The Dust-Cloud | A Ghost Story by E. F. Benson | A Bitesized Audiobook

In the aftermath of a tragic motor accident in Norfolk, stories abound locally of strange visual and auditory phenomena. Can there really be such a thing as a ghost motor car? Our narrator is intrigued by the legend, but has no particular intention to visit the scene himself... The story starts at 00:01:20

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 (and get access to exclusive content):

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 The Dust Cloud
00:36:52 Credits, thanks and further listening

About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) is probably best remembered today for his social satires, the Mapp and Lucia stories, written relatively late in his career in the 1920s and 30s and hugely popular ever since. However prior to that success he was more famous for his many “spook stories” (as he liked to call them) which he composed regularly for publication in periodicals – usually Hutchinson’s or Pearson’s magazines – from the 1890s through to the 1930s.

E. F. Benson, known as Fred, was born at Wellington College in Berkshire, where his father was headmaster at the time, the fourth of six children, although two siblings died young. Their father Edward White Benson later became Bishop of Truro and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883, until his death in 1896.

Remarkably, all four surviving Benson children became accomplished authors. The only sister, Margaret Benson, was regarded as perhaps the most academically successful, and she later became a notable Egyptologist. All three brothers – Arthur Christopher, Edward Frederic, and Robert Hugh, the youngest – published works on a wide variety of subjects but interestingly all three wrote ghost stories. I’ve read one of A. C. Benson’s stories for this channel previously, ‘Basil Netherby’ (   • Basil Netherby | A Ghost Story by A. ...  ), and would like to do more in the future, and I hope to read some of R. H. Benson’s at some point too. Of the three brothers, Fred’s ghost stories are the best known and he was certainly the most prolific of the three in that genre, producing more than 50 "spook stories" during his career.

Benson was a friend and contemporary of M. R. James, perhaps the most celebrated of 20th century ghost story authors, and he was a member of the Chitchat Club, the Cambridge University literary society where James would read aloud his ghost stories to a select few. As a writer of ghost stories, E. F. Benson's own output includes an unusually wide and adventurous range of styles and themes, encompassing stories of vampires, homicidal spirits, monstrous creatures, as well as satires of charlatan mediums who became so fashionable in the 1920s.

'The Dust Cloud' is one of Benson's earliest ghost stories; it first appeared in the January 1906 edition of The Pall Mall Magazine. It later appeared in book form as part of the collection 'The Room in the Tower and Other Stories', published by Mills & Boon in 1912.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2024