July 2026 Newsletter
Podcast Update
I'm back from a couple of weeks in Anglesey with Sheila and the dogs. We spent the first few days visiting megalithic tombs and stone circles before the heat made that impractical and we retired to the garden instead. We were at Bryn Celli Ddu just before Solstice, when the hippies were gathering in their van. Sheila had an idea we'd go back for 3 a.m. for the Solstice Ceremony and apparently it was a fantastic one, but we slept and went to Aberffraw beach instead. I had the chance to speak Welsh again so that was splendid.
Some of you on Spotify have been getting in touch to ask if everything's alright, because new episodes stopped appearing there for a while. I'm fine — the issue was a distribution problem with a company called Spreaker, which meant that five or six weeks' worth of stories went out on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere else but never made it to Spotify. That's now sorted.
Listen to them on my Patreon for free and paid members
https://www.patreon.com/cw/barcud
A few people have also asked about the missing commentaries on the batch of London ghost stories I put out before I went away. I was recording those ahead of the trip and ran out of time to do the commentary and analysis on each one. The more recent episodes have commentaries as normal.
What I'm Reading
While I was away I read Middlemarch for the first time. I'd always assumed I wouldn't have much patience for a gossipy Victorian novel about small-town life, and I was completely wrong. It's one of the best things I've ever read — Eliot's understanding of how people deceive themselves, the way she holds an entire community in her head at once, the sheer intelligence of the writing. I wish I'd got to it twenty years ago.
I also read Tom Cox's The Villager, which I picked up at a bookshop called Left for Dead on Wyle Cop in Shrewsbury, and which I'd heartily recommend — both the book and the shop. Cox built his reputation writing about cats, golf, and the countryside, but The Villager is something stranger: twelve linked stories set in a fictional Dartmoor village called Underhill, spanning from prehistory to 2099, narrated by locals, outsiders, and an earth spirit that watches the land change across millennia. There's a vanished American folk musician whose recordings keep surfacing, a gravedigger, a self-aware search engine, and the grumpy ghost of a horse. If you've read Cox's earlier collection Help the Witch, it's in the same territory — folkloric, atmospheric, deeply rooted in landscape — but more ambitious. It builds to something overwhelmingly sad and beautifully written. Not quite a horror novel, but it's doing something in that neighbourhood.
One of the stories was so moving, I had to stop reading it! Then I went back. Whimsical, lovely, sad, beautiful stuff.
And I'm reading an advance copy of Ghost Month by Simon Wroe, out from Faber in August. The premise is that the dead come back as ghosts for one month each year — not permanently, just long enough to complicate things. Your judgemental mother hovering over your shoulder, the people who know what really happened following you around, a daughter who won't even look at you. It's a multi-strand novel about grief and how people manage it, and it has some similarities to Adam Nevill's Lost in the Garden in the way the dead refuse to stay put. All ghost stories are morality tales, and this one is no exception. Wroe used to be a chef and his first novel Chop Chop won the Betty Trask Award, so he can write. I'm trying to arrange an interview with him.
A True Ghost Story! The Haunted House on the Hill
We were in Anglesey for a couple of weeks and I came across a story I hadn't heard before. There's a house at Trearddur Bay called Craig Y Môr that sits on a rocky headland above the beach. It was built around 1911 for a wealthy Englishman called William Smellie as a summer house, and it has the kind of looming, austere look that makes people cross the road. Locally it's known as the Haunted House on the Hill. We actually went through Trearddur Bay on a very hot day after visiting Trefignath Burial Chamber and the nearby standing stone, on our way out to South Stack and then Holyhead. I wish I'd known the story at the time — I'd have gone looking for it.
In 2023 a woman on a walking holiday took a photograph of the house because she thought it was beautiful. Later that night, while her husband was asleep, she was scrolling through the day's photos on her phone and found what looks like a figure in period dress walking away from the house, carrying something in both hands. She hadn't seen anyone when she took the picture. She called her mother rather than wake her husband, which I think is a wonderful detail — that instinct to phone your mum when something frightens you.
I love the fact that some people think the figure is a cook or a maid, because the house originally had a servant's lodge attached. But the detail that really got me was from a local who remembered visiting as a child. The lights in the house were never on, they said, but in the water's reflection every light was always on. That's the kind of image that stays with you. One of the neighbours, asked for comment by the Daily Post, offered the more direct assessment that the place is "haunted to sh*t."
Gear 'n' That.
A few people have been asking about my recording setup, so here's a quick word on microphones. I am a bit of a microphone fan, as it turns out. My main mic is a Neumann U87, which is the workhorse — it does most of the heavy lifting on the podcast and the audiobooks. I also have a Shure SM7B, which is the mic you see on every podcast in the world for good reason, and various Rode mics that I've accumulated over the years.
I'm always trying to get the best possible voice. The one that pleases the most people, the one that sounds right for the kind of stories I'm telling. Obviously we start with what nature gave us, and there's a limit to what you can do about that, but I always have the hope that technology can improve on nature's work — or at least present it in its best light. The next addition is going to be a Warm Audio WA-47, which is their recreation of the classic Neumann U47. The original U47 is probably the most famous studio microphone ever made. It came out of post-war Berlin in 1949 and within a few years it was everywhere. Sinatra called his one his "Telly" and used it on all those Capitol recordings. The Beatles recorded on U47s almost exclusively — George Martin used them on nearly everything on Rubber Soul. Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, David Bowie, Jim Morrison — the list of voices that passed through a U47 is essentially the history of recorded music from the 1950s to the mid-sixties. Only about 5,600 were ever made, and originals now sell for the price of a small car. The Warm Audio version is their attempt to get that warmth and richness into something a normal human being can afford, and it's praised specifically for what it does with voices — flattering spoken word without sounding coloured or hyped. For narration work that's exactly what you want: something that sounds like you, only slightly better. I'll report back once I've had a chance to record with it. Or you may notice an improvement!
Ghost Stories Playing Cards
Someone got in touch recently to show me a set of playing cards they've designed around classic ghost stories, and they're good enough that I wanted to pass them on. They're by F.C. Designs and the deck is called Ghost Stories Playing Cards — a second edition is currently on Kickstarter with cold foil and lenticular effects on the tuck case.
I haven't seen the cards themselves but the illustrations on the Kickstarter looked really fun. The court cards feature characters from the stories — Sleepy Hollow, The Phantom of the Opera, A Christmas Carol — illustrated by Juanfran Moyano with a level of detail that rewards close looking. The aces carry portraits of the writers: Dickens, Shakespeare, Wilde, Goethe. The joker is Carnacki, which tells you the designers know their stuff. Even the numbered cards have sinister faces half-hidden in the backgrounds, taken from old spirit photographs.
The first edition was printed by USPCC and funded well on Kickstarter. If you're the sort of person who likes a beautiful object on the shelf alongside your M.R. James and your Shirley Jackson, these are worth a look.
