Skip to the main content
Nocturnal TalesMystery audiobooks for quiet evenings

The Woman in Black

Original mysteryNo. 1211 hr 28 minHercule Poirot

Play this story
0:00
1:27:47

The story

In the hills above Orsano, an ancient castle broods over a gorge and holds its family like a prison, and when a countess summons the Belgian Detective in secret, a stone shatters a window with a dagger-drawn warning that “honour” will be kept in blood; as a forbidden meeting on an upper gallery ends in a violent fall and a “woman in black” vanishes into shadowed passages, the investigation turns from spectacle to paperwork—missing dispatch books, a surgically removed page, and ash in a grate that points to inheritance, legitimacy, and a marriage treated like a treaty; inspired by historical crime of its era while remaining entirely fictional, The Woman in Black is an original Golden Age–style mystery about tyranny disguised as tradition, the ruinous cost of secrecy, and the moment a household chooses violence to keep its silence.

Free to listen, in full, with no account and no password. Your place is remembered in this browser, so you can stop and come back.

Enjoyed this one?

Every story on Nocturnal Tales is free, and stays free. Listeners who choose to give are the reason there is a new one tomorrow.

This is our work and what we live on: two of us, writing and producing a story every night. Giving here goes straight to us, rather than through a platform that can change its mind overnight. Why donations are important.

Choose a monthly amount

or

Give with PayPal

PayPal opens in a new page. Monthly support is easiest to manage through the card option.

No story is ever locked. Payment is handled securely by Stripe — we never see your card details. You can change or cancel your support at any time, from this page, with no explanation needed.

Be the first to comment

Tell us what you made of this one. No account and no password — just a name.

No account, no password. Your email is never shown to anyone, and is used only to reply to you unless you ask for the nightly email above.

More from the library

Cover illustration for The Bathtub Enigma

The Bathtub Enigma

Hercule Poirot

London in the fog, and a block of mansion flats in Battersea where a man has been found dead in his own bath. The dead man is an architect. He was seen alive the previous evening, the door was locked from within, and the water was long cold by the time anybody thought to look.

2 hr 18 minNo. 250

Cover illustration for A Day's Folly

A Day's Folly

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard

The newspaper-reading public called it the Somersetshire Outrage, and to this day, as far as the public is concerned, it was never properly explained at all. A young shop assistant named Jane Turner is found in her lodgings at Weston, tied to a chair with a rope, a shawl over her head, half-slipping to the floor.

by Baroness Orczy

46 minNo. 249

Cover illustration for The Two Confessions

The Two Confessions

Hercule Poirot

New Orleans, the spring of nineteen thirty-three. There are certain cities which, even before one has committed a crime in them, seem already to know the secret. Arthur and the Belgian Detective have come for a rest.

1 hr 14 minNo. 248

Cover illustration for The Knight's Cross Signal Problem

It begins with Max Carrados greeting his friend Carlyle at the door and remarking that he has a mystery about him somewhere. He can hear it in the man's step. The mystery is a railway disaster.

by Ernest Bramah

1 hr 7 minNo. 247