"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
As October draws to a close, so too does our month-long journey through haunted halls, spectral visions, and uneasy hearts. This Spooktober, we’ve celebrated a remarkable group of writers: Charlotte Riddell, Marjorie Bowen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Katharine Green,...
We close the month as we started it: with Elizabeth Gaskell. The Open Door is possibly her most famous ghost story. Some people do not believe in ghosts. For that matter, some people do not believe in anything. There are persons who even affect incredulity concerning that...
It was a mystery to me, but not to the other doctors. They took, as was natural, the worst possible view of the matter, and accepted the only solution which the facts seem to warrant. But they are men, and I am a woman; besides,...
ELSIE was always lonely, but her desolation seemed more poignant when the day was sunny. Elsie lived with her grandmother in a large house at Hampstead. She thought that there could not be, anywhere, a house with more rooms, more stairs, more quiet and empty. There were...
When the rumours first began, I can't tell you. They must have had a beginning: but no one recollected when the beginning was. It was said that curious noises were heard in the neighbourhood of Sandstone Torr. One spoke of it, and another spoke of...
It stood on the left of the road as you went towards Alcester: a good-looking, red-brick house, not large, but very substantial. Everything about it was in trim order; from the emerald-green outer venetian window-blinds to the handsome iron entrance-gates between the enclosing palisades; and...
Better known by her pen name Mrs. Henry Wood, Ellen Wood (1814–1887) was a Victorian novelist whose works reached an immense popular audience. Her most famous book, East Lynne (1861), became a sensation for its mix of domestic drama and Gothic intrigue. Alongside her bestselling...
The light had been put out on the stairs. Usually, when he returned late to spend the night in his rooms, he found it burning. Now he had to make his way slowly, striking matches as he went up the old dingy enclosed stairs. It was...
I was riding along one autumn day through a certain wooded portion of New York State, when I came suddenly upon an old stone house in which the marks of age were in such startling contrast to its unfinished condition that I involuntarily stopped my...
Nest revived during the warm summer weather. Edward came to see her, and stayed the allotted quarter of an hour; but he dared not look her in the face. She was, indeed, a cripple: one leg was much shorter than the other, and she halted...
