A cautionary tale of a gambler and a ghost, Alexander Pushkin's original short story led to one of the most lavishly ambitious supernatural movies to emerge from 1940 cinema.

Tomorrow, we talk about Alexander Pushkin's 1834 supernatural short story The Queen of Spades and Thorold Dickinson's 1949 brilliant, but often overlooked, film version.

Informed by parapsychology, rich in philosophy and metaphysics, this brilliant 1922 story is also as bloody as Robert Block's Psycho and as disturbing as anything in Poe.

The classic ghost story meets delicious nostalgia for 1960s summer camps for children and teens. I talk to acclaimed author Charis Cotter about coming of age ghost stories in general and in particular about The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall (Tundra Books) about to be released in paperback.

We have talked in recent episodes about fiction which begs to be dramatized. The Twelfth Century half man, half beast caught in a fishing net off England's Suffolk coast is quite possibly a drama from real life. Who was he? Why are the details of this "legend" so precise?

The radio and the ghost story have a special affinity for each other. Creaking doors, echoing footsteps, the breathless delivery of the narrator. Great opportunities for suggestive details, but enough scope for the imagination to fill in the gaps. In 1926 L.P. Hartley expertly anticipated the long relationship between the radio and supernatural terror with this story of a self-made millionaire returned to London after decades in Australia, drowsing to the sound of the BBC in a hotel lounge while some thing travels through the rain to catch up with him.

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs, Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad, by M.R. James, The Signalman by Charles Dickens. We all know the stories and we all know at least one film or TV adaptation. But what what about the many, many other ghost stories which give us a similar frisson? The next two episodes will deal with some of these. L.T.C. Rolt's 1948 Bosworth Summit Pound, a tale of a haunted tunnel in a desolate canal is clever, sensuous, and begs for someone to adapt it for film or tv.

Sheridan Le Fanu's 1839 ghost story Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter stands out as a remarkable melding of fiction and biography. Godfried Schalken was a historical character, as was his mentor Gerrit Dou, a former pupil of Rembrandt. The story plunges us into the world of the Dutch masters and expands upon themes of darkness and transactional sexuality hinted at in some of Schalken's later works. In 1979 the story also spawned one of British television's most ambitious and daring dramatizations. I discuss both story and film.