Hawley Bank Foundry by L T C Rolt

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2025

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beneath the soot and iron of England’s industrial heart, a foundry lies silent. Its furnaces once roared for empire, but the men are gone, the machinery rusted, the sand floor undisturbed. When war comes and the living return to wake it, something else stirs too—something that remembers.In the stillness of metal and dust, the past is waiting to be poured once more. “Hawley Bank Foundry” was first published in L. T. C. Rolt’s collection Sleep No More (1948), a landmark of twentieth-century British ghost fiction. L. T. C. Rolt (1910–1974) was an engineer, historian, and writer whose love of canals and craftsmanship gave his supernatural tales their distinctive sense of industrial melancholy and moral gravity. P S I've just had my Classic Detective Podcast demonetised by YouTube for some spurious reason, probably decided by a bot. So, if you're reading this and enjoying it please consider becoming a patreon https://patreon.com/barcud Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:27.5	Everybody dies, don't they?
0:39.3	Everybody come back.
0:42.3	Isn't that certain?
0:44.3	You tried to get into the locked drawn today, didn't you?
0:47.3	How do the dead comeback, mother?
0:50.3	What's the secrets of that they'd come back?
0:52.3	Hawley Bank Foundry by LTC wrote.
0:57.7	Mr George Frimley is a successful Birmingham businessman.
1:02.8	He is the managing director of Herbert Frimley and Company, iron founders of Brookend,
1:08.1	and he lives in a desirable detached residence situated conveniently near to the golf course at Sutton Coldfield.
1:16.6	His success is manifested to the world in the shape of an expensive car and an even more expensive wife,
1:23.6	whose blonde hair is of doubtful authenticity, and whose thirst for gin equals that of her husband
1:31.4	for whiskey. Their other hobbies are golf and bridge. In short, Mr. Frimley exhibits to the world
	...

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