A traveller on a walking tour in the south west of England takes his lunch at a lonely country inn, where he encounters a strange old rustic and hears the local legend of the Wood of the Dead...
Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:10 The Story begins
00:38:52 Credits and thanks
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English author and journalist best remembered for his "weird tales" and ghost stories. He was born in Kent and went to school at Wellington College in Berkshire. In his youth he travelled widely, in particular in North America, and gained experience in a startling variety of professions, including hotel management and dairy farming in Canada, as well as newspaper journalism and violin teaching in New York City. He contributed short stories and other pieces of journalism to a number of publications on both sides of the Atlantic; his first short story, 'A Mysterious House' was published in The periodical 'Belgravia' in July 1889.
Blackwood settled back in the UK in the first decade of the 20th century and his first collection of supernatural fiction, 'The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories' was published in 1906. He went on to write many more, as well as 14 novels and a number of children's books. He also found success as a playwright, often as adaptor or co-author, most famously 'The Starlight Express' (1915), an adaptation of his own children's story with Violet Peam. His short ghost stories and novellas remain very highly regarded today: amongst the best-known are 'The Willows' (1907), 'The Wendigo' (1910), as well as a short series featuring the supernatural detective John Silence (1908).
'The Wood of the Dead' first appeared in Blackwood's 1906 collection 'The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories', and has been much anthologised ever since.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022