Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

The Baroness recounts a hunting story with a twist. Instead of a fox, the quarry turns out to be an escaped hyena, which adopts her and Constance Broddle and leads them to cover up a heinous killing. Hector Hugh Munro at his most macabre.

An impoverished French family awaits the prodigal return of their long vanished Uncle Jules from his travels in America. From his letters it would appear that he has made his fortune and when he returns the family hopes their fortunes will change too. A boat trip to Jersey provides the opporunity for a reunion...but nobody could anticipate the twist in events.

Louisa Baldwin (1845-1925) was a British author of popular Victorian ghost stories. She spent much of her adult life as a bedridden invalid. Her hatred of idleness, combined with her imagination, led her to write. Her son was Stanley Baldwin, who became the British prime minister. 'The Ticking of the Clock' is a touching tale of a grandfather and his little grandson, Peter, on whom he dotes. Peter wants to know why his grandfather is so old and infirm.

Letitia Hopkins has always been curious about the peculiar green door in her Aunt Peggy's cheese room. But whenever she asks about it, she is always forbidden to open it or go through it. And the door is always locked. But one day, she finds a small black key on a green ribbon. And when she is left alone in the house, she cannot resist the temptation to try the door. Immediately Letitia finds herself in a strange, unfamiliar world full of wild animals, hostile natives, and a frontier life of hardship and hard work in the company of her pioneer ancesters. But how is she to find her way back to her own time?

When Mr. Dillet buys a breathtakingly beautiful antique dolls' house from a dealer, he is delighted with his purchase and has it installed in his bedroom at home. When he goes to bed, however, he hears a clock strike one and then a strange scene unfolds before his eyes, leading him into a vision from the past in which he unravels a mysterious unsolved murder...

Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser's was a Victorian writer best known for her weird psychological horror stories. The best known of these is 'The Scarecrow', an eerie tale of a sinister scarecrow beckoning to the young son of the farmer from the moonlit cornfield.

'Wailing Well' is the story of a group of boy scouts camping somewhere on the downs in the south of England who are warned not to go into a particular field which contains a single clump of trees. A local shepherd relates a strange story about the place, which he refers to as Wailing Well. He claims to have seen four skeletal figures walking through the field, three women and one man, all walking towards the clump of trees where the well is. One of the young scouts determines to investigate for himself....

At the deathbed of Ursula, the eldest of three sisters, the dying women declares that she will return from the dead when the time comes to accompany each of her younger siblings into the afterlife. The two survivors and their old housekeeper, now live on in fear of encountering Ursula's ghost, and strange happenings in the house bring this terror to an unholy climax.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer, now best remembered for his science fiction novels and often credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Pearl of Love' is a pecular allegorical tale taken from ancient persian literature, telling the story of a bereaved Indian prince whose beloved wife dies young. The prince devotes the rest of his life to creating the perfect memorial for his love - but there is a cruel twist at the end.

A yellow dog narrates his escape from his camembert-cheese-scented New York mistress to a new life in the Rocky Mountains... taking her long suffering husband with him.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the preeminent modernists of the 20th century. 'The String Quartet' is a beautifully written and evocative stream of semiconscious thought stimulated by listening to a string quartet playing a piece by Mozart.

Arthur Gray (1852-1940) wrote under the pseudonym Ingulphus for several years, and it was only in 1919, when his stories were collected as Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye under Gray's own name, that the identity of the author was discovered. The Necromancer is a strange tale set in Jesus College Cambridge in the time of Cromwell. A strange, reclusive fellow who specialises in mathematics and astronomy is suspected of necromancy and black magic.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer of science fiction stories and novels and is frequently credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Lost Inheritance' is the story of a young man whose sole purpose in life is to persuade his wealthy and eccentric uncle to leave him his fortune. He is delighted when the old man declares that he has written a will leaving him everything...but when the old man passes away, the will is nowhere to be found. What follows next is comic tragedy.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his evocative and beautifully narrated ghost and horror stories.The Thing in the Hall is one of the creepiest supernatural tales ever told. Two old friends live next door to one another. One, Louis Fielder dies unexpectedly in horrific and mysterious circumstances.

William Chambers Morrow (1854-1923) was an American author famed for his short stories of horror and suspense. 'The Permanent Stiletto' is the story of a young man who has been stabbed close to the heart with a stiletto. The blade has pierced the aorta and come out the other side. To withdraw the blade would mean the man would bleed to death...but so long as the blade is in place, it is blocking off the wound. The only solution is to leave the blade in place...after which the young man will live his life on a knife edge.

A celebrated doctor receives a visit from a new patient with a most peculiar ailment. He has an excruciatingly painful spot on his hand. But on examination, he can find nothing wrong with the patient at all. He assumes it is a psychosomatic illness, but the patient is insistant that the area of his hand be surgically removed. When the doctor declines this, the patient attempts to cut out the area himself, and the doctor is obliged to complete the operation after all.

Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) was, amongst other things, an eccentric archaologist, historian, architect, antiquarian collector and author of Gothic horror stories very much after the fashion of M. R. James. 'The Dolls' Castle' is the creepy story of a haunted house with a sinister past which uses old, rotting dolls to lure unwary children away from their parents.

William James Wintle (1861-1920) was already an established writer before he became an Oblate for the Abbey of Caldey Island in Wales. It was there that he wrote his famous ghost stories, intended for the entertainment of eight boys who attended the abbey. In the forward of this collection, Wintle states that the stories were originally told on Sunday nights while "crouching over a wood fire on a wind-swept island off the Western shore".

Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne (1866-1944) was a British writer of popular adventure fiction and fantastic literature. 'The Lizard' is an adventure story about a man who goes exploring a newly discovered underground cave in Yorkshire, where he makes a terrifying discovery.

Everybody remembers Wych Street, a road in London which no longer exists. But nobody can agree on exactly where it used to run. Stacy Aumonier's classic story follows the catastrophic events sparked by a dispute over the location of the elusive street, from pub brawls and murders, to the infamous siege of Aztec Street, to the ignominious ending of a promising young lawyer's career, a broken engagement and a foreign policy fiasco.