{"podcast":{"title":"The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast","slug":"the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206","podcast_index_feed_id":421206,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/7002956/episodes/feed","website_url":"http://www.classicghost.com","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/8a15de31d0a499398c4e04f4f8c6dc66.jpg","author":"Tony Walker","episode_count":375,"summary":"A weekly podcast that reads out ghost stories, horror stories, and weird tales every week. Classic stories from the pens of the masters Occasionally, we feature living authors, but the majority are dead. Some perhaps are undead. We go from cosy Edwardian ghost stories (E. F. Benson, Walter De La Mare) to Victorian supernatural mysteries (M. R. James, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and Charles Dickens) to 20th-century Weird Tales (Robert Aickman, Fritz Lieber, Clark Ashton-Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft) and wander from the Gothic to the Odd, even to the Literary, and then back again. Each episode is followed by Tony's take on the story, its author, its content and any literary considerations, which may be useful to students! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support .","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206"},"episode":{"title":"The Playfellow by Lady Cynthia Asquith","slug":"the-playfellow-by-lady-cynthia-asquith","published_at":"2026-01-23T21:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/the-playfellow-by-lady-cynthia-asquith","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-playfellow-by-lady-cynthia-asquith--71815914","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71815914/cgs9266002547.mp3","summary":"Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the fire that claimed a child's life twelve years ago. For Claude Halyard, it is an earthly paradise reclaimed. For his wife Laura, it is a home that seems to cast a spell—lovely, peaceful, and somehow waiting. Their daughter Hyacinth finds the old day nursery and makes it her own. She plays alone there for hours, running invisible races, laughing at jokes only she can hear. She is never lonely, she insists. She has a friend. Laura begins to notice small impossibilities: a rocking horse galloping in an empty room, its stirrups held forward. Candles lit on a Christmas tree when no one has been near. The faint sound of a child's gramophone playing \"Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.\" Claude grows tense, strained, building walls of silence his wife cannot penetrate. He speaks of leaving. He cannot say why. But Hyacinth has made a promise to her playmate. And some promises, once given, cannot be broken—even when the one who waits to claim them has been dead for twelve years. \"The Playfellow\" by Lady Cynthia Asquith was first published in This Mortal Coil (Arkham House, 1947), later reissued in the UK as What Dreams May Come (Rich & Cowan, 1951). Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) was J. M. Barrie's secretary, a distinguished memoirist and biographer, and editor of the influential Ghost Book series. Her own supernatural fiction is characterized by restraint, psychological insight, and civilized unease. 24/7 Ad free stream of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on Internet radio. It goes on and on and on and on. For all you not-so sleepy heads, and better still: it's free! www.gravenheim.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit…","meta_description":"Lichen Hall is the perfect English country mansion, a veritable rural paradise—a Tudor house of mellow beauty that has been carefully restored after the f…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4686,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/episodes/the-playfellow-by-lady-cynthia-asquith/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/the-playfellow-by-lady-cynthia-asquith.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}