A weekly podcast that reads out ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales every week. Classic stories from the pens of the masters Occasionally, we feature living authors, but the majority are dead. Some perhaps are undead.
We go from cosy Edwardian ghost stories (E. F. Benson, Walter De La Mare) to Victorian supernatural mysteries (M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and Charles Dickens) to 20th-century Weird Tales (Robert Aickman, Fritz Lieber, Clark Ashton-Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft) and wander from the Gothic to the Odd, even to the Literary, and then back again.
Each episode is followed by Tony's take on the story, its author, its content and any literary considerations, which may be useful to students!
RSS
Spotify
Apple
Data updated on 03/10/2026
Recent rankings
Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.
Shared links between episodes and podcasts
Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.
Discover shows related to Classic Ghost Stories, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
The Residence at Whitminster by M R James
Thursday, October 1, 2026 β’ Duration 01:32:09
Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!
The prebendal residence at Whitminster stands in the shadow of its great collegiate church, solid, respectable, and comfortable. A young Irish lord came to lodge there once, in the 1730s, and his guardian noted his odd habits with mild concern. He grew more concerned as time went on. By the time he understood what the boy had been doing in the garden at night, it was already too late.
M. R. James tells this story the way a scholar reconstructs a cold case: from letters, diaries, servant's gossip, and family memory preserved at two removes. The witnesses contradict each other. The documents are partial. The truth, such as it is, arrives a century late. There is a glass that has absorbed what it once witnessed and will show it again, to the right viewer. There is a room that was sealed for reasons only partially explained. There is a press that has not been opened, and a note from a long-dead man advising that it should stay that way.
"The Residence at Whitminster" was first published in 1919 as the lead story of A Thin Ghost and Others, James's third collection, published by Edward Arnold. The collection takes its title from a line within this story.
Montague Rhodes James (1862β1936) was a medieval scholar, palaeographer, and Provost first of King's College Cambridge and then of Eton College. He is widely regarded as the finest writer of ghost stories in the English language.
By the way the print edition of my Sherlock Holmes puzzle story: The Cumberland Kidnapping is available now on Payhip
The Case of the Cumberland Kidnapping
The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E Wilkins Freeman
Season 7
Thursday, September 24, 2026 β’ Duration 01:05:59
An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.
Nobody in Ford Village will say anything. And then there's the rose-bush that flutters when there is no wind.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, better known for her hard-eyed portraits of small-town New England households, turns that same unsparing eye on a relationship that prizes respectability over truth. What starts as an ordinary of family obligation becomes something closer to a tragedy, and we never see it coming.
π Buy my paperbacks here:
https://books.by/tony-walker-books
ποΈ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here:
payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
This was a request, but fitted in with my current interest in mummies.
Read my full notes on the history of the Egyptian Mummy in Horror here:
https://www.classicghost.com/blog/the-egyptian-mummy-in-horror/
Old College, Oxford, in the last years of the nineteenth century. A young medical student named Abercrombie Smith shares a stair with a fellow he barely knows β a brilliant scholar of Eastern languages, whose rooms are crowded with the relics of a dead civilisation, and whose company he has been quietly warned against. Something is wrong with the sound that comes through the wall at night: a low, monotonous muttering, the same words over and over, in no language Smith can place. Enemies begin to suffer, one by one, in ways that leave no mark and no explanation. And in the corner of that cluttered room stands a thing purchased at auction, numbered like an item in a catalogue, upright, ancient, and β Smith is almost certain β not quite as still as it should be.
"Lot No. 249" was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1892.
Doyle is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he wrote extensively in the supernatural and horror genres throughout his career. He died in 1930, having remained a committed spiritualist to the end of his life.
π Buy my paperbacks here:
https://books.by/tony-walker-books
ποΈ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here:
payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
Lot 249
The Haunted Dolls House by M R James
Season 7
Friday, August 21, 2026 β’ Duration 56:07
Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses...
A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas β a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable block, a drawer of tiny embroidered clothes. He spends a happy evening setting its rooms in order, delighted with his find. There's no clock within earshot β none on the stair, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower.
And yet, at one in the morning, a bell tolls once.
"The Haunted Dolls' House" was first published in the Empire Review in February 1923, and later collected in M. R. James's A Warning to the Curious.
M. R. James (1862β1936) was Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a distinguished medieval scholar β antiquarian interests that shaped his ghost stories as much as his day job.
Go to get the full notes here:
The Face by E F Benson
Season 7
Friday, August 14, 2026 β’ Duration 01:06:33
London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate.
And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should β she has never had cause to wish for anything else, and she is grateful for it, in the quiet, unshowy way of someone who has never really been tested.
Until something from very long ago reaches forward and taps her on the shoulder.
Something she had put away so completely she'd almost convinced herself it was never real. A half-remembered thing from childhood, stirring now in the middle of the night.
She stops sleeping. She starts watching the dark corners of rooms.
Her doctor is kind, practical, entirely unworried. Nerves, he tells her β the heat, nothing more. What she needs is rest, and quiet, and a change of scene. A little village on the East Anglian coast, away from London, away for a while even from her husband. Somewhere she can put it all behind her.
She goes because she means to get well.
E.F. Benson's The Face.
*Publication: "The Face" first appeared in Hutchinson's Magazine in February 1924, and was collected four years later in E.F. Benson's Spook Stories* (Hutchinson & Co., 1928).
*About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867β1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories β his own term for them was "spook stories" β placed regularly in magazines like Pearson's and The Illustrated London News*.
I now have an archive where you can find stories more easily.
https://www.classicghost.com/the-archive/
Find Stories More Easily
A Professor of Egyptology by Guy Boothby
Season 7
Friday, August 7, 2026 β’ Duration 01:16:49
Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other β a man treated with strange deference by those who know him best, a man whose knowledge of the dead seems to run deeper than any book could teach. She will walk beside him through moonlit halls where the pharaohs sleep in glass cases,
"A Professor of Egyptology" first appeared in The Graphic on 10 December 1904, and was collected that same year in Guy Boothby's volume The Lady of the Island.
Boothby was an Australian-born novelist best known for his Dr Nikola thrillers, a writer of ferocious productivity who dictated up to six thousand words a day. He died suddenly in 1905, only months after this story appeared, at the age of thirty-seven.
Search the archive here
www.classicghost.com
The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous
Friday, July 31, 2026 β’ Duration 55:50
A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go.
He goes anyway.
There are things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs. Something in the gallery, after dark, when the fire burns low and the talk runs out. Those who see it together are marked by it, in ways that take a year to come due.
This is the story of what a house remembers, and what it does to those who are told to stay away, and don't.
Published anonymously in 1878, later reprinted with the tag "by the author of Freda." Modern editors tentatively attribute it to novelist Elizabeth Anna Hart, though the evidence remains circumstantial.
Elizabeth Anna Hart (1822β1890) was a London-born novelist and poet, cousin to Lewis Carroll, best remembered for her children's classic The Runaway and the novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal.
β Join my Patreon β
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
The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling
Season 7
Friday, July 24, 2026 β’ Duration 01:29:35
A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it β not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed somewhere else, by someone else, for reasons the walls should know nothing about. The question is not what haunts the house. The question is what was done to the dead.
"The House Surgeon" was first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1909 and collected in Actions and Reactions later that year.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and remains one of the most widely read English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
β Join my Patreon β
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