Think ghosts and you tend to think of old houses, even older castles or those spooky Victorian institutions such as foundling hospitals, orphanages and workhouses whose past occupants would have good reason to stick around and indulge in a little light haunting.

You don't tend to think of airports, however.

But Heathrow in particular is known for its large number of ghost sightings.

A common report from pilots, for example, is of a bowler hatted figure on Runway One, which dates back to the airport's first serious plane crash - a Dakota DC-3 which came down in fog in the spring of 1948, killing 22 people.

In Ghosts Of Heathrow (BBC Radio 4, Monday, 2.15pm), the first of the week's Afternoon Drama offerings, writer Sebastian Baczkiewicz took the idea of the haunted airport and spun it into a bewitching 45-minute story.

It turned on the tragic misadventures of San Diego-based computer consultant Martin, who flies in to attend a conference at a Heathrow hotel and ends up in a phantasmagorical nightmare which begins with him witnessing his own death.

He doesn't realise that at the time, of course. All he does know is that he's met Rebecca, a woman he once had a fling with, that there appear to be children running in the corridor outside his room - the receptionist blanks him when he complains though - and that he's woken in the small hours by a man in a cloak who calls himself 16-String Jack. Leaving his hotel, a confused Martin then travels to a tavern with a Mr Monday. Together they drink beer.

Later he encounters a man who introduces himself as Geoffrey Springer. Springer has never heard of Martin's hotel - "New is it? - but has just flown in himself. On a Dakota. And yes, he's wearing a bowler hat.

Like William Boyd's excellent short ghost story A Haunting (which also has a Californian angle, oddly), Baczkiewicz gives a modern and unexpected twist to a familiar and (some might say) rather tired form.

It's an accomplished piece of writing, a fact which probably helped attract its equally accomplished cast, including Paul McGann as Martin, Susannah Harker as Rebecca and the great Dudley Sutton as Mr Monday.

It added up to a pretty accomplished piece of radio drama too, and for extra spectral oomph, the drama is intercut with real documentary interviews with Heathrow workers to whom strange things really have happened.