The True Story of Anthony Ffryar by Arthur Gray

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Drama, Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A scholar remains behind as pestilence silences the college. The gates are locked, the chapel dim, and a single window glows with the light of something unfinished. In the stillness of old stone, a man pursues his solitary work—methodical, precise, and unknowable. What follows is not a tale of horror in the usual sense, but something quieter, older, and threaded with the weight of ritual. Memory lingers in the cloisters. The dead are not always absent. *The True History of Anthony Ffryar* was first published in *Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye* (W. Heffer & Sons, 1919), under the pen name “Ingulphus.” The story was reissued in the Ghost Story Press edition of 1993 with an additional tale. Arthur Gray (1852–1940) was Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a scholar of Shakespeare and local history. He wrote ghost stories rooted in the architecture, liturgy, and institutional memory of the university he called home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 sir?
0:14.4	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
0:17.4	How do that they'd come back, mother?
0:19.9	What's the secret? The true history of Anthony Fryer by Arthur Gray.
0:26.6	The world, it is said, knows nothing of its greatest men.
0:31.6	In our Cambridge microcosm, it may be doubted whether we are better informed concerning some of the
0:38.7	departed great ones who once walked the confines of our colleges?
0:43.2	Which of us has heard of Anthony Friar of Jesus?
0:47.2	History is dumb, respecting him.
0:49.6	Yet, but for the unhappy event recorded in this unadorned chronicle. His fame might have stood with that of Bacon of Trinity or Harvey of Keys.
1:00.0	They lived to be old man.
1:02.0	Friar died before he was thirty, his work unfinished, his fame unknown even to his contemporaries.
1:09.0	So meager is the record of his life's work that it is contained
1:13.4	in a few bare notices in the college bursa's books, in the Grace Books, which date his
1:18.6	matriculation and degrees, and in the entry of his burial in the register of all saints'
1:23.6	parish. These simple annals I have ventured to supplement with details of a more
1:28.9	or less hypothetical character which will serve to show what humanity lost by his early death.
1:37.0	Readers will be able to judge for themselves a degree of care which I have taken not to
1:41.1	import into the story anything which may saour of the improbable or romantic.
1:49.0	Anthony Fryer matriculated in the year 1541 too, his age being then probably 15 or 16.
	...

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