Show Notes
A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes in. He goes upstairs. He strikes a match.
The next morning she is perfectly well, and the room he entered was locked all night, the key in her pocket.
But the almanack on the mantelpiece read the 21st of October. And it was May.
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*"The Mystery of the Semi-Detached"* was first published in Edith Nesbit's collection *Grim Tales* in 1893.
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) is best remembered today as the author of *The Railway Children* and *Five Children and It*, but she was also a prolific and accomplished writer of supernatural fiction, whose ghost stories combine suburban ordinariness with genuine dread to unsettling effect.
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More from Classic Ghost Stories
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.
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.
Thanks to Hayley Smith for sponsoring this episode!
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.
In a quiet curiosity shop in Paris, a shelf holds a collection of objects from another time. Our protagonist notices a small object that at first appears to be the broken foot of a Greek statue. The antiques dealer, however, explains that it is the mummified foot of a pharaoh’s daughter. The absurdity of a once royal foot now serving as a paperweight strikes them both. The dealer warns that the old pharaoh will not be pleased.