All Hallows

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A traveller walking the coast of the west of England comes at evening upon an enormous cathedral standing almost alone above the sea, far from any town, its towers reddening in the last of the light.

Inside he finds an elderly verger who is glad of the company and in no hurry to send him away. The old man talks about the restoration work going on in the building: scaffolding in the transept, stone being recut, masonry mended. Then he explains that no mason has set foot there in months. The work goes on at night, by itself, and it is not repairing the cathedral so much as changing it, slowly and patiently, into something else.

First published in 1926, All Hallows is widely regarded as Walter de la Mare’s masterpiece and one of the greatest supernatural stories in English. It is a slow, luminous tale of desecration and quiet dread, in which almost nothing happens and everything is wrong.

Listen to the complete, unabridged audiobook of this classic ghost story.