EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  An Oxford student, Heyling, visits a village in the Cotswolds for a restful break...but what is the truth behind the folk song and dance practiced in the old market square, and what is the secret of the ancient barrow in the field? This is an audio presentation of "Randalls Round" (1929) written by Eleanor Scott. It is narrated and produced by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast. "Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares" by Eleanor Scott is available to buy from the British Library: https://shop.bl.uk/collections/british-library-fiction/products/randalls-round-nine-nightmares-by-eleanor-scott 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 Please support my work   Researching, reading, re-reading, recording, mixing, uploading, promoting each of these short story audio presentations takes many hours - possibly more than you'd imagine. You can say thank you in the following ways:  Patreon: Becoming a patron on Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/encry...

    After a yacht catches fire and Paterson swims to the safety of a desert island, he soon finds out he is not the first castaway to wash up on its shores. But what is the secret of the island? And why do NO SHIPS PASS...? This is an audio presentation of "No Ships Pass" (1932) by Lady Eleanor Smith. It is narrated and produced by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast. 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 Please support my work   Researching, reading, re-reading, recording, mixing, uploading, promoting each of these short story audio presentations takes many hours - possibly more than you'd imagine. You can say thank you in the following ways:  Patreon: Becoming a patron on Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/encryptedpod ) and making a monthly donation will not only keep me creating, but also lets you access the exclusive content I am uploading for patrons. This includes patron-only stories not scheduled to appear on the main YouTube cha...

Arriving at a far-flung colonial outpost in Borneo, a young man stays with the District Officer who regales him with a "funny" story about a Dutchman being hunted by a Sumatran he has wronged. This is an audio presentation of "The End of the Flight" by Somerset Maugham. It is narrated and produced by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast.  💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀  Please support my work Researching, reading, re-reading, recording, mixing, uploading, promoting each of these short story audio presentations takes many hours - possibly more than you'd imagine. You can say thank you in the following ways: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/encryptedpod Becoming a patron on Patreon and making a monthly donation will not only keep me creating, but also lets you access the exclusive content I am uploading for patrons. This includes patron-only stories not scheduled to appear on the main YouTube channel or podcast. You can ...

  An injured army major falls in love with his nurse, but, when he goes to stay with her family at her ancestral home, what secrets are they hiding, and why is no one allowed to spend the evening...outside the house? This is an audio presentation of "Outside The House" (1920) written by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor. It is narrated and produced by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast. Please support my work   Researching, reading, re-reading, recording, mixing, uploading, promoting each of these short story audio presentations takes many hours - possibly more than you'd imagine. You can say thank you in the following ways:  Patreon: Becoming a patron on Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/encryptedpod ) and making a monthly donation will not only keep me creating, but also lets you access the exclusive content I am uploading for patrons. This includes patron-only stories not scheduled to appear on the main YouTube channel or podcast. You can als...

  Hello! When I started the EnCrypted Classic Horror Podcast many moons ago (well, a few months back) I didn't really know what to expect. Things I did expect turned out not to be the case at all. Firstly, I thought it would be easier to get listeners for the podcast than it would be to get listeners on YouTube.  Indeed, I mistakenly thought that the YouTube channel would be the promotional vehicle for the podcast.  It's hard to be sure what the listenership is for the podcast because I don't entirely trust the analytics provided by the hosting service Anchor.  I do know some people who exclusively listen through their podcast app and I know that I have listeners all over the world, but overall it seems to be a small audience and a tough nut to crack. Let's face it, everyone and his/her dog seems to have a podcast these days, and the market seems to be increasingly crowded with celebrities who have marketing budgets behind them. The YouTube channel, on the other hand...

  This is an audio presentation of a classic short story by a writer. I'm being deliberately vague because Blogger wouldn't let me publish this previously due to a breach of community guidelines. I've no idea what the violation was so I'm not taking any chances.

  A vintage radio special of EnCrypted, returning once again to the whimsical uncanny shaggy dog stories of A.J. Alan. In "The Dream", Alan recounts the strange recurring dream he has had since childhood. But what can it all mean...?   Nottingham-born A.J. Alan (real name: Leslie Harrison Lambert) was a performing magician, radio ham, volunteer coastguard radio operator, and  naval intelligence officer who, at the start of World War II was part of the vital military intelligence effort at Bletchley Park. Prior to  the war, he was telling stories on BBC radio and became one of the most popular broadcasting personalities of the time. These stories - light, but often strange and sometimes spooky - were later to be anthologised in ghost story collections such as the Fontana series curated by Robert Aickman, although they were meant to be performed and delivered in the rambling, conversational style Alan had made his own. He died in 1941.   Archive radio of A.J. Ala...

L.A. (Leslie Allin) Lewis is, like a few of the other writers we've explored on this podcast, a largely overlooked practitioner of the weird tale, in this case with a legacy confined entirely to a handful of stories published (under the title Tales of the Grotesque ) in 1934.  The work fell out of print but some of the stories would turn up in horror anthologies from time to time during the intervening years before the original collection was reprinted. It seems that Lewis, whose best stories - The Tower of Moab , The Author's Story , and this one - touch on hallucinatory visions and madness, unfortunately struggled with his own mental health, and destroyed his unpublished works during a bout of depression. A bleakness suffuses Lost Keep (note the oxymoronic title) with a central character who is seemingly condemned by the Fates to pay for the inherited crimes of his ancestors - from the moment he opens a (Pandora's?) box and finds a mysterious minature fortress and an equ...

    As the workload producing the podcast/YouTube channel seems to grow exponentially, I've been keeping these blog entries brief.  Biographical information is often readily available on Wikipedia and the like, and I'm not sure repeating tittle tattle about the authors' private lives adds much value here. That said, since I began EnCrypted, I've been struck by the fact that the British writers of much horror/supernatural/speculative fiction of the period this podcast usually concerns itself (roughly 1890-1930) represent a definite literary clique.  At first that seems rather obvious, that writers working in the same genre should have awareness of each other's work, correspond about it, and sometimes form friendships.  What is more surprising is that so many should be public school-educated, scholarly sons of clergymen, and either closeted homosexuals, or conspicuously celibate. One can only speculate why this particular set of circumstances should seem to engend...

  As I continue to forage for forgotten gems I keep turning up authors about whom I know very little and about whom very little seems to be known. I can tell you that G.M. (Gertrude Minnie) Robins (11 July 1861 — 22 November 1939) wrote over fifty novels, many of which were published under her married name, Mrs Baille Reynolds, and that she wrote chiefly in the mystery, crime and gothic genres - including macabre, strange short stories like this one. The Man With No Face  appeared in her collection The Relations and What They Related , and tells the story of a wife who has a terrifying vision that leads her to fear for her husband's safety and her own sanity. But what does the vision mean? Is it a spectre from his past, or a premonition of his future? Robins, who was active in the suffrage movement and a president of the Society of Women Journalists, writes a neat little story - a short, dark tale with a twist of the kind I appreciate and like to cover on the show sometimes....

  Producing the EnCrypted podcast has upsides and downsides. One downside is that, since so much of my time is focused on the show, I am now exclusively reading horror/supernatural/macabre short stories. No bad thing, you might think, but the other fiction and non-fiction books I hoped to read this year now taunt me from my physical and virtual bookshelves. The upside is that I keep being introduced to writers I have never read or heard of before. One instance of this is Mary Butts, who, although a contemporary of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, May Sinclair et al, and also of the occultist Aleister Crowley (she is listed as co-author on his Magick, Book 4 ), remained something of a fringe literary figure until her death in 1937 and, for a long time, her work languished in out-of-print obscurity. Born in 1890, she died young, aged 46, having lived, nonetheless, a full life that saw her explore her bisexuality, brought her into contact with numerous writers, artists and film ...