Great Ghost Stories

One Dozen Terrible Encounters And Paranormal Short Stories By The Masters of the Craft.

“Ghost stories lend themselves well to fiction. They leave the imagination entirely free. In ordinary fiction, especially of the realistic type, we expect some concessions to be made to facts but when it comes to a ghost story we assign no limits to the imagination. This is because the supernatural world offers us no standards for curbing our fancy. Icarus is given impunity in that atmosphere and there is no sun to melt his wings. Whatever our wishes, we do not expect ghosts to be real, and we are fancy free to invent or distort as we may. But in the twilight of human knowledge it was not thus. The boundaries of the real and the unreal were undefined and the belief in the supernatural, while it allowed the imagination free reins, revealed little difference between its creations and the ideas men held of the actual world. In this overlapping of the real and the imaginary, the ghost story arose and has never lost its interest for men, though the cold judgment of science deprived the real thing of its terrors….

“Perhaps in this age when we are beginning to break down the barriers which science has set to the imagination, and this by an expansion of science itself, which is the Nemesis of its own prejudices and arbitrarily imposed limits, we may find the salvation of both the intellect and the will. However this may be, with apparitions as a proved fact, and on any theory not due to chance in all instances, the fancies of the past may prove to have been founded in fact, however dressed to suit the purposes of literary art.” -James H. Hyslop, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research

CONTENTS

Foreword. James H. Hyslop

The House and the Brain. Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The Roll-Call of the Reef. A. T. Quiller-Couch

The Open Door. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant

The Deserted House. Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann

The Mysterious Sketch. Erckmann-Chatrian

Green Branches. Fiona Macleod

The Four-Fifteen Express. Amelia B. Edwards

The Were-Wolf. H. B. Marryatt

The Withered Arm. Thomas Hardy

Clarimonde. Théophile Gautier

The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. Montague Rhodes James

What Was It? Fitz-James O'Brien