The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

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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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

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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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*To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

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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.
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*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.
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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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The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

 To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk 

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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. 

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support.

*To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

 To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk 

*Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback