Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

A spectacular collection of classic ghost stories from some of the masters of spooky fiction. 'On the Brighton Road' by Richard Middleton; 'A Ghost Story' by Mark Twain; 'The Everlasting Club' by Arthur Gray; 'The Snow' by Hugh Walpole; 'Rose Rose' by Barry Pain; 'The Ghost Ship' by Richard Middleton; 'The Bus Conductor' by E. F. Benson; 'The Tarn' by Hugh Walpole; 'The Diary of Mr. Poynter' by M. R. James.

During the last part of the nineteenth century, the detective story took off as a popular genre as literary magazines vied with each other to draw in readers with gripping page-turners by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Guy Boothby and Wilkie Collins. This collection brings together some of the great detectives of the Victorian era, from the master sleuth himself, Sherlock Holmes, to the mild mannered Father Brown, to the feisty J. G. Reeder.

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (1884-1941) was a New Zealand-born English novelist, famous for his skill at scene setting and vivid plots. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s and remains popular to this day. The Staircase tells the story of a house. An old house, which has seen much and knows many things about the ways of humans. In this story the house feels compelled to intervene in the affairs of the inhabitants to prevent an impeding disaster by murdering one of the humans.

'Relics of General Chassé' is a humorous tale of a corpulent and somewhat dandified clergyman who, while visiting the castle at Antwerp, inadvertently becomes separated from his breeches. What follows shakes him to the core. The breeches fall into the hands of a group of female English tourists who decide to take some sample of the cloth as a souvenir.

Kipling’s classic tale taken from the Just So Stories. The camel who lives in the howling desert is reluctant to join the other animals in working for man. He gets his comeuppance when he is magically given a hump, so that he can work three days in a row without stopping to eat.

When the prematurely middle-aged J.P. Huddle is recommended to take an “unrest-cure” by a friend, he little realizes that the other passenger in the railway compartment, the prank-loving Clovis, will take this as a personal challenge. The havoc which Clovis’s macabre and at times shocking practical joke causes is beyond anything that the sleepy hamlet of Tilfield has seen before. Hector Hugh Munro at his most macabre.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Among her most popular and terrifying tales are the many masterly ghost stories which she wrote in her early career. "Pomegranate Seed" is a disturbing ghost story in which a man receives a series of eerie letters from his dead first wife.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The Apple Tree is a delightful story narrated from the perspective of a child whose father discovers that he has a rare and valuable apple tree growing in his orchard. The family wait impatiently for the first crop of the magical and splendid apples. Finally the day arrives when they can taste the wonderful red fruits...

A spine-tingling collection of the greatest short stories by the father of science fiction, H. G. Wells. 'The Time Machine', 'The Empire of the Ants', 'The Crystal Egg', 'The Sea-Raiders', 'The Door in the Wall', 'A Dream of Armageddon', 'The Country of the Blind', 'Under the Knife', 'The Stolen Body', 'The Plattner Story', 'The Stolen Bacillus', 'The Magic Shop', 'The Inexperienced Ghost', and many more short fiction masterpieces.

An enchanting folk tale of two sisters who could not be more different from one another. One is hardworking, cheerful and willing, the other lazy and disagreeable. When the first meets an old woman and helps her she is rewarded with some very remarkable eggs which help her make her fortune. When the second sister behaves badly towards the old woman, she too is given some eggs... but with very different results. Enchanting!

A medieval tale of the trial of a werewolf in southern France. A strange wandering beggar-boy meets a group of French girls who are tending their flocks. He frightens the girls with dreadful stories of souls in Hell and explains that he is a werewolf and describes how at night he ravages the country and devours sheep and children. The boy is arrested and brought before the courts. His testimony is alarmingly frank and astonishingly well corroborated by the evidence of other witnesses.

Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer of science fiction stories and novels, and is credited with being the father of science fiction. 'A Deal in Ostriches' is an amusing tale about a situation on a ship returning from the Indies with several passengers and five ostriches on board. One of the ostriches swallows a valuable diamond - but nobody knows which bird it was.

A fascinating collection of intriguing and unusual classic murder stories by some of the masters of mystery and crime writing.

A spine-chilling collection of fantastical and enchanting classic short stories. 'The Wolf Book' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'Absolute Zero' by Morgan Robertson; 'An Uncommon View of It' by W. C. Morrow; 'The Baumoff Explosive' by William Hope Hodgson; 'Absolute Evil' by Julian Hawthorne; 'The Dolls' Castle' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'The Legend' by Edith Wharton; 'A Tropical Horror' by William Hope Hodgson; 'Castle Valley' by Henry Chapman Mercer; 'Passing of a God' by Henry S. Whitehead.

A mysterious and unsolved murder has taken place on the train from Euston to Manchester. A bearded man with a cigar is sitting in the first class smoking carriage. In the next carriage a tall middle aged man and a younger woman travelling together. When the train arrives at Rugby, the smoking compartment is empty and in the next carriage the couple are also gone, but there is the corpse of a young man who has been shot through the heart. There is nothing which can help identify the dead man...

A newly qualified doctor receives a call from his first patient - a mysterious woman who is deeply distressed and who is covered in a thick black veil. She tells him a confusing story about a dying man who she wishes the doctor to visit the following day, although she assures the doctor that the patient will certainly be dead by then. The young doctor agrees that he will make the visit at nine on the next morning...and finds himself on the strangest professional call of his entire life.

E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror as well as a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories were highly influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. 'The Cremona Violin' is the story of Councillor Krespel, an eccentric violin maker who lives with a mysterious woman, Antonia, who has the most beautiful singing voice ever heard by anyone in the town, but she was only ever heard to sing once.

A glittering collection of classic stories for children, which have delighted generations and continue to appeal.

Edmund Gill Swain (1861-1938) was an English cleric and author of ghost stories. He was a longtime friend of M. R. James, and his ghost stories show James' influence. 'The Eastern Window', 'The Man with the Roller', 'The Rockery'.

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is a haunting ballad describing a young knight whose very lifeblood and vitality have been drained by a beautiful but parasitic, fairylike vampire. This knight has now been left as an undead shell of his former self, alone on a barren hillside.