Classic Ghost Stories

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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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.

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 comes, and he is gone.

It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, is a boy with light brown eyes that hold something tigerish in them, lying in the sun with an ease that belongs to no child he has ever met.

The aunt will find him charming. The dog will not stay in the house.

Saki understood that the old country — the country before the parishes and the property lines — was never entirely tamed. The animals there talk.

"Gabriel-Ernest" was first published in 1909 in the Westminster Gazette, and later collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910).

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), a writer of savage wit and supernatural unease. He was killed on the Western Front in the closing months of the Somme campaign.

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