Cushi by Christopher Woodforde

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

# Cushi - Teaser Script In the chalk hills of Hertfordshire lies Rooksgate Green, where tradition runs deeper than any rector's authority. Here, the sexton Cushi Holloway has his own peculiar ways—with hymn numbers, with cats, with the rituals of the churchyard. When the Reverend David Evans arrives from Cardiff, he sees only quaint village customs that need reforming. But some traditions have roots that go deeper than doctrine. And some authorities cannot be challenged. The villagers watch in silence as their world changes. Cushi says nothing, yet something shifts in the parish—something the new rector cannot quite understand. In the churchyard where the sexton tends his domain, an older power stirs. When the outside world intrudes upon Rooksgate Green, it will uncover more than anyone expected. Some things, once disturbed, refuse to rest quietly. Christopher Woodforde was an Anglican clergyman, Dean of Wells, and scholar of medieval stained glass who told supernatural tales to choirboys at New College, Oxford. He died in 1962, his stories published posthumously. Join Our Podia Community for 100s of Ad Free Ghost Stories www.classicghost.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Everybody dies, don't they?
0:10.4	Everybody come back, isn't that certain?
0:14.4	You tried to get into the locked drawn today, didn't you?
0:17.1	How do the dead comeback, mother?
0:20.0	What's the secrets of they'd come back?
0:22.3	Cushy by Christopher Woodford.
0:25.6	Although it is little more than 40 miles from London,
0:29.1	you would be likely to lose your way in trying to find
0:32.2	Rooksgate Green in Hertfordshire.
0:34.7	It's hidden away in the Chalk Hills and is curiously suited to its name.
0:40.1	The green is large and is still common ground. There is a pond and there are many geese.
0:46.0	Around it are scattered cottages of various sizes and considerable antiquity. A road runs through
0:52.8	the green. It is no longer gated, but the gateposts still remain at each end of the green.
0:58.9	Just beyond, there is a dilapidated, clunch-built church, which is the parish church of Cotterley,
1:05.5	although it's nearly three miles from that village. By the church is a very large and ugly red brick rectory surrounded by
1:13.4	tall elms in which the rooks live noisily. If you visited Rooksgate Green on a cold winter's day,
1:21.6	you would be sure that no place in England could be colder. If you visited it in high summer,
1:27.0	you would know how hot these chalk uplands can be.
1:31.3	It might not be expected that Rooksgate Green produces much news for the large world around it.
1:38.3	Indeed, it seems never to have done so. It once had an important fare, but this has dwindled to a few roundabout swings and
1:46.3	stalls which still arrive on the eve of the Feast of St John Baptist, under whose patronage
1:51.4	Cotterly Church was placed. Yet in the year 1939, there was a very strange occurrence which
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