The Lady's Maid's Bell


Edith Wharton - 1902
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Screaming Skull


F. Marion Crawford - 1908
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories


Ambrose Bierce - 1909
    His masterful tales of the supernatural bespeak an imagination generations ahead of its time, exhibiting impressionistic conceits of reality in which space and time expand and contract according to individual perception.This stimulating and provocative collection of twelve of Bierce's finest ghost and horror stories abounds in crimes of passion, restless specters seeking revenge, haunted houses, forewarnings of doom, and sound minds deranged by contact with the spirit world. Selections include "The Eyes of the Panther," a chilling account of a young woman's supernatural link to a beast of the forest; "A Watcher by the Dead," in which a madcap wager has ghastly consequences; "The Man and the Snake," a hallucinogenic encounter between serpent and human; "Moxon's Master," a nineteenth-century caveat against the coming Machine Age; the celebrated title story; and seven other vignettes.A feast for devotees of ghost and horror stories, this remarkable collection of intelligent and inventive tales will captivate any reader who enjoys a compelling and suspenseful narrative.--back cover

The Canterville Ghost


Oscar Wilde - 1887
    The family -- which refuses to believe in him -- is in Wilde's way a commentary on the British nobility of the day -- and on the Americans, too. The tale, like many of Wilde's, is rich with allusion, but ends as sentimental romance...

A View from a Hill


M.R. James - 1925
    R. James first published in The Living Age, 4 July 1925, and collected in his 1925 collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories.The story tells the tale of a historian who goes on holiday to visit his friend and has a disturbing experience after venturing up a notorious local landmark.

The Shunned House


H.P. Lovecraft - 1937
    We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders.

John Charrington’s Wedding


E. Nesbit - 1891
    It was written in 1891 and is included in Nesbit's 1893 anthology Grim Tales. The story's title character is a man who somehow always seems to get what he wants. John makes up his mind to marry May Forster, the prettiest young woman in the village. After John asks her to marry him several times, May finally agrees. John says that his love for May is so great that he would come back from the dead if that was what she wanted him to do. Two days before his wedding, John leaves to visit his seriously ill godfather. May begs him not to go because she has a feeling that something bad will happen. John reassures her that nothing will prevent him from arriving at his wedding on time.

The Kit Bag


Algernon Blackwood - 1908
    It was first published in the December 1908 issue of Pall Mall Magazine.The action takes place in London shortly before Christmas. The story's protagonist is a young man named Johnson who works for an eminent lawyer named Arthur Wilbraham. Arthur Wilbrham has been defending a man named John Turk, who was accused of murdering a woman and cutting her body up into small pieces. Johnson is obliged to be in court for every day of the trial, which he finds highly unpleasant. When the trial is over, Johnson is glad that he will not have to see John Turk's face again and is looking forward to going away on a Christmas vacation to the Alps. He asks Arthur Wilbraham to lend him a kit-bag[1] to take with him on vacation. After the requested kit-bag arrives, Johnson passes a fright filled night

The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice


Wilkie Collins - 1879
    Are their malefactions at the root of the haunting -- or is there something darker, something much more unknowable at work? (Jacketless library hardcover.)

The Captain of the Pole-Star


Arthur Conan Doyle - 1890
    However, he was also an accomplished teller of tales featuring the weird, the supernatural, and the horrific, and 'The Captain of the Pole-Star' is one of the best examples of his weird fiction. The Captain of the Pole-Star is a collection of strange mystery tales that are all independent, sometimes involving ship voyages, shipwrecks, amnesia, lost love, grand thefts, comedy, and fairy tales.Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. It was between 1876 and 1881, while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, that he began writing short stories, and his first piece was published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal before he was 20. In 1882, Conan Doyle opened an independent medical practice in Southsea, near Portsmouth. It was here, while waiting for patients, that he turned to writing fiction again, composing his first novel, The Narrative of John Smith.In his later years, following the death of his son in World War I, Conan Doyle became deeply interested in spiritualism and psychic phenomena, producing several works on the subjects and engaging in a very public friendship and falling out with the American magician Harry Houdini. He died of a heart attack while living in East Sussex in 1930, aged 71.

The Judge's House


Bram Stoker - 1891
    He finds the place infested with rats, but it suits his purposes... until one of the rats grows too bold, and the scholar realizes the horror he's stumbled into.

Berenice


Edgar Allan Poe - 1835
    The tale is centered on the death of a young girl, named Berenice, and the mysterious visions of her cousin, Egaeus.

The Body Snatcher


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1884
    Jekyll and Mr. HydeMedical school students Fettes and Macfarlane are charged with the unenviable task of receiving and paying for the institution’s research cadavers. When Fettes recognizes the dead body of a woman he saw alive and well just the day before, he suspects murder. Macfarlane, however, insists that the authorities would never believe they had nothing to do with her death. Reluctantly, Fettes agrees to keep quiet, but soon regrets his decision when another familiar corpse turns up—and takes on a life of its own.

The Turn of the Screw


Henry James - 1898
    Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls... But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow


Washington Irving - 1820
    He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals' stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they're not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn't schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?