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 […]
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 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 into […]
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 […]
The Shadow in the Corner
A creepy tale from the pen of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of the most popular writers of sensational fiction of Victorian England, from the Gothic Curiosity Cabinet.
The Roll Call of the Reef
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a British writer of the 19th and 20th centuries, who published under the curious pen-name of Q. An academic as well as a writer, he is best known for the anthology the Book of English Verse. His short story, The Roll Call of the Reef is another treasure from the Gothic Cabinet of Curiosities and Mysteries.
