Classic Ghost Stories

A man drives out to the Norfolk Broads one February night to look at a holiday bungalow. Snow is falling. The marshes are silent. Not even the waterfowl are stirring. Then, close to midnight, headlamps appear on the road — a car has broken down, and a young woman is alone with an engine that won't start. He does what anyone would do. He helps. He offers whisky. He thinks nothing of it. But there is something not quite right about her. Something in the way she watches the road behind her. Something in the way she keeps to the shadows.

There is a bog in County Meath that the old people will not speak of after dark. They know, as old people in such places always know, that certain ground is not waste ground simply because nothing grows on it, that still water is not empty water, and that when a man of money and modern confidence arrives to improve what does not wish to be improved, the wisest thing to do is quietly leave.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote "The Moon-Bog" in 1921, and it was first published in Weird Tales magazine in 1926. It was written to be told aloud, after dinner, when the fire was low.

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890 and died there in 1937, in poverty and near obscurity. He is now regarded as one of the most influential writers of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.

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This is for Terry Illikainen. No commentar.y As an experiment, I will do the commentary as a separate post.

In a sombre Elizabethan pile above Lake Windermere, the air is thick with more than just decay. Miss Prunella Pendleham, the last of a long line, watches her companion, Amelia, wither into a gaunt and listless shadow.

Amelia is the sixth companion; three before her never left these walls alive. Amidst the rattle of mountain rain, thin, high screams echo through the stone-vaulted halls. Is it the onset of madness, or is the house reclaiming a brutal, hidden history? As the light fades, the only certainty is the tightening grip of a terror that will have its say.

The Triumph of Death first appeared in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949.

It was later collected in Strayers from Sheol (1961) and The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield (1978).

H. Russell Wakefield (1888--1964) was an English writer best known for his unsettling ghost stories.

Drawing on clerical, military, and publishing-world experience, he brought a sharp psychological edge to the classic British supernatural tale.

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Tom Enderby is a widower who would like to remarry. There is nothing unusual in that. He has found a woman he is fond of, a gentle and pretty woman who is fond of him in return. There is nothing unusual in that either. What is unusual is what keeps happening to the white linen.

His first wife Gloriana has been dead for four years. She asked only one thing of him before she died — a small, strange, domestic request — and he honoured it. He made no promises. He is bound by nothing. And yet.

H. D. Everett's "The Death Mask" is a ghost story about what we owe the dead, and about the debts that accumulate, unnoticed, in the ordinary fabric of a marriage. The fabric, in this case, is quite literal.

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"The Death Mask" was first published in 1920 as the title story of *The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts* (London: Philip Allan, Quality Court, Chancery Lane), issued under the name Mrs. H. D. Everett.

Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was an English writer of supernatural fiction and historical novels who published her first book at the age of forty-four under the male pseudonym Theo Douglas, and whose ghost stories drew admiring notice from both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft.

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