Classic Ghost Stories

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 return. There is nothing unusual in that either. What is unusual is what keeps happening to the white linen.

His first wife Gloriana has been dead for four years. She asked only one thing of him before she died — a small, strange, domestic request — and he honoured it. He made no promises. He is bound by nothing. And yet.

H. D. Everett's "The Death Mask" is a ghost story about what we owe the dead, and about the debts that accumulate, unnoticed, in the ordinary fabric of a marriage. The fabric, in this case, is quite literal.

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"The Death Mask" was first published in 1920 as the title story of *The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts* (London: Philip Allan, Quality Court, Chancery Lane), issued under the name Mrs. H. D. Everett.

Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was an English writer of supernatural fiction and historical novels who published her first book at the age of forty-four under the male pseudonym Theo Douglas, and whose ghost stories drew admiring notice from both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft.

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Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936)

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There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable.

M. R. James wrote this story in 1895. His erudition encompassed the respectable and the less so, and he knew the darker currents of the archive as well as any man alive.

Something — or someone — has been waiting in that house. Waiting, with considerable patience, for the third.

"Lost Hearts" was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895, and collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904.

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval manuscript scholar, Provost of King's College Cambridge and later of Eton, and the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the twentieth century.

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On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade places, and the question of who is watching whom will not stay safely inside the story.

First published in The London Mercury in November 1935; later collected in the volume The Sun Cure (1936).
Now widely reprinted in anthologies of supernatural and psychological horror, where it has earned a reputation as a minor classic.

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was a British poet and prose writer, best known for poems such as “The Highwayman”.
Alongside his popular verse, he wrote a small but influential body of uncanny fiction, of which “Midnight Express” is the most celebrated.

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A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on in ways that are difficult to explain.

Edith Wharton set this story not in her usual territory of New York drawing rooms, but somewhere in North Africa, in a crumbling pile of Crusader stonework and Arab plasterwork, where the palms rattle like rain above an ancient well, and the desert stretches out in every direction, golden and merciless. She wrote it without a single ghost. She didn't need one.

First published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1926 under the title "A Bottle of Evian," the story was collected in Certain People (1930) and later reprinted in Wharton's posthumous ghost story anthology Ghosts (1937).

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She published more than forty books across four decades.

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The moon lifts off the water and climbs the sky over Calabria.

Two men sit on the stones of an old tower above the coast, sipping the local wine, basking in the warm dark. Below them, where the rock runs down toward the sea, there is a mound in the earth.

One of them notices something in the gorge far below. He descends to look. The other sits, and watches, and says nothing.

When the first man climbs back up, his companion turns to him quietly and asks: do you want to hear the story of what you saw there, and also what you didn't?

First published in Collier's Weekly, 16 December 1905. Collected in Wandering Ghosts, 1911.

F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909) lived most of his adult life in Italy. In his own time he was one of the most widely read novelists in the English language. He is less remembered now than he deserves.

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