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The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9835 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade places, and the question of who is watching whom will not stay safely inside the story. First published in The London Mercury in November 1935; later collected in the volume The Sun Cure (1936). Now widely reprinted in anthologies of supernatural and psychological horror, where it has earned a reputation as a minor classic. Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was a British poet and prose writer, best known for poems such as “The Highwayman”. Alongside his popular verse, he wrote a small but influential body of uncanny fiction, of which “Midnight Express” is the most celebrated. Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Now, are all the traitors present?

0:02.0

Let's get started, shall we?

0:04.0

From rags to riches.

0:06.0

I'm so sick of this.

0:07.0

Working like a dog and being treated worse.

0:09.0

Yorkshire to New York.

0:10.0

Poor climbers, you and me.

0:12.0

A life dedicated to revenge.

0:14.0

Let's make this an occasion to remember.

0:17.0

A Woman of Substance on Channel 4.

0:19.0

Stream now.

0:20.0

A woman of substance on Channel 4, stream now.

0:29.3

Everybody dies, don't they?

0:31.5

Everybody come back.

0:33.6

Isn't that so?

0:37.2

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

0:38.3

How do the dead come back, mother?

0:39.3

What's the secrets of dead?

0:42.3

Night Express by Alfred Noyes.

0:45.3

It was a battered old book bound in red Buckram.

0:50.3

He found it when he was 12 years old, on an upper shelf in his father's library, and against

0:56.4

all the rules he took it to his bedroom to read by candlelight, when the rest of the

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