Winter ghost stories

A classic tale of what comes to those whose hearts are hard. In a series of ghostly visits, Scrooge visits his happy past, sees the difficulties of the present, views a bleak future, and in the end amends his mean ways. (Summary written by Kristen McQuillin)

The Monkey’s Paw was written in 1902 by W.W. Jacobs. It’s a dark brooding tale which promises from the start that the light you see at the end of the tunnel is actually an oncoming train. Mr and Mrs White of Laburnum Villas step out toward that light by taking up the three wishes granted to the owner of the Monkey’s Paw.

The American Minister and his family have bought the English stately home Canterville Chase, complete with the ghost of Sir Simon de Canterville - blood-stains, clanking chains and all. But these modern Americans will have no truck with ghostly goings-on, and set out to beat the spectre at his own game. (Summary by David Barnes)

Mary and Ned Boyne have fled their dreary life in Wisconsin for a home in rustic Dorsetshire. But you can only run so far, and some things - some secret things - may follow you. A creepy and tragic ghost story from one of the masters. (Summary by John Silence)

Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Prize in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. The Treasure (Herr Arnes penningar) is a fairly short Novel, both a Drama and a Ghost Story.

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a medieval scholar; Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. His stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces.

This is a collection of short stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The stories all have different topics, there are mysterious deaths, haunted houses, ghosts, moving shadows, and all other ingredients which make for a good ghost story. - Summary by Carolin

"The Horla" (French title "Le Horla") is among the most famous short stories by the French writer Guy de Maupassant. This version, published in 1887, is an expanded version of that previously published in the Paris literary periodical, Le Gil Blas, on October 26, 1886. Written as a series of private journal entries, it recounts the narrator's terrifying experience of "a strange, unknowable, and invisible being."

Most of the following Kwaidan, or Weird Tales, have been taken from old Japanese books,— such as the Yaso-Kidan, Bukkyo-Hyakkwa-Zensho, Kokon-Chomonshu, Tama-Sudare, and Hyaku-Monogatari. Some of the stories may have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream of Akinosuke," for example, is certainly from a Chinese source.

Henry James' classic ghost story comprises the written testimony of a young governess, charged with looking after two small children at an isolated country estate, who believes they are being haunted. As the story progresses, the governess' increasingly frenetic narration provokes the question: is she insane, or are the ghosts real? (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)

A collection of gentle stories that draw us into that hidden world where fear is just around the next corner, and where loving hands can touch across the boundaries of death. (Summary by Peter Yearsley)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu...was in his own particular vein one of the best story-tellers of the nineteenth century; and the present volume contains a collection of forgotten tales by him, and of tales not previously known to be his.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914?), satirist, critic, poet, short story writer and journalist. His fiction showed a clean economical style often sprinkled with subtle cynical comments on human behaviour. Nothing is known of his death, as he went missing while an observer with Pancho Villa’s army in 1913/14.

A Phantom Lover is a supernatural novella by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) first published in 1886. Set in a Kentish manor house, the story concerns a portrait painter commissioned by a squire, William Oke, to produce portraits of him and his wife, the eccentric Mrs. Alice Oke, who bears a striking resemblance to a woman in a mysterious, seventeenth century painting. (Summary by Anthony Leslie)

The Ghost Pirates is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate.

A Victorian charmer! River Hall is a handsomely furnished, eminently desirable residence, conveniently situated in a fashionable district. It could be rented at a more than reasonable rate by anyone willing to share the home with its dead but, by all accounts, not departed owner.

Wilhemina Fitzclarence was a Scottish novelist and short story author and a descendant of King William IV. In these stories published in 1896, the past is never far away. In ‘The Bruges Ghost’ a frightening spectre appears suddenly in an historic Belgian town, while in ‘A Mysterious Visitor’ a convalescent young officer hears a startling revelation from a man he does not recognise.

An anthology of short, chilling stories from Algernon Blackwood. They will make you start at noises in the night and wonder about your neighbors. These stories likely stem from Blackwood's investigations into haunted houses for the Psychical Research Society and reflect his fascination with the weird, occult and supernatural. - Summary by Lynne Thompson

Two stories "of the seen and unseen" with mysterious occurrences by Margaret O. Oliphant, originally published in 1881. (Summary by Gesine)

It is Christmas Eve, and the narrator, his uncle and sundry other local characters are sitting round the fire drinking copious quantities of whisky punch and telling ghost stories until bedtime, when...