The Man Who Came Back by Margery Lawrence

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christmas at Colonel and Lady Garrison’s house is all warmth, laughter, and parlour games, until the evening’s “entertainment” arrives: a small, shabby medium with disconcertingly sharp eyes. The guests settle round the table for an amusing bit of spiritualism. As the lights dim and the control takes over, the party games curdle into something closer to an inquest, and the most unwelcome of visitors finds its way back. First published in The Sphere on 20 November 1935, “The Man Who Came Back” was collected in The Floating Café and Other Stories (Jarrolds, 1936). It has since reappeared in several modern anthologies of seasonal supernatural tales, including the British Library’s Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights (2021). Margery Harriet Lawrence (1889–1969) was an English writer who moved with ease between ghost stories, occult fiction, romance, and crime, and whose work was widely read in the inter-war decades. She is now best remembered for her Club of the Round Table tales and for Dr Miles Pennoyer, her “psychic doctor” occult detective, whose cases draw heavily on the spiritualist beliefs she embraced in later life. Buy My Christmas Ghost Stories Paperback as a Gift for Someone!? https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=MxXXCglWV2Uu4L9ArK8eIz8rexI8huhrBketkRcyMfh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Sainsbury's, I'm having a big party.
0:02.1	Got any finger food that won't cost an arm and a leg? We do. All our Sainsbury's party food is three for two with nectar. Like our taste the difference, crispy mushroom tartlets, mini-waggy beef cheeseburgers or crispy chicken bow buns. That will get them coming back for seconds. And thirds. Want to save big on party pleases? Ask Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's Good Food for All of Us.
0:23.0	18 plus, next required. Want to save big on party pleasers? Ask Sainsbury's.
0:23.0	Sainsbury's good food for all of us.
0:28.8	18 plus, next required, cheapest product free, available in store and online, excluding locals, subject to availability.
0:29.8	Teas and sees apply. Everybody dies, don't they?
0:40.4	Isn't that same?
0:44.4	You tried to get into the locked room today, didn't you?
0:47.4	How do the dead come back, mother?
0:49.9	What's the secrets?
0:51.9	The man who came back by Marjorie Lawrence first published in the Sphere, November 1935.
1:03.0	It was a very merry house party. The givers of it, Colonel and Lady Garrison, were too pleasant, gregarious souls, not peculiarly interesting
1:13.1	in themselves, but possessing that priceless gift, and in my opinion, should be subsidised
1:19.1	when found by the government of the country to which the owner of it belongs, that gift that
1:24.8	the Americans crisply describe as mixing.
1:29.3	The garrisons, childless, well-to-do and middle-aged, gave it was well known by far the most amusing parties in their particular cuterie,
1:38.3	and fierce was the competition for invitations especially to the annual Christmas house party held in their country
1:45.6	house, a rambling, old-fashioned but supremely comfortable old manner in a well-known hunting
1:51.7	county.
1:53.7	The Colonel was a keen man to the hounds and despite his increasing years and weight,
1:59.8	still easily held his own with the younger men
2:02.2	and several of his rivals in the hunting field were members of the present party,
	...

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