{"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 Treasure of Abbot Thomas by M R James","slug":"the-treasure-of-abbot-thomas-by-m-r-james","published_at":"2026-02-13T21:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/the-treasure-of-abbot-thomas-by-m-r-james","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-treasure-of-abbot-thomas-by-m-r-james--71815912","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71815912/cgs5062324562.mp3","summary":"A mediaeval abbot leaves behind a cipher—not in his will, but scratched into the glass of his own church. The treasure it guards has lain undisturbed for centuries. Mr. Somerton, a scholar with a taste for puzzles, believes he can solve what others have missed. The Latin is difficult, the clues are scattered, but gold is gold, and curiosity has its own momentum. What waits beneath the stone was put there deliberately. It has been patient. Some things, once disturbed, do not easily return to silence. \"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas\" was first published in 1904 in M.R. James's second collection, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The story has been widely anthologized and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1974. Montague Rhodes James was a distinguished mediaeval scholar and Provost of King's College, Cambridge, later of Eton College. He is regarded as one of the finest writers of supernatural fiction in the English language, and his ghost stories continue to define the antiquarian tradition of literary horror. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support . *To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books 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 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…","meta_description":"A mediaeval abbot leaves behind a cipher—not in his will, but scratched into the glass of his own church. The treasure it guards has lain undisturbed for…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3907,"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-treasure-of-abbot-thomas-by-m-r-james/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-treasure-of-abbot-thomas-by-m-r-james.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}