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The Big Book of Ghost Stories

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Paperback
$30.00 US
6.95"W x 9.05"H x 1.4"D   | 31 oz | 16 per carton
On sale Sep 18, 2012 | 848 Pages | 9780307474490
Over a thousand pages of haunted—and haunting—ghost tales: the most complete collection of uncanny, spooky, creepy tales ever published! Edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler. Including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Rudyanrd Kipling, Isaac Asimov, James MacCreigh, and many more! Featuring eerie vintage ghost illustrations. 

The ghost story is perhaps the oldest of all the supernatural literary genres and has captured the imagination of almost every writer to put pen to the page. Here, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler has followed his keen sense of the supernatural to collect the most chilling and uncanny tales in the canon.

These spectral stories span more than a hundred years, from modern-day horrors by Joyce Carol Oates, Chet Williamson and Andrew Klavan, to pulp yarns from August Derleth, Greye La Spina, and M. L. Humphreys, to the atmospheric Victorian tales of Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention modern works by the likes of Donald E. Westlake and Isaac Asimov that are already classics. Some of these stories have haunted the canon for a century, while others are making their first ghoulish appearance  in book form.  Whether you prefer possessive poltergeists, awful apparitions, or friendly phantoms, these stories are guaranteed to thrill you, tingle the spine, or tickle the funny bone, and keep you turning the pages with fearful delight.

Including such classics as “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Open Window” and eerie vintage illustrations, and also featuring haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore! AlsoFeaturing haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore!
"Volumes of frightfulness. . . . No one should go through life (let alone death) without experiencing W.W. Jacobs’s 'The Monkey’s Paw,' Perceval Landon’s 'Thurnley Abbey,' Ambrose Bierce’s 'The Moonlit Road' and M.R. James’s 'Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad.' But Penzler also includes many stories that should be equally well known. This year, for instance, I read for the first time Ellen Glasgow’s 'The Shadowy Third'."
    —The Washington Post

"If you enjoy, as I have since childhood, a great ghost story well told, this book is required reading."
    —Paste Magazine

"Wonderful. . . . A list on your computer is one thing. A big, fat, juicy, paperback anthology like this is something else altogether."
    —The Buffalo News (editor's choice)

"Jam packed with enough classic horror and otherworldly stories to keep you having nightmares through the month of October. . . . This collection of short stories coupled with eerie vintage illustrations is a must-have for the nightstand. The only thing that can make it better is a flashlight under the covers."
    —The Long Island Press

"This mountain-sized omnibus contains every wrinkle of the form you could ever want. . . . There’s enough in this volume to please both dilettantes and devotees among ghost story readers."
 —Publishers Weekly

"Penzler has done an excellent job of collecting interesting, unnerving, and fascinating stories as well as providing nifty tidbits in the introductions. Reading most of these stories just before trying to sleep, though, is not recommended."
  —Booklist
© Charles Perry
Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and publishes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, MWA’s Ellery Queen Award and the Raven. He has been given Lifetime Achievement awards by Noircon and The Strand Magazine. His new company, Penzler Publishers, launched its imprint American Mystery Classics in October 2018; it is devoted to reissuing classic American mysteries in hardcover and paperback. View titles by Otto Penzler
Introduction
 

By Otto Penzler
 

Tales of the supernatural have been a fixture of the storytelling tradition since preliterate times, and the most popular form they have taken is the ghost story. This should not be at all surprising, as the fear of death and its aftermath has abided in the breasts of humans ever since they became cognizant of what it meant to no longer be alive in the manner in which it is traditionally understood. Animals, down to the most primitive invertebrates, share this fear without precisely being aware of what it means in a conscious sense, but they nonetheless do all they can to stay alive. The question of what follows the extinguishing of life probably does not keep mosquitoes or squirrels awake at night, but more than a few homo sapiens have pondered their uncertain futures with trepidation in the dark of night.
 
All cultures on the planet have superstitions about the dead returning as spirits or -phantoms—-belief systems memorialized in drawings and writings from the very beginnings of civilization. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, departed people are shown to return, not merely looking as they did in life, but dressed in similar garments. Therefore, apparently not only do dead people have the ability to materialize, making themselves visible again after they are gone, but so do textiles, leather, and metal.
 
In the Bible, the story of King Saul calling on the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of Samuel has been recorded, as have the questions surrounding whether Jesus after his resurrection was a living being or a ghost. From ancient texts in Greek mythology, various types of ghosts are described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Romans, notably Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, wrote about haunted houses.
 
Literature of all eras abounds in ghosts stories. William Shakespeare often used ghosts in his plays, most famously in Hamlet and Macbeth, and Charles Dickens wrote the greatest pure ghost story of all time in A Christmas Carol. Others among the world’s greatest authors who have written in the genre include Ben Jonson, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Edward -Bulwer--Lytton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather, F. Scott -Fitzgerald—-well, -really too many to continue.
 
What is the great attraction of supernatural fiction in general, and the ghost story in particular? From the time of childhood, we have a fear of the dark (and rightly so, as we don’t know exactly what is lurking out there, wrapped in the black cloak of invisibility). Although it frightens them, children still love to hear scary stories at bedtime; just consider such fairy tales as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood. We never outgrow our love of fairy tales, even if in adulthood they take a more complex form as stories about vampires, serial killers, werewolves, or terrorists.
 
Ghost stories may be told in many different tones and styles, ranging from the excruciatingly horrific to the absurdly humorous. Ghosts, after all, may have widely divergent goals. Some return from the dead to wreak vengeance; others want to help a loved one. Some are the spirits of people who were murdered or committed suicide and so could not rest because their time officially had not yet come and therefore walked the earth instead of stretching out comfortably in their graves. Some were playful, enjoying the tricks and pranks their invisibility allowed them, while others delighted in their own cruelty, committing acts of violence and terror for the sheer inexplicable pleasure of it.
 
All these ghosts, and more, appear in this volume. You will meet ghosts who frighten you, who make you laugh, and for whom you will feel sorry. And they are true ghosts. I have tried to remain true to the notion that ghosts are spirits or specters of the dead. Some stories that frequently have appeared in other ghost story anthologies have nothing at all to do with ghosts. They may be trolls, or evil plants, vile fungi, monsters, or other creatures of that ilk. Rightly or not, I have attempted to be a bit of a -narrow--minded purist about it all, not that it created a problem. There have been an astonishing number of outstanding ghost stories written by some of the finest authors who ever dared allow their dark creations to be set down on paper. It has been a confounding challenge to select the stories for this, the biggest collection of ghost stories ever compiled. It was tempting to include all the great classics but that would have filled to overflowing even this gigantic tome. It was equally tempting to stuff the pages with -little--known stories, often every bit the equal of the cornerstone titles, but it is impossible to attempt to produce the definitive collection of ghost stories and omit M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, or Edith Wharton. Although I admire some of the supernatural tales of Henry James, especially “The Turn of the Screw,” he won’t be found here because that novella has been anthologized to death, is easy to find elsewhere, and is so long that a -half--dozen other stories would have had to be sacrificed. Putting together an anthology is not a pure science, so there are contradictions galore. I’ve included “The Monkey’s Paw,” for example, which has also been anthologized to the point of being a cliché. Still, it’s short, -didn’t use up too much space, and it is lively (unlike dear old Henry -James—-no offense). To make up for the very familiar stories, I’ve included some that you’ve never seen before, several of which appear in book form for the very first time. The Golden Age of the ghost story (the late Victorian and Edwardian eras) is fully represented, and so is the Golden Age of the pulp magazines (the 1920s and 1930s), while the contemporary masters have not been ignored.
 
Whether this collection is best enjoyed next to a summer campfire or a winter fireplace is up to you. On the other hand, it is so enormous that it may endure through several seasons. Whenever you read it, I hope you have a shiveringly good time with it. After all, in the dead of night, who would not believe in ghosts?
 
Although I read more than a thousand stories to find and identify those that I hope you will most enjoy, it would not have been possible to compile such a comprehensive and -wide--reaching volume without the invaluable assistance of those who know a great deal more than I do. Sincere, if hopelessly inadequate, thanks are owed to Robert Weinberg, John Pelan, Chris Roden, Gardner Dozois, Joel Frieman, Harlan Ellison, John Knott, and those I’m forgetting who so freely and generously offered their assistance and expertise.
BUT I’M NOT DEAD YET
Conrad Aiken: Mr. Arcularis
William Fryer Harvey: August Heat
 
I’LL LOVE YOU—FOREVER (OR MAYBE NOT)
Ellen Glasgow: The Shadowy Third
Ellen Glasgow: The Past
David Morrell: But At My Back I Always Hear
O. Henry: The Furnished Room
Paul Ernst: Death’s Warm Fireside
Andrew Klavan: The Advent Reunion
R. Murray Gilchrist: The Return
Rudyard Kipling: The Phantom Rickshaw
Ambrose Bierce: The Moonlit Road
Lafcadio Hearn: The Story of Ming-Y
Lafcadio Hearn: Yuki-Onna
 
THIS OLD HOUSE
Amyas Northcote: Brickett Bottom
E. F. Benson: How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
G. G. Pendarves: Thing of Darkness
Edward Lucas White: The House of the Nightmare
Hector Bolitho: The House on Half Moon Street
Dick Donovan: A Night of Horror
Vincent O’sullivan: The Burned House
 
KIDS WILL BE KIDS
Rosemary Timperley: Harry
Michael Reaves: Make-Believe
A. M. Burrage: Playmates
Ramsey Campbell: Just Behind You
A. E. Coppard: Adam And Eve and Pinch Me
Steve Friedman: The Lost Boy of the Ozarks
 
THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY AROUND HERE
Mark Twain: A Ghost’s Story
Donald E. Westlake: In At The Death
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Ghost of Dr. Harris
“Ingulphus”: The Everlasting Club
Isaac Asimov and James Maccreigh: Legal Rites
Albert E. Cowdrey: Death Must Die
Frank Stockton: The Transferred Ghost
Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost
 
A NEGATIVE TRAIN OF THOUGHT
August Derleth: Pacific 421
Robert Weinberg: The Midnight El
 
STOP—YOU’RE SCARING ME
Frederick Cowles: Punch and Judy
Henry S. Whitehead: The Fireplace
H. F. Arnold: The Night Wire 400
Fritz Leiber: Smoke Ghost 406
Wyatt Blassingame: Song of the Dead
 
I MUST BE DREAMING
Wilkie Collins: The Dream Woman 437
Washington Irving: The Adventure of the German Student
 
A SÉANCE, YOU SAY?
Joseph Shearing: They Found My Grave
Edgar Jepson: Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance
Joyce Carol Oates: Night-Side
 
CLASSICS
M. R. James: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad”
W. W. Jacobs: The Monkey’s Paw
W. W. Jacobs: The Toll-House
Edith Wharton: Afterward
Willa Cather: Consequences
Cynthia Asquith: The Follower
Cynthia Asquith: The Corner Shop
H. P. Lovecraft: The Terrible Old Man
Erckmann-Chatrian: The Murderer’s Violin
Saki: The Open Window
Saki: Laura
Fitz-James O’Brien: What Was It?
Alexander Woollcott: Full Fathom Five
H. R. Wakefield: He Cometh and He Passeth By
Perceval Landon: Thurnley Abbey
 
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
Algernon Blackwood: The Woman’s Ghost Story
Victor Rousseau: The Angel of the Marne
Olivia Howard Dunbar: The Shell of Sense
Marjorie Bowen: The Avenging of Ann Leete
 
BEATEN TO A PULP
Greye La Spina: The Dead-Wagon
Urann Thayer: A Soul with Two Bodies
Arthur J. Burks: The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee
Thorp Mcclusky: The Considerate Hosts
Cyril Mand: The Fifth Candle
August Derleth and Mark Schorer: The Return of Andrew Bentley
M. L. Humphreys: The Floor Above
Manly Wade Wellman: School for the Unspeakable
A. V. Milyer: Mordecai’s Pipe
Julius Long: He Walked by Day
Dale Clark: Behind the Screen
 
MODERN MASTERS
M. Rickert: Journey into the Kingdom
H. R. F. Keating: Mr. Saul
Chet Williamson: Coventry Carol

About

Over a thousand pages of haunted—and haunting—ghost tales: the most complete collection of uncanny, spooky, creepy tales ever published! Edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler. Including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Rudyanrd Kipling, Isaac Asimov, James MacCreigh, and many more! Featuring eerie vintage ghost illustrations. 

The ghost story is perhaps the oldest of all the supernatural literary genres and has captured the imagination of almost every writer to put pen to the page. Here, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler has followed his keen sense of the supernatural to collect the most chilling and uncanny tales in the canon.

These spectral stories span more than a hundred years, from modern-day horrors by Joyce Carol Oates, Chet Williamson and Andrew Klavan, to pulp yarns from August Derleth, Greye La Spina, and M. L. Humphreys, to the atmospheric Victorian tales of Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention modern works by the likes of Donald E. Westlake and Isaac Asimov that are already classics. Some of these stories have haunted the canon for a century, while others are making their first ghoulish appearance  in book form.  Whether you prefer possessive poltergeists, awful apparitions, or friendly phantoms, these stories are guaranteed to thrill you, tingle the spine, or tickle the funny bone, and keep you turning the pages with fearful delight.

Including such classics as “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Open Window” and eerie vintage illustrations, and also featuring haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore! AlsoFeaturing haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore!

Praise

"Volumes of frightfulness. . . . No one should go through life (let alone death) without experiencing W.W. Jacobs’s 'The Monkey’s Paw,' Perceval Landon’s 'Thurnley Abbey,' Ambrose Bierce’s 'The Moonlit Road' and M.R. James’s 'Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad.' But Penzler also includes many stories that should be equally well known. This year, for instance, I read for the first time Ellen Glasgow’s 'The Shadowy Third'."
    —The Washington Post

"If you enjoy, as I have since childhood, a great ghost story well told, this book is required reading."
    —Paste Magazine

"Wonderful. . . . A list on your computer is one thing. A big, fat, juicy, paperback anthology like this is something else altogether."
    —The Buffalo News (editor's choice)

"Jam packed with enough classic horror and otherworldly stories to keep you having nightmares through the month of October. . . . This collection of short stories coupled with eerie vintage illustrations is a must-have for the nightstand. The only thing that can make it better is a flashlight under the covers."
    —The Long Island Press

"This mountain-sized omnibus contains every wrinkle of the form you could ever want. . . . There’s enough in this volume to please both dilettantes and devotees among ghost story readers."
 —Publishers Weekly

"Penzler has done an excellent job of collecting interesting, unnerving, and fascinating stories as well as providing nifty tidbits in the introductions. Reading most of these stories just before trying to sleep, though, is not recommended."
  —Booklist

Author

© Charles Perry
Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and publishes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, MWA’s Ellery Queen Award and the Raven. He has been given Lifetime Achievement awards by Noircon and The Strand Magazine. His new company, Penzler Publishers, launched its imprint American Mystery Classics in October 2018; it is devoted to reissuing classic American mysteries in hardcover and paperback. View titles by Otto Penzler

Excerpt

Introduction
 

By Otto Penzler
 

Tales of the supernatural have been a fixture of the storytelling tradition since preliterate times, and the most popular form they have taken is the ghost story. This should not be at all surprising, as the fear of death and its aftermath has abided in the breasts of humans ever since they became cognizant of what it meant to no longer be alive in the manner in which it is traditionally understood. Animals, down to the most primitive invertebrates, share this fear without precisely being aware of what it means in a conscious sense, but they nonetheless do all they can to stay alive. The question of what follows the extinguishing of life probably does not keep mosquitoes or squirrels awake at night, but more than a few homo sapiens have pondered their uncertain futures with trepidation in the dark of night.
 
All cultures on the planet have superstitions about the dead returning as spirits or -phantoms—-belief systems memorialized in drawings and writings from the very beginnings of civilization. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, departed people are shown to return, not merely looking as they did in life, but dressed in similar garments. Therefore, apparently not only do dead people have the ability to materialize, making themselves visible again after they are gone, but so do textiles, leather, and metal.
 
In the Bible, the story of King Saul calling on the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of Samuel has been recorded, as have the questions surrounding whether Jesus after his resurrection was a living being or a ghost. From ancient texts in Greek mythology, various types of ghosts are described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Romans, notably Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, wrote about haunted houses.
 
Literature of all eras abounds in ghosts stories. William Shakespeare often used ghosts in his plays, most famously in Hamlet and Macbeth, and Charles Dickens wrote the greatest pure ghost story of all time in A Christmas Carol. Others among the world’s greatest authors who have written in the genre include Ben Jonson, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Edward -Bulwer--Lytton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather, F. Scott -Fitzgerald—-well, -really too many to continue.
 
What is the great attraction of supernatural fiction in general, and the ghost story in particular? From the time of childhood, we have a fear of the dark (and rightly so, as we don’t know exactly what is lurking out there, wrapped in the black cloak of invisibility). Although it frightens them, children still love to hear scary stories at bedtime; just consider such fairy tales as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood. We never outgrow our love of fairy tales, even if in adulthood they take a more complex form as stories about vampires, serial killers, werewolves, or terrorists.
 
Ghost stories may be told in many different tones and styles, ranging from the excruciatingly horrific to the absurdly humorous. Ghosts, after all, may have widely divergent goals. Some return from the dead to wreak vengeance; others want to help a loved one. Some are the spirits of people who were murdered or committed suicide and so could not rest because their time officially had not yet come and therefore walked the earth instead of stretching out comfortably in their graves. Some were playful, enjoying the tricks and pranks their invisibility allowed them, while others delighted in their own cruelty, committing acts of violence and terror for the sheer inexplicable pleasure of it.
 
All these ghosts, and more, appear in this volume. You will meet ghosts who frighten you, who make you laugh, and for whom you will feel sorry. And they are true ghosts. I have tried to remain true to the notion that ghosts are spirits or specters of the dead. Some stories that frequently have appeared in other ghost story anthologies have nothing at all to do with ghosts. They may be trolls, or evil plants, vile fungi, monsters, or other creatures of that ilk. Rightly or not, I have attempted to be a bit of a -narrow--minded purist about it all, not that it created a problem. There have been an astonishing number of outstanding ghost stories written by some of the finest authors who ever dared allow their dark creations to be set down on paper. It has been a confounding challenge to select the stories for this, the biggest collection of ghost stories ever compiled. It was tempting to include all the great classics but that would have filled to overflowing even this gigantic tome. It was equally tempting to stuff the pages with -little--known stories, often every bit the equal of the cornerstone titles, but it is impossible to attempt to produce the definitive collection of ghost stories and omit M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, or Edith Wharton. Although I admire some of the supernatural tales of Henry James, especially “The Turn of the Screw,” he won’t be found here because that novella has been anthologized to death, is easy to find elsewhere, and is so long that a -half--dozen other stories would have had to be sacrificed. Putting together an anthology is not a pure science, so there are contradictions galore. I’ve included “The Monkey’s Paw,” for example, which has also been anthologized to the point of being a cliché. Still, it’s short, -didn’t use up too much space, and it is lively (unlike dear old Henry -James—-no offense). To make up for the very familiar stories, I’ve included some that you’ve never seen before, several of which appear in book form for the very first time. The Golden Age of the ghost story (the late Victorian and Edwardian eras) is fully represented, and so is the Golden Age of the pulp magazines (the 1920s and 1930s), while the contemporary masters have not been ignored.
 
Whether this collection is best enjoyed next to a summer campfire or a winter fireplace is up to you. On the other hand, it is so enormous that it may endure through several seasons. Whenever you read it, I hope you have a shiveringly good time with it. After all, in the dead of night, who would not believe in ghosts?
 
Although I read more than a thousand stories to find and identify those that I hope you will most enjoy, it would not have been possible to compile such a comprehensive and -wide--reaching volume without the invaluable assistance of those who know a great deal more than I do. Sincere, if hopelessly inadequate, thanks are owed to Robert Weinberg, John Pelan, Chris Roden, Gardner Dozois, Joel Frieman, Harlan Ellison, John Knott, and those I’m forgetting who so freely and generously offered their assistance and expertise.

Table of Contents

BUT I’M NOT DEAD YET
Conrad Aiken: Mr. Arcularis
William Fryer Harvey: August Heat
 
I’LL LOVE YOU—FOREVER (OR MAYBE NOT)
Ellen Glasgow: The Shadowy Third
Ellen Glasgow: The Past
David Morrell: But At My Back I Always Hear
O. Henry: The Furnished Room
Paul Ernst: Death’s Warm Fireside
Andrew Klavan: The Advent Reunion
R. Murray Gilchrist: The Return
Rudyard Kipling: The Phantom Rickshaw
Ambrose Bierce: The Moonlit Road
Lafcadio Hearn: The Story of Ming-Y
Lafcadio Hearn: Yuki-Onna
 
THIS OLD HOUSE
Amyas Northcote: Brickett Bottom
E. F. Benson: How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
G. G. Pendarves: Thing of Darkness
Edward Lucas White: The House of the Nightmare
Hector Bolitho: The House on Half Moon Street
Dick Donovan: A Night of Horror
Vincent O’sullivan: The Burned House
 
KIDS WILL BE KIDS
Rosemary Timperley: Harry
Michael Reaves: Make-Believe
A. M. Burrage: Playmates
Ramsey Campbell: Just Behind You
A. E. Coppard: Adam And Eve and Pinch Me
Steve Friedman: The Lost Boy of the Ozarks
 
THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY AROUND HERE
Mark Twain: A Ghost’s Story
Donald E. Westlake: In At The Death
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Ghost of Dr. Harris
“Ingulphus”: The Everlasting Club
Isaac Asimov and James Maccreigh: Legal Rites
Albert E. Cowdrey: Death Must Die
Frank Stockton: The Transferred Ghost
Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost
 
A NEGATIVE TRAIN OF THOUGHT
August Derleth: Pacific 421
Robert Weinberg: The Midnight El
 
STOP—YOU’RE SCARING ME
Frederick Cowles: Punch and Judy
Henry S. Whitehead: The Fireplace
H. F. Arnold: The Night Wire 400
Fritz Leiber: Smoke Ghost 406
Wyatt Blassingame: Song of the Dead
 
I MUST BE DREAMING
Wilkie Collins: The Dream Woman 437
Washington Irving: The Adventure of the German Student
 
A SÉANCE, YOU SAY?
Joseph Shearing: They Found My Grave
Edgar Jepson: Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance
Joyce Carol Oates: Night-Side
 
CLASSICS
M. R. James: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad”
W. W. Jacobs: The Monkey’s Paw
W. W. Jacobs: The Toll-House
Edith Wharton: Afterward
Willa Cather: Consequences
Cynthia Asquith: The Follower
Cynthia Asquith: The Corner Shop
H. P. Lovecraft: The Terrible Old Man
Erckmann-Chatrian: The Murderer’s Violin
Saki: The Open Window
Saki: Laura
Fitz-James O’Brien: What Was It?
Alexander Woollcott: Full Fathom Five
H. R. Wakefield: He Cometh and He Passeth By
Perceval Landon: Thurnley Abbey
 
THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
Algernon Blackwood: The Woman’s Ghost Story
Victor Rousseau: The Angel of the Marne
Olivia Howard Dunbar: The Shell of Sense
Marjorie Bowen: The Avenging of Ann Leete
 
BEATEN TO A PULP
Greye La Spina: The Dead-Wagon
Urann Thayer: A Soul with Two Bodies
Arthur J. Burks: The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee
Thorp Mcclusky: The Considerate Hosts
Cyril Mand: The Fifth Candle
August Derleth and Mark Schorer: The Return of Andrew Bentley
M. L. Humphreys: The Floor Above
Manly Wade Wellman: School for the Unspeakable
A. V. Milyer: Mordecai’s Pipe
Julius Long: He Walked by Day
Dale Clark: Behind the Screen
 
MODERN MASTERS
M. Rickert: Journey into the Kingdom
H. R. F. Keating: Mr. Saul
Chet Williamson: Coventry Carol