Classic Ghost Stories

My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

Classic Ghost Stories

Show Notes

A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that won't start. He does what anyone would do. He helps. He offers whisky. He thinks nothing of it. But there is something not quite right about her. Something in the way she watches the road behind her. Something in the way she keeps to the shadows.

"My Adventure in Norfolk" by A.J. Alan, first collected in Good Evening, Everyone!, published by Hutchinson in 1928. The story was originally broadcast live on the BBC in the mid-1920s.

A.J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert, a senior intelligence officer who worked at Bletchley Park and served as Vice-President of the Magic Circle. He broadcast only a handful of stories each year and never revealed his true identity to the public during his lifetime.

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

*To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk

*Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

*Intro Movie by The Playground* https://www.instagram.com/theplayground.powder Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More from Classic Ghost Stories

Oct 22, 2026

Mr Bessel is a conscientious man, and the experiment he agrees to try with his friend Vincey is undertaken in the spirit of honest enquiry. It takes place on a quiet evening, and it concerns nothing more alarming than how far one mind might reach toward another. Yet something has noticed what they are doing, and before long Mr Bessel will have found that the self he has always taken for granted is far less secure than he supposed, and that some questions, once asked, are answered.

Oct 15, 2026

A middle‑aged businessman sits in a psychiatrist’s office with a problem he can barely put into words. Something in the world has shifted, or else something in his own perception has, and the solid faces around him no longer look quite as human as they once did. In his account there are no apparitions, no rattling chains, only the slow, unnerving sense that certain very ordinary people are quietly working to empty life of colour, choice, and meaning. As he talks, the calm, professional office itself begins to feel strangely less reassuring.

Oct 8, 2026

Edith Wharton's “All Souls” begins with an empty house on a winter night and a woman waiting as the snow piles up. Written six months before Wharton's death, this final completed work of fiction is something quieter than a cozy ghost story—and hard to shake.

Oct 1, 2026

Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!

Sep 24, 2026

An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.

See all episodes →