Classic Ghost Stories

The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen: classic ghost stories audio

This episode of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast brings you a classic ghost story from the weird tradition, told as audio fiction for the long dark evenings. On a winter night in London, a starving, educated young woman meets a courteous stranger under a gas lamp and finds herself drawn into his private universe. Professor Gregg is an ethnologist by trade, but his true life’s work is hidden in a single drawer: a vanished servant girl, a child lost on the mountains, a few lines of strange red writing on a limestone rock, and a dull black stone carved with characters no scholar can read. In a lonely Welsh valley, under a sky that looks older than history, those fragments begin to arrange themselves into a pattern that is nothing like the playful fairy stories of the fireside. Miss Lally, who began as a rationalist, discovers how thin the crust of ordinary life can be when one man is determined to follow his theory wherever it leads, and how easily the beautiful countryside can take on the aspect of an ancient ritual ground.

The Novel of the Black Seal was first published in 1895 as one of the interlinked tales within Arthur Machen’s episodic horror novel The Three Impostors. It has since been widely reprinted as a standalone classic of weird fiction and classic horror literature, and it sits comfortably among the best classic short stories of its period. Modern critical editions and public-domain texts are readily available, including online via Project Gutenberg Australia.

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a Welsh writer whose strange tales of occult survivals, pagan remnants, and visionary terror helped shape twentieth-century supernatural fiction. His work, admired by M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft, stands at the uneasy border where scholarly curiosity meets the older, darker strata of myth. Listeners who enjoy classic ghost tales and classic horror in audio form will find this one a late-night listen. Anyone who usually prefers cosy ghost stories should know that this one runs much colder than the fireside kind.
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The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft is a classic tale of cosmic horror, first published in Weird Tales in August 1931. One of Lovecraft's great stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, it introduces the mysterious Mi-Go and the terrible secrets lurking in the remote hills of Vermont.

When the great Vermont floods of 1927 send strange, swollen shapes down the rivers, the hill folk begin telling old stories again. They speak of winged creatures dwelling among the high peaks, creatures that have haunted the local imagination for generations.

Albert Wilmarth, a scholar of folklore at Miskatonic University, dismisses the rumours as superstition. Then a letter arrives from Henry Akeley, a reclusive farmer living in the hills, who claims to possess evidence that will change Wilmarth's mind.

As their correspondence deepens, Akeley's letters grow increasingly desperate. Strange voices are heard in the woods, mysterious visitors gather around his lonely farmhouse, and Wilmarth finds himself drawn towards the mountains to discover what is really happening.

But some knowledge comes at a terrible price.

The Whisperer in Darkness is Lovecraft at his most atmospheric: a slow-burning supernatural mystery in which the rational world gives way to something vast, alien and profoundly unsettling.

Our Halloween 2026 special continues the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast tradition of settling in with a long and properly disturbing tale on the darkest night of the year.

Turn the lights down low, and keep an ear on the dark.

More classic horror and supernatural fiction

Classic Ghost Stories Podcast, narrated by Tony Walker, brings you Gothic horror, Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, weird fiction and forgotten tales of the supernatural.

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The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel | Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

On a nameless rock in the far northern sea stands a brass house chained against storm and tide. An old friend answers a summons, finding a family on the brink of extinction and an ocean roar so loud that spoken words become useless.

Join us for M. P. Shiel’s masterwork of Edwardian dread, The House of Sounds. First published in 1911, this story remains an essential highlight of classic horror literature and Edwardian weird fiction. If you prefer deep atmospheric dread over cosy ghost stories, this tale offers the relentless tension loved by fans of Bram Stoker and early 20th-century macabre tales.

In this episode:

- Unabridged audio narration of The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel.

- Literary background on M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) and his contribution to classic horror literature.

Whether you are looking for bedtime ghost stories or classic horror audiobooks, please subscribe, leave a rating, and share the show!

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Mr Bessel is a conscientious man, and the experiment he agrees to try with his friend Vincey is undertaken in the spirit of honest enquiry. It takes place on a quiet evening, and it concerns nothing more alarming than how far one mind might reach toward another. Yet something has noticed what they are doing, and before long Mr Bessel will have found that the self he has always taken for granted is far less secure than he supposed, and that some questions, once asked, are answered.

First published in The Strand Magazine, November 1898.
Collected in Twelve Stories and a Dream (Macmillan, 1903) and reprinted in Weird Tales, November 1925.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English novelist and journalist, a founder of science fiction best known for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
A student of T. H. Huxley, he brought a biologist's habit of mind to his scientific romances and to his short stories, a number of which edge toward the supernatural.

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A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around him no longer look quite as human as they once did. In his account there are no apparitions, no rattling chains, only the slow, unnerving sense that certain very ordinary people are quietly working to empty life of colour, choice, and meaning. As he talks, the calm, professional office itself begins to feel strangely less reassuring.

The Grey Ones was first published in 1952 and later collected in J. B. Priestley’s The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort (1953). It stands among Priestley’s late uncanny pieces, where post‑war England is haunted less by ghosts than by structures of power.

J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was an English novelist, playwright, essayist, and broadcaster, widely read and heard from the 1920s to the 1970s. Best known for works like The Good Companions and An Inspector Calls, he combined sharp social criticism with an abiding fascination with time, conscience, and the hidden pressures of modern life.

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