The Playfellow by Lady Cynthia Asquith

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2026

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the fire that claimed a child's life twelve years ago. For Claude Halyard, it is an earthly paradise reclaimed. For his wife Laura, it is a home that seems to cast a spell—lovely, peaceful, and somehow waiting. Their daughter Hyacinth finds the old day nursery and makes it her own. She plays alone there for hours, running invisible races, laughing at jokes only she can hear. She is never lonely, she insists. She has a friend. Laura begins to notice small impossibilities: a rocking horse galloping in an empty room, its stirrups held forward. Candles lit on a Christmas tree when no one has been near. The faint sound of a child's gramophone playing "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play." Claude grows tense, strained, building walls of silence his wife cannot penetrate. He speaks of leaving. He cannot say why. But Hyacinth has made a promise to her playmate. And some promises, once given, cannot be broken—even when the one who waits to claim them has been dead for twelve years. "The Playfellow" by Lady Cynthia Asquith was first published in This Mortal Coil (Arkham House, 1947), later reissued in the UK as What Dreams May Come (Rich & Cowan, 1951). Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) was J. M. Barrie's secretary, a distinguished memoirist and biographer, and editor of the influential Ghost Book series. Her own supernatural fiction is characterized by restraint, psychological insight, and civilized unease. 24/7 Ad free stream of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on Internet radio. It goes on and on and on and on. For all you not-so sleepy heads, and better still: it's free! www.gravenheim.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal.
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0:11.0	Some fun, some food, it's all inside this happy meal.
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0:53.6	Everybody. The Playfieldered, isn't they?
1:00.0	Everybody come back, isn't that so?
1:04.0	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
1:07.0	How do the dead come back, mother?
1:10.0	What's the secret?
1:11.6	The playfellow by Lady Cynthia Asquith.
1:16.6	Laura Halliard wondered whether she would ever grow more accustomed to the loveliness of her new home.
1:22.6	Each time she looked at the beautiful Tudor house, she still wanted to rub her eyes.
1:26.6	After the din and glare of New York, the mellow beauty and green silence of Lichenhall and its
1:32.8	perfect surroundings lay like a spell on its new mistress.
1:37.0	It was just six months since her husband, Claude Halliard, had succeeded to the property
1:41.3	at the death of his elder brother who had died childless.
1:45.2	Since his marriage to law, a business had kept Claude in America,
	...

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