Et in Sempiternum Pereant by Charles Williams
Lord Arglay, retired Chief Justice and seeker of forgotten knowledge, sets out for a quiet scholarly errand in the English countryside—only to find the landscape subtly warped, time grown strangely dense, and a chimney smoking where no fire burns. Drawn by a narrow path to a door that seems to wait for him alone, he enters a place where memory thickens, boundaries blur, and the air presses with the weight of something ancient and unyielding. Each step leads him deeper into a mystery that threatens not just understanding, but escape itself.
First published in The London Mercury, December 1935.
Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a British novelist, poet, and critic associated with the Inklings. He wrote metaphysical thrillers—War in Heaven, Descent into Hell, All Hallows’ Eve—exploring theology, myth, and the supernatural.
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The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke
A man walks the London streets, thin as a shadow, his eyes open but unseeing. He has no destination, yet something leads him — as if by an unseen hand — to a quiet room where the ordinary will no longer hold. What follows is not terror in the usual sense, but a slow unravelling, as if the familiar fabric of life has been touched by something that should have remained at rest.
The Hollow Man by Thomas Burke first appeared in Collier’s on 14 October 1933, and was later collected in Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales (Constable, 1935).
Thomas Burke (1886–1945) was a British author best known for his tales of London’s hidden quarters, especially Limehouse. He wrote across fiction, essays, and poetry, blending realism with the uncanny.
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A Visitor from Down Under by L. P. Hartley
On a wet and foggy evening in post-war London, a man arrives at a modest hotel carrying the calm assurance of wealth and distance. But something else arrives that night too—quietly, without fuss, with a newspaper clipping and a request for a room. In the lounge, the sounds of unseen children drift through the walls. In his sleep, the man dreams of trees and dead branches. And outside, the fog thickens.
*“A Visitor from Down Under” first appeared in *The London Magazine* and was later collected in *The Travelling Grave and Other Stories* (1948). It was included in *The Collected Macabre Stories of L. P. Hartley* (Tartarus Press, 2001).*
L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) was an English novelist and short story writer, best known for *The Go-Between*. Though celebrated for his novels, his ghost stories reveal a quieter, colder kind of terror.
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Old Man's Beard by H. Russell Wakefield
At Brinton-on-Sea, the summer passed in gentle rhythms. Mariella and her young fiancé read side by side on the beach, swam together in the quiet sea, while her parents looked on from their chairs. Nothing seemed amiss. But something was. She said nothing, yet her smiles grew thinner, her sleep unsettled. Her eyes lingered too long on nothing at all. And in the evenings, the air inside the house felt changed—thickened, as if it held its breath. Whatever troubled her was unseen, but it was growing.
Publication details:
“Old Man’s Beard” was first published in Old Man’s Beard: Fifteen Disturbing Tales by Geoffrey Bles in 1929.
Author biography:
H. R. Wakefield (1888–1964) was a British writer and publisher, known for ghost stories that marry restrained supernatural suggestion with psychological unease. He brought the Edwardian tale into the modern world with quiet menace.
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The Little Ghost by Hugh Walpole
In an old house by the Glebeshire coast, silence lingers more heavily than the sound of the sea. Its walls hold an atmosphere of watchfulness, as though the house itself remembers lives once lived within it. To a grieving visitor, it offers not terror but something stranger, something that cannot easily be explained.
“The Little Ghost” by Hugh Walpole was first published in When Churchyards Yawn (1931), edited by Cynthia Asquith, and later collected in Walpole’s own volume All Souls’ Night (1931).
Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) was a bestselling English novelist and short story writer. He is remembered for his Lake District saga The Herries Chronicle and for a handful of haunting tales that combine psychological insight with Gothic atmosphere.
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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!
Canada - english