Show Notes
There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of the street has noticed something — he has noticed it for four years, and he does not like to say it aloud. What happens inside that house comes to us through letters. Two women writing to each other in the warm, confiding way of close friends — about curtains, about dinner guests, about the peculiar mercy of a low rent in a good street. Something is in that house. It has been seen. And the ones who have seen it cannot say what it was. They cannot say anything at all, after. Rhoda Broughton published this story in 1873. It has barely aged a day.
Publication details: "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth" was first published in Belgravia: A London Magazine, Volume 21, 1873, and later collected in Broughton's Tales for Christmas Eve (1873), subsequently reissued as Twilight Stories (1879).
Author biography: Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920) was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, witty fiction made her one of the most widely read and controversial writers of the Victorian era. She outlived her own scandalous reputation, remarking late in life that she had begun as Zola and ended as Miss Yonge.
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
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
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.
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.