Classic Ghost Stories

Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse by Lousia May Alcot

A young woman sits for a portrait, turning over a small gold box while her fiancé paints. Inside: three scarlet seeds, brought back from a place he'd rather forget. He wa

Lot 249 by Arthur Conan Doyle

This was a request, but fitted in with my current interest in mummies. Read my full notes on the history of the Egyptian Mummy in Horror here: https://www.classicghost.

The Haunted Dolls House by M R James

Kindly commissioned and sponsored by Gavin Critchley for his friend Victoria, a lover of dolls' houses... A collector buys a Gothic dolls' house for sixty guineas — a mu

The Face by E F Benson

London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate. And Hester Ward is fortun

A Professor of Egyptology by Guy Boothby

Cairo, in the winter season, when the wealthy of Europe come for the warmth and the ruins. A young woman falls under the spell of a scholar unlike any other — a man treat

The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous

A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go. He goes anyway. There are thi

The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling

A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could na

The Werewolf Howls by Clifford Ball

In the vineyards of the Château Doré, something has been moving at night. The workers whisper of a wolf — enormous, grey, and wantonly destructive — and Monsieur Etienne

Gabriel Ernest by Saki

Something is wrong in the woods. The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train com

The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith

There is a house in Auburn, California, with a tragic history and a new tenant. Jean Averaud has come from New Orleans with money, with books, with a beautiful mute woman

A Ghost of the Sea by Francis Prevost

On the Cornish coast, a man is dying by the sea. He has chosen to be there, and he knows why, and he is willing — with one exception — to let the world draw its own concl

Hertford O'Donnells Warning by Charlotte Riddell

Gerard Street, Soho. A winter's night. A surgeon sits alone by his fire, a practical man — a man who has cut through flesh and bone without flinching, who has long since

The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth by Rhoda Broughton

There is a house in Mayfair. Charming, freshly decorated, inexplicably cheap. The landlord asks no questions. The neighbours say nothing. But the grocer at the corner of

The Mystery of the Semi Detached by Edith Nesbit

A young man waits in a suburban lane for his sweetheart. She doesn't come. Walking home past her house, he finds the front door standing open, the windows dark. He goes i

To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens

A man reads about a murder in his morning paper over breakfast in his Piccadilly rooms. That should be the end of it. But something follows him from that reading — someth

A Walk in the Park by William Bundy

There is a park at the edge of a sleeping city. A man walks through it at night — tall, cloaked, unhurried — as if he has walked this way before, many times, across many

My Adventure in Norfolk by A J Alan

A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. The

The Moon Bog by H P Lovecraft

There is a bog in County Meath that the old people will not speak of after dark. They know, as old people in such places always know, that certain ground is not waste gro

The Triumph of Death by H Russell Wakefield

This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post. In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air i

The Death Mask by H D Everett

Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in