Classic Ghost Stories

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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In an old private chapel attached to a country house, a trusted servant keeps night watch beside the ancient altar, alone behind a locked door. By morning he is found dead, a dagger from the chapel’s peculiar mechanism driven clean through his heart—though no human hand should have been able to strike the blow. No tracks, no witnesses, only the oppressive sense that something in that dim, little sanctuary has moved unseen. As Thomas Carnacki retraces the dead man’s final hours and tests the chapel’s sinister contrivance for himself, the silence around the altar begins to sound like an answer of its own.

First published in the 1909 collection The Ghost Pirates, A Chaunty, and Another Story, “The Thing Invisible” later appeared in The New Magazine (January 1912) before being collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913). The story is in the public domain.

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English writer of sea stories, supernatural fiction, and weird horror. He is best known for his visionary novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, as well as his stories featuring the occult detective Carnacki.

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There is a house at the end of a lane. You have seen it before — or something like it. Palladian, still, its pale stone holding the last of the May light as if reluctant to let the evening come. The chestnut trees stand tall around it. The air is warm and gold and very quiet.

Charles Dash stops his car. He is trespassing, he knows, but the house is empty, surely? And it is such a beautiful house. Worth seeing, if only for a few minutes.

And then the car key goes missing. He cannot find it anywhere. And the owner appears — such a welcoming man, such a pressing, generous, will-not-take-no-for-an-answer kind of man. Do come in. Stay for dinner. The night is drawing in. Why not stay?

Why not?

A Recluse was first published in 1926 and collected in On the Edge, Faber and Gwyer, 1930.

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, novelist and short story writer, regarded as one of the supreme masters of the uncanny in the English language. His ghost stories occupy a singular place in the tradition — atmospheric, oblique, and finally inexplicable.
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