Classic Ghost Stories

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.

📚 Buy my paperbacks here:

https://books.by/tony-walker-books

🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here:

payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

In a quiet curiosity shop in Paris, a shelf holds a collection of objects from another time. Our protagonist notices a small object that at first appears to be the broken foot of a Greek statue. The antiques dealer, however, explains that it is the mummified foot of a pharaoh’s daughter. The absurdity of a once royal foot now serving as a paperweight strikes them both. The dealer warns that the old pharaoh will not be pleased.

First published in 1840 as "Le Pied de momie" in Le Chroniqueur de Paris, The Mummy’s Foot is one of the earliest examples of French fantastic fiction.

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), a poet, novelist, and critic, was a leading figure of French Romanticism. Known for his belief in “art for art’s sake,” he helped define the fantastic and Gothic tale as a lasting literary form.

📚 Buy my paperbacks here:

https://books.by/tony-walker-books

🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here:

payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

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: