A Haunted House by Charles Dickens

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A neglected Georgian house, shutters still, poplars trees surround it, whispering. Downstairs is a row of servant bells to call servants. One has a mysterious name and is reputed to ring when no one is there. Rumour speaks of a hooded figure and an owl; the corridors mutter with sounds of pipes, disconnected wires, and something harder to dismiss. By night, faces seem to change in the mirror; but by day, the rooms are ordinary. Servants won't stay there and then the owner organises an investigation, a ghost hunt, if you like. A society of guest who are to keep their counsel until Twelfth Night, listening for what remains and for the presence that speaks when the house is empty. First published as the Christmas number of All the Year Round (December 1859), a collaborative sequence framed and partly written by Charles Dickens. This reading includes Dickens’s chapters: “The Mortals in the House” and “The Ghost in Master B.’s Room.” Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a British novelist and social critic, author of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. He edited Household Words and All the Year Round, helping to make the Victorian Christmas ghost story a tradition. Join Our Podia Community for 100s of Ad Free Ghost Stories www.classicghost.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:39.3	Everybody come back.
0:41.3	Isn't that same?
0:43.3	You tried to get into the long drawer today, didn't you?
0:47.3	How do the dead come back with it?
0:49.3	What's the sequence of it?
0:52.3	Hello, and my name's Tony Walker, and I am the host and narrator of the classic ghost stories podcast.
0:59.0	I normally just do audio but things are moving on and I'm out of my comfort zone now but I feel obliged to do video.
1:11.6	Feel free to turn the screen off if you don't want to see it.
1:15.6	So what I'm going to do is I've got a bit of a habit of every Christmas time,
1:19.6	or every as we're getting into the winter, of doing a Charles Dickens story.
1:24.6	And I think I've done the famous one, the Christmas Carol, I know I have, I've done the chimes and I've done the famous one the Christmas Carol I know I have
1:29.2	I've done the chimes and I've done various others the goblins who stole the
1:34.5	sexton and various of his Christmas stories anyway this one from this book
1:38.3	here so it's a real person reading a real book with real breath from real
1:42.3	paper and with real glasses and it is the haunted house.
1:49.0	So let's get going and it's a completely new way of doing things for me this, so we'll see how we get on.
1:55.0	Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances and environed by none of the conventional ghostly
	...

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