The Wishing Well by E F Benson

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

E.F. Benson's "The Wishing-Well" was first published in the United Kingdom in the collection Visible and Invisible by Hutchinson & Co. in 1923. This collection, featuring a range of supernatural and uncanny tales, showcases Benson's skill in blending traditional ghost story elements with psychological depth and social commentary. "The Wishing-Well," a particularly potent example of his Cornish-set fiction, has since been reprinted in numerous anthologies of ghost and horror stories, cementing its place as a classic of the genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.1	The Wishing Well by E.F. Benson. E.F. Benson, 1867 to 1940, is still remembered in Rye, where he was the mayor and also
0:40.9	the occupant for many years of Lamb House, whose original tenant was Henry James.
0:46.2	They became friends after Benson wrote asking James for a critical opinion of his work.
0:51.5	Lamb House must have provided inspiration for ghost stories, as there is a haunting attached
0:56.2	to its history, and Benson himself reports seeing a cloaked figure in the garden.
1:01.0	The wishing well is set in Benson's other spiritual home, Cornwall, where he spent much of
1:06.4	his youth and subsequently set many of his tales.
1:09.7	This is a splendid story of unrequited love,
1:12.6	vengeance and witchcraft in which Benson exploits his talents to the full.
1:18.6	I am Tony Walker and this is the classic ghost stories podcast. Everybody dies, don't they?
1:34.8	Everybody come back, isn't that so?
1:38.7	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
1:41.8	How do the dead come back, mother?
1:54.0	What's the secrets of they'd come? The Wishing Well by E.F. Benson. The village of St. Javais lies at the seawood base of that broad triangular valley which lies scooped out among the uplands of the North Cornish mo, and not even among the fells of Cumberland
2:02.5	could you find so remote a cluster of human habitations. Four miles of by-road, steep and stony
2:09.5	lies between it and the highway, along which in tourist time the motor-busses pounded
2:14.5	to Bude and Newkey, and eight more separate it from the railhead.
	...

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