The Bus Conductor by E.F. Benson, read by Mike Bennett.

My friend Hugh Granger and I had just returned from a two days visit to the country where we

had been staying in a house of sinister repute which was supposed to be haunted by

ghosts of a peculiarly fearsome and truculent sort. The house itself was all that such a house

should be,

Jacobean and oak-paneled with long dark passages and high-vaulted rooms.

It stood also very remote and was encompassed by a wood of somber pines that muttered and whispered in the dark.

And all the time that we were there, a southwesterly gale with torrents of scolding rain had prevailed so that by day and night

weird noises moaned and fluted in the chimneys, a company of uneasy spirits held colloquy among the trees, and sudden tattoos

and tapings beckoned from the window panes.

But in spite of these surroundings, which were sufficient in themselves one would almost say to spontaneously generate occult phenomena, nothing of any description had occurred. I am bound to add also that my own state of mind was

peculiarly well adapted to receive or even invent the sights and sounds we had gone to seek, for I was, I confess, during the whole time that we were there, in a state of abject apprehension, and lay awake both nights, through hours of terrified unrest, afraid of the dark, yet more afraid of what a lighted candle might show me.

Hugh Granger, on the evening after our return to town, had dined with me, and after dinner, our

conversation, as was natural, soon came back to these entrancing topics.

But why Hugo Ghost Seeking, I cannot imagine, he said,

because your teeth were chattering and your eyes starting out of your head all the time you were there from sheer fright?

Or do you like being frightened?

Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways,

this is one of them.

Why, of course I like being frightened, I said.

I want to be made to creep and creep and creep.

Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.

...