Welcome to All Things Eerie, a collection of spooky tales and strange stories of the invisible world and its scary inhabitants. Any time is a good time for a ghost story.
Paul Smethers, a former high school English teacher, is an Associate with the Adult Services Team at Main.
His special interests are poetry, ghost stories, and the French Bourbon dynasty.
Scottish folklore is full to the brim of exciting stories about otherworldly beings – be they fairies, sprites, pixies, brownies, or actual ghosts –the Scots love them all. Tonight’s story, “The Witch of Fife,” tells the story of a husband whose interest in his wife’s private affairs has dangerous and terrifying consequences.
Every reader who accepts Arthur Conan Doyle’s invitation to “come through the magic door” discovers a world in which the senses are a thin veneer over an unsettling psychological and spiritual realm, a realm in which possibilities have no limits.
Of all the ghost stories that haunt me presently - and there are many - none are so terrifying to me as those in which the ghost appears in broad daylight, shunning the shadows of dark corridors and the blowing curtains of dimly-lit rooms. This evening’s story begins with this premise and launches us into an adventure.
You may not recognize the name of tonight’s author, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but you have surely heard some of the more famous ideas from his writings.
Known for his Gothic or Victorian Gothic tales, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 – 1873) was the leading horror or ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century.
“The Monkey’s Paw” is a classic “three wishes” story that doubles as a horror story and a cautionary tale, reminding us that unintended consequences often accompany the best intentions.
When we last met, Mary Boyne’s husband had been missing for two weeks already, and we re-enter our story this evening as a rush of searching and inquiry as to his whereabouts spreads loudly throughout the environs of Lyng.
This evening we are presenting a ghost story by the esteemed and renowned American author Edith Wharton, who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
Although more renowned as an illustrator for children than as an author, Howard Pyle, nonetheless, greets us this evening with an eerie tale about witchcraft in colonial Americ
In this evening’s story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” we follow our protagonist, the homely Ichabod Crane, through the peaceful vales of Sleepy Hollow, a place swarming with the memories of ghosts, and one in particular, a headless horseman.
In our last encounter with our protagonist Ichabod Crane, we find him en route to visit the Van Tassels—and one in particular, their daughter Katrina—for an evening of celebration and perhaps—perhaps not—a little romance.
Tonight we revisit one of our old friends, H.G. Wells, who spins a tale about a man and his young son who find a magic shop in their foot travels about town, where each one gets an unforgettable experience at the hands of the shopman, who insists upon the reliability of the goods in his shop.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, whom we know simply as Mrs. Gaskell, wrote the following short story, “The Old Nurse’s Story,” at the invitation of Mr. Charles Dickens – whom we know to be a thoroughgoing aficionado of the ghostly tale.
“The Canterville Ghost" is a short story by Oscar Wilde about an American family who move to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead nobleman who killed his wife and was starved to death by his wife’s brothers.
An English writer nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times, H.G. Wells was prolific in many genres and is often called the Father of Science Fiction.
Tonight we draw our attention to one of the stories of Algernon Blackwood, a former Commander of the British Empire, who was one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre.
We introduce our new podcast with a very special ghost story, this one by a Mr. Dickens, whom we all know as one of the most prolific and beloved authors of the 19th century.
“The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” is the most famous example of a well-established genre at the time, that of the “apparition narrative,” which flourished in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and which developed in response to a crisis in religious belief that had been provoked by the works of Thomas Hobbes and the emergence of modern materialist philosophies.
