{"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":"To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens","slug":"to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt-by-charles-dickens","published_at":"2026-05-15T16:20:02+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt-by-charles-dickens","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt-by-charles-dickens--71892656","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71892656/classic_ghost_stories_episode_to_be_taken_with_a_grain_of_salt_by_charles_dickens.mp3","summary":"A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — something that refuses to stay on the page. And when fate places him in the jury box at the murder trial itself, he begins to count his fellow jurymen, there there should be twelve, he counts thirteen... Dickens wrote this story with a title that is itself a warning. Whether you take that warning as a comment on the narrator, on the law, or on the nature of what follows, is a question the story leaves carefully unanswered. * \"To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt\"* was first published in the Christmas 1865 edition of *All the Year Round*, Dickens's own literary journal, as part of a collection entitled *Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions*. It was later republished under the titles *The Trial for Murder* and *The Thirteenth Man*. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Portsmouth and is widely regarded as the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era. He was also one of the finest writers of ghost stories in the language, and this story was considered the definitive English ghost story for decades, before M.R. James arrived to claim that title. 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 Heartwood In…","meta_description":"A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1824,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast-421206/episodes/to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt-by-charles-dickens/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/to-be-taken-with-a-grain-of-salt-by-charles-dickens.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}