Lost Hearts by M R James

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936) Join my patreon: https://patreon.com/barcud There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable. M. R. James wrote this story in 1895. His erudition encompassed the respectable and the less so, and he knew the darker currents of the archive as well as any man alive. Something — or someone — has been waiting in that house. Waiting, with considerable patience, for the third. "Lost Hearts" was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895, and collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904. Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval manuscript scholar, Provost of King's College Cambridge and later of Eton, and the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Everybody dies, don't they?
0:10.4	Everybody come back.
0:12.5	Isn't that so?
0:14.3	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
0:17.4	How do the dead come back, mother?
0:19.9	What's the secrets of dead come?
0:21.6	Lost Hearts by M.R. James.
0:25.6	It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811,
0:31.6	that a post-Chez drew up before the door of Aswo B. Hall in the heart of Lincolnshire.
0:35.6	The little boy, who was the only
0:37.8	passenger in the chaise and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest
0:43.2	curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening
0:48.4	of the hall door. He saw a tall square red brick house built in the reign of Anne, a stone-pillared porch had been
0:55.8	added in the purer classical style of 1790. The windows of the house were many, tall and narrow,
1:02.5	with small panes and thick white woodwork, a pediment pierced with a round window crowned
1:08.0	the front. There were wings to right and left connected by curious
1:11.8	glazed galleries, supported by colonnades with the central block. These wings plainly contained
1:18.3	the stables and offices of the house. Each was surmounted by an ornamental coupler with a gilded
1:24.3	vein. An evening light shone on the building, making the window panes glow
1:29.3	like so many fires. Away from the hall in front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed
1:35.7	with furs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church tower, buried in trees
1:41.6	on the edge of the park, only its golden weathercock catching
	...

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