorship and original publication remain subjects of scholarly dispute. If the attribution holds, it represents the first vampire story written and published by a woman.

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Jean-Pierre Ducharme and Ms. Esmeralda Spinoza are experts in the delicate architecture of the séance.

Inside the stillness of Julia Silverman’s game room, they prepare to reach across the divide for a daughter lost four months prior. It is a space of flickering candles, soft whispers, and the heavy weight of a mother’s grief.

But as the circle joins hands, the atmosphere begins to curdle. The familiar rituals start to feel unpredictable, and a coldness settles that no draft can explain.

They have spent years navigating the boundaries of the unknown, but tonight, those boundaries are no longer holding.

"A Message for Julia" was first broadcast on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast in January 2025.

Roy Sunter is a New Hampshire-based author.

Roy Sunter’s primary body of work can be found at Studio 8, with earlier archives located at ArcanumCafe. He writes under the handle "sasha"—the Russian diminutive of his middle name, Alexander.

His ongoing "chapbook" at Studio 8 features a collection of spontaneous prose, much of it in the zuihitsu style, alongside his photography.

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One of my own stories. The River Thames freezes and a Frost Fair is held for the first time since 1814. Two friends meet for a pint of Dark Ale in the ancient London riverside pub, the Water Witch. What could go wrong?

If you've never listened to one of my stories, give this one a try. Many people find them splendid.

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It's Boxing Night in Bruddersford and the pantomime's a disaster waiting to happen. The company's second-rate, the theatre's half empty, and the actor playing the Demon King hasn't turned up. Then he does—and suddenly everything changes. The performance takes on an authority it never had in rehearsal. The comedy gets sharper, the villain more convincing, and by the end something has happened that nobody can quite explain.

Priestley wrote this in 1931, drawing on his Bradford theatre days and the tradition of the pantomime devil who enters from stage left. The BBC adapted it for radio in 1962 with Ian Wallace, adding Radiophonic Workshop effects to a story that's as much about provincial theatre life as it is about the supernatural.

First published 1931. BBC Home Service radio adaptation December 1962.

Author: J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), Bradford-born novelist and playwright. Best known for The Good Companions, Angel Pavement, and An Inspector Calls. During the war his BBC radio talks reached audiences of 16 million.

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