The Haunted Dolls House by M R James

A young woman sits for a portrait, turning over a small gold box while her fiancé paints. Inside: three scarlet seeds, brought back from a place he'd rather forget. He warns her the story behind them will haunt her. She only laughs — she likes weird tales, and they never trouble her. But something was disturbed in that pyramid, something bound by an old promise to whoever broke her rest. The seeds are waiting. So is the curse. Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse first appeared in Frank Leslie's *The New World* on 16 January 1869, published under initials rather than a name. It vanished for over a century before being rediscovered in the 1990s as one of the earliest true "mummy's curse" stories. Its author was Louisa May Alcott, best known to the world as the creator of *Little Women*. Behind that respectable reputation, she spent years writing anonymous, blood-soaked thrillers — and this was one of the last. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ 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 — 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 — Smith is almost certain — 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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Lot 249

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 — 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 — 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 (1862–1936) was Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a distinguished medieval scholar — antiquarian interests that shaped his ghost stories as much as his day job. Go to get the full notes here:

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 — 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 — 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 (1867–1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories — his own term for them was "spook stories" — 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

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 — 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

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 (1822–1890) 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. ⭐ 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

A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — 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. ⭐ 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

In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne Delacroix, master of the estate, has heard enough. He is a rational man. He does not believe in werewolves. He has moulded the silver bullets himself, in the cellar, as a concession to superstition — nothing more. Tonight his sons will go out into the moonlight and put an end to it. But there is something in the way he says goodbye to Pierre. Something in the way he asks after the crucifix. Something in the reason he will not be going with them. The Werewolf Howls was first published in Weird Tales, November 1941. It is the final story Clifford Ball published before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps. Ball was born in New York City in 1908 and wrote just six stories, all for Weird Tales, between 1937 and 1941. He drowned accidentally in Baltimore in January 1947, aged thirty-eight.

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. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast 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 paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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 *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder

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. 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 paperback books: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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 *Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder