Snoozecast Presents: Spooky Stories

Petit Trianon pt. 2

Tonight, we’ll continue with The Petit Trianon, adapted from An Adventure by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, first published in 1911. This episode is part of our Spooky Sleep Story series, where we share classic tales of the strange and mysterious. In Part One, the two English academics described an uncanny afternoon walk through the gardens of Versailles in 1901—an experience they could neither explain nor forget. In this second part, Miss Morison and Miss Lamont revisit the scene and begin to investigate what happened. Their return visits bring no repetition of the strange events, yet each discovery only adds to the puzzle. The vanished paths, missing buildings, and contradictions in the landscape leave them wondering whether they had truly stepped into another century. What began as a curious outing gradually turns into a quiet obsession. Tonight’s reading follows their continued search for reason amid the unaccountable, and the lingering question of what, exactly, they had walked into that August day. — read by 'V' — Sign up for Snoozecast+ to get expanded, ad-free access by going to snoozecast.com/plus! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Petit Trianon pt. 1

Tonight, we’ll read the first half of The Petit Trianon, adapted from An Adventure by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, first published in 1911. This episode is part of Snoozecast’s 7th annual Spooky Sleep Story series, where we share true and imagined encounters with the strange and unexplained every October. The two English women, both Oxford academics, recorded their uncanny experience while visiting the gardens of Versailles in 1901. What began as an ordinary afternoon outing soon became one of the most famous “time-slip” mysteries in modern folklore. Their book recounts the event through two separate testimonies, each written without the other’s influence: first that of Miss Morison (Moberly), then Miss Lamont (Jourdain). The pair describe wandering from the lively palace grounds into an oddly still corner of the estate—the Petit Trianon—where they encountered figures, fashions, and a mood belonging to another century. Later, their impressions would be linked to the last days of Queen Marie Antoinette, whose private retreat once stood on the same path. This episode presents the first half of their written accounts. Next week, in Part Two, we’ll continue with the remainder of their story—and the discoveries that followed, as they began to investigate what truly happened that August afternoon. — read by 'V' — Sign up for Snoozecast+ to get expanded, ad-free access by going to snoozecast.com/plus! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Gogol's Souls

Tonight, for this month’s Snoozecast+ Deluxe bonus episode, and in the vein of our Spooky Sleep Stories series, we’ll read the opening to “Dead Souls”. It was written by Nikolai Gogol and first published in 1842. It is known as a ghost story with no ghosts—unless you count the living. The novel follows the mysterious Pavel Chichikov as he travels through provincial Russia buying the legal rights to deceased serfs—“dead souls”—to use in a scheme for social advancement. Though often grimly comic rather than overtly supernatural, Dead Souls captures a kind of haunting unique to Gogol’s world: one of moral decay, vanity, and the hollow pursuit of status. Our monthly bonus episodes—like this one—are made especially for Snoozecast+ Deluxe subscribers. If you’re not a Deluxe listener, you’ll hear a shortened cut of tonight’s story; to get the full episode and more, visit snoozecast.com/plus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

The Castle of Otranto

Tonight, for the next in our October spooky sleep story series, we’ll read an excerpt from “The Castle of Otranto”, a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. Set in a haunted castle, the novel produced a new style that has endured ever since, and has shaped the modern-day aesthetic of the goth subculture. Walpole wrote it at Strawberry Hill, his fanciful neo-Gothic villa, and pitched it as a “Gothic story” that fused chivalric romance with novelistic realism. Its startling images—a colossal helmet from the sky, moving portraits, doors that yield on their own—fixed the template later taken up by Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and beyond. The first edition masqueraded as a Crusades-era manuscript “translated” by Walpole, a playful hoax that lent the tale mock-antique authority. Manfred’s name nods to Manfred of Sicily, a learned, charismatic king repeatedly excommunicated—apt echoes for a plot of usurpation and prophecy. In tonight’s excerpt, Princess Isabella flees the tyrant after he demands her hand on the very night his own son—her betrothed—dies beneath that impossible, fallen helmet. — read by 'N' — Sign up for Snoozecast+ to get expanded, ad-free access by going to snoozecast.com/plus! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

The Willows

Tonight, as part of our annual Spooky Sleep Stories series, we’ll read the opening to the novella “The Willows”. It was written by Algernon Blackwood, and first published in 1907. Two friends drift down the Danube by canoe, threading a maze of shifting channels, sandbanks, and low islands crowded with willow scrub. The river’s moods—eddies, gusts, glittering sun—seem to lean in and watch them, and the thickets along the banks gather like a listening crowd. As night closes, the landscape feels less like scenery and more like a presence with its own designs—most vividly in the willows, which “moved of their own will as though alive.” Blackwood was a devoted outdoorsman and a writer fascinated by the numinous in nature; he often suggested that the wilderness is not merely backdrop but a more-than-human realm. “The Willows” helped define early modern weird fiction by trading blood and monsters for unease and awe, its influence echoed by later authors across the genre. H.P. Lovecraft praised it as the finest supernatural tale in English, and readers still come to it for that distinctive sensation of the world turning subtly, inexorably, strange. — read by 'V' — Sign up for Snoozecast+ to get expanded, ad-free access by going to snoozecast.com/plus! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]