Walnut-Tree House | A Ghost Story by Charlotte Riddell | A Bitesized Audiobook

Edgar Stainton returns to his native England, having made his fortune in the colonies, to take possession of Walnut-Tree House, an abandoned mansion inherited from a cousin who died in an asylum. Can he solve the mystery which surrounds the old house, which drove his relative out of his wits and which has led tenants and tradespeople alike to avoid the place at all costs... 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: Occasional/one-off support via Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bitesize... Monthly support on Patreon:   / bitesizedaudio   Visit my Bandcamp page to hear more of my performances of classic stories, and you can purchase and download high quality audio files to listen offline: https://bitesizedaudio.bandcamp.com/ Become a Bitesized Audio Classics member on YouTube, from $1 per month with various benefits:    / bitesizedaudioclassics   Chapters/Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:16 Chapter 1: The New Owner 00:12:49 Chapter 2: The Child 00:29:05 Chapter 3: Seeking for Information 00:42:58 Chapter 4: Brother and Sister 00:53:01 Chapter 5: The Next Afternoon 01:01:37 Chapter 6: The Missing Will 01:06:45 Credits, thanks and further listening Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906), sometimes credited (in typically Victorian fashion) under her husband's name as "Mrs. J. H. Riddell", was born Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland. She moved to London in 1855 and married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer, two years later. She apparently turned to writing to make a living after her husband lost all his money, early in their marriage. Her early works were published under pseudonyms, as "R. V. M. Sparling" for 'Zuriel’s Grandchild' (1856), as "Rainey Hawthorne" for 'The Ruling Passion', and as "F. G. Trafford" for 'The Moors and the Fens' (both 1857); she continued using the Trafford alias until 1866. Recalling this period in an 1890 interview in The Pall Mall Gazette, Riddell said: “At that time I wrote under the nom de plume of ‘Trafford,’ for it was not considered quite the thing for a lady to write in her own name. My husband was much amused one day when a man told him that he knew Trafford the novelist well, and that he was a ‘very good sort of fellow, don’t you know?’ But though there were few ladies writing in those days it was not a bit easier to get one’s work accepted than now. All my publishers would look upon my writing as a joke at first.” In all she wrote 56 novels and short stories, of which several had a supernatural theme. Her best remembered shorter ghost stories include 'A Strange Christmas Game' and 'The Open Door'. She was also the co-proprietor and editor of the periodicals 'Home' and 'St. James's Magazine' in the 1860s and 70s. Her husband died suddenly in 1880; there were no children from their marriage, and from 1886 she "retired in seclusion" to Upper Halliford, Middlesex, until her death in September 1906. 'Walnut-Tree House' first appeared in The Illustrated London News on 28 December 1878. It was subsequently republished in book form as part of 'Weird Stories', a collection of Charlotte Riddell's shorter fiction, in 1882. The setting in Lambeth, south-east London, reflects her own knowledge of the area – she lived for a number of years at 75 South Lambeth Road in "an old-fashioned house" (sadly now demolished) and the opening of 'Walnut-Tree House' describes the area vividly with old mansions still standing while new streets and houses were rapidly built up around them. Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022.