Halloween Special: A Reading of Arthur Machen's "The White People"

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Originally released in 2018 but remixed for your listening pleasure, here's Phil reading Arthur Machen's classic weird tale, "The White People." Happy Halloween! Machen's "The White People" was discussed all the way back in ⁠Weird Studies episode 3⁠. Earlier this week, JF and Phil joined Conner Habib on his podcast to talk all about horror. It was a great conversation and we hope you'll give it a listen. Image: Photo of doll from Auckland War Memorial Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectre Vision Radio
0:03.3	Hello, fellow lover of dark matter.
0:11.2	If you've been suffering from a persistent desire
0:14.4	for just a little more unpleasantness in your life,
0:18.0	we have the answer.
0:21.0	The Nocturnal Transmissions Podcast.
0:26.0	It's a celebration of horror and just good old-fashioned storytelling.
0:33.6	Aliens, bullshit.
0:35.6	Oh, come on, Mr. Joint Chiefs, Chairman.
0:37.8	You were just in your bedroom one moment, and in the president's bedroom the next.
0:43.9	Who on this backwater planet could have done that?
0:46.9	It was crawling towards him.
0:49.9	And in the pale glow of the flashlight, the man saw a frightful gargoyle face thrust into his own.
0:57.3	It was the passionless death's head skull of a long dead corpse.
1:03.7	The Nocturnal Transmissions Podcast, now transmitting in association with Specter Vision Radio.
1:16.6	Come get some.
1:25.4	Hi, welcome to Weird Studies, or should I say, welcome to Weird Stories.
1:35.7	Back in 2018, when JF and I were starting out, we thought it might be nice to have regular features,
1:41.9	and one of our ideas was to develop a feature called
1:44.7	Weird Stories, where we would read a series of public domain short stories that we could then
1:49.7	discuss in flagship episodes. Like most of our ideas for regular features, this one never went
1:56.3	anywhere. We only got as far as recording two stories, M.R. James the Mesotent and Arthur Mackins, the white people,
	...

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