Classic Ghost Stories

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 fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should — she has never had cause to wish for anything else, and she is grateful for it, in the quiet, unshowy way of someone who has never really been tested.

Until something from very long ago reaches forward and taps her on the shoulder.

Something she had put away so completely she'd almost convinced herself it was never real. A half-remembered thing from childhood, stirring now in the middle of the night.

She stops sleeping. She starts watching the dark corners of rooms.

Her doctor is kind, practical, entirely unworried. Nerves, he tells her — the heat, nothing more. What she needs is rest, and quiet, and a change of scene. A little village on the East Anglian coast, away from London, away for a while even from her husband. Somewhere she can put it all behind her.

She goes because she means to get well.

E.F. Benson's The Face.

*Publication: "The Face" first appeared in Hutchinson's Magazine in February 1924, and was collected four years later in E.F. Benson's Spook Stories* (Hutchinson & Co., 1928).

*About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories — his own term for them was "spook stories" — placed regularly in magazines like Pearson's and The Illustrated London News*.

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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 treated with strange deference by those who know him best, a man whose knowledge of the dead seems to run deeper than any book could teach. She will walk beside him through moonlit halls where the pharaohs sleep in glass cases,

"A Professor of Egyptology" first appeared in The Graphic on 10 December 1904, and was collected that same year in Guy Boothby's volume The Lady of the Island.

Boothby was an Australian-born novelist best known for his Dr Nikola thrillers, a writer of ferocious productivity who dictated up to six thousand words a day. He died suddenly in 1905, only months after this story appeared, at the age of thirty-seven.

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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 things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs. Something in the gallery, after dark, when the fire burns low and the talk runs out. Those who see it together are marked by it, in ways that take a year to come due.

This is the story of what a house remembers, and what it does to those who are told to stay away, and don't.

Published anonymously in 1878, later reprinted with the tag "by the author of Freda." Modern editors tentatively attribute it to novelist Elizabeth Anna Hart, though the evidence remains circumstantial.

Elizabeth Anna Hart (1822–1890) was a London-born novelist and poet, cousin to Lewis Carroll, best remembered for her children's classic The Runaway and the novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal.

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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 name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed somewhere else, by someone else, for reasons the walls should know nothing about. The question is not what haunts the house. The question is what was done to the dead.

"The House Surgeon" was first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1909 and collected in Actions and Reactions later that year.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and remains one of the most widely read English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Go here for a library of ad-free stories, a monthly members only story and early access to the regular stories I put out.

You can choose to have ghost stories only, or detective stories or classic literature, or all of them for either $5 or $10 a month.

Many hundreds of hours of stories. Who needs Audible?

Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work

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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 Delacroix, master of the estate, has heard enough. He is a rational man. He does not believe in werewolves. He has moulded the silver bullets himself, in the cellar, as a concession to superstition — nothing more. Tonight his sons will go out into the moonlight and put an end to it.

But there is something in the way he says goodbye to Pierre. Something in the way he asks after the crucifix. Something in the reason he will not be going with them.

The Werewolf Howls was first published in Weird Tales, November 1941. It is the final story Clifford Ball published before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps.

Ball was born in New York City in 1908 and wrote just six stories, all for Weird Tales, between 1937 and 1941. He drowned accidentally in Baltimore in January 1947, aged thirty-eight.