The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match. The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, the key in her pocket.

But the almanack on the mantelpiece read the 21st of October.

And it was May.

"The Mystery of the Semi-Detached" was first published in Edith Nesbit's collection Grim Tales in 1893. Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is best remembered today as the author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It, but she was also a prolific and accomplished writer of supernatural fiction, whose ghost stories combine suburban ordinariness with genuine dread to unsettling effect.

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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?
0:17.3	How do the dead comeback, mother?
0:19.8	What's the secret?
0:27.1	The mystery of the semi-detached by Edith Nesbitt.
0:29.5	He was waiting for her.
0:33.2	He'd been waiting an hour and a half in a dusty suburban lane with a row of big elms on one side and some eligible building sites on the other,
0:38.5	and far away to the southwest, the twinkling yellow lights of the Crystal Palace.
0:44.0	It was not quite like a country lane, for it had a pavement and lampposts,
0:48.5	but it was not a bad place for a meeting all the same.
0:51.7	And farther up towards the cemetery, it was really quite rural and almost pretty, especially
0:59.0	in the twilight.
1:01.1	But twilight had long deepened into the night, and still he waited.
1:07.3	He loved her, and he was engaged to be married to her, with a complete disapproval of every
1:12.9	reasonable person who had been consulted.
1:15.6	And this half-clandestine meeting was tonight to take the place of the grudgingly sanctioned
1:20.9	weekly interview, because a certain rich uncle was visiting at her house, and her mother
1:26.0	was not the woman to acknowledge to a moneyed
1:28.1	uncle who might go off any day, a match so deeply ineligible as hers with him.
1:35.3	So he waited for her, and the chill of an unusually severe May evening entered into his bones.
	...

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