Show Notes
Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses...
A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a museum piece, the dealer calls it, and means it more than he says. Six feet of Strawberry Hill in miniature: a chapel, a stable block, a drawer of tiny embroidered clothes. He spends a happy evening setting its rooms in order, delighted with his find. There's no clock within earshot — none on the stair, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower.
And yet, at one in the morning, a bell tolls once.
"The Haunted Dolls' House" was first published in the Empire Review in February 1923, and later collected in M. R. James's A Warning to the Curious.
M. R. James (1862–1936) was Provost of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and a distinguished medieval scholar — antiquarian interests that shaped his ghost stories as much as his day job.
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Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!
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