The Great God Pan, a novella by Welsh born Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 – 15 December 1947), was cited by Stephen King as maybe the best horror story in the English Language. Originally decried for its strong sexual and horror content, it is almost tame in comparison to today’s literature of the same genre. […]
gothic horror stories
The Mezzotint
From Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James M.R. James had a knack for compressing a chilling tale into a short space. Which is very refreshing, considering some writers, yes, I’m speaking to you Stephen King, has a tendency to stretch out their short stories almost to novel length. Montague Rhodes James was born in […]
Gothic Horror Stories: The Death of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce
When we say Ambrose Bierce was a western writer, we aren’t referring to western civilization. Rather, Bierce lived and wrote in the western United States, based in San Francisco for much of his career. A journalist by trade, Bierce left his indelible stamp on the short story with the twist at the end, and found […]
Gothic Horror Stories: J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
When we think of the Marie Celeste, we might be surprised to know that much of our facts are based upon a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is heavily fictional. Published anonymously in 1884 by a pre-Sherlock Holmes Doyle, it was thought to be the work of among others, Robert Louis Stevenson […]
Gothic Horror Stories: The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Blackwood was one of the most prolific writers of gothic horror stories, particularly ghost stories, including both novels and short stories. No less a personage than H.P. Lovecraft named Blackwood as one of his inspirations. As a young man he moved from his native England to the United States, working in a variety of […]
Glassic Gothic Ghost Stories: Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft
Growing up in the seventies, we were more likely to equate the title of this short story to Black Sabbath than to H.P. Lovecraft. A song by that same title appeared on their debut album, Black Sabbath in 1970. Much has been written about a thread of white supremacy in Lovecraft’s work, but with […]
On the Brighton Road
Richard Middleton Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds, who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no trace […]
A Southern Gothic Ghost Story from Edisto Island, South Carolina’s Low Country
Top: Legare Mausoleum, Graveyard of the Edisto Presbyterian Church, c. 1831. Edisto Island, Charleston County, South Carolina Diphtheria, now almost non-existent in the United States was once among the most feared of diseases. What made it all the more dreadful, is that children were frequently its main victims. While no one was immune, it was […]
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
By Nathaniel Hawthorne The great-great-grandson of the only judge in Salem’s witch trials who never publicly regretted his role, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent much of his life dealing with his family’s past through his writing. Whilst The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables get all the notoriety, perhaps none of his works deal as […]
The Pursuit of Ichabod Crane, from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Writing in an introduction from a reprinting of the story in 1996, Henry Steiner, Village Historian of Sleepy Hollow states that “At the close of his narrative, Irving anticipates a time when change will have so completely altered Sleepy Hollow that cramped historians will doubt that it once existed at all.” Irving need not have […]
The Tractate Middoth
The Salem Athenaeum in Salem Massachusetts has a ghost story of it’s own. The tales of M.R. James (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936) are rightfully considered classics of the genre. In the Tractate Middoth, we have a mysterious visitor in the library, setting off a chain of events which turns a curious librarian […]
Poe in Charleston and the Legend of Annabel Lee
Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina. “I asked myself- “Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is […]
