London has been accumulating its dead for two thousand years. These are their stories.
This collection brings together twenty of the finest ghost stories set in the capital, drawn from the Victorian and Edwardian periods and selected by Tony Walker, narrator of The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. The authors gathered here represent the best of their age: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Algernon Blackwood, M R James, E F Benson, H G Wells, and others whose names are synonymous with the supernatural tale at its height.
The streets, squares, and buildings in these pages are real. A surgeon walks home through Soho on a winter night. Something stirs in a house on Vauxhall Walk. A man keeps a strange appointment in a part of the city that looks, on the surface, entirely ordinary. London has always been this way — layered, ancient, and not quite done with its past — and these writers knew it.
Tony Walker's introduction sets the stories in context, and each story carries a note on its publication history. Whether you are visiting London for the first time, have lived here all your life, or simply carry the city in your imagination, this is a book to read after dark, when the streets outside are quiet and the old town is doing what it has always done.
