Classic Ghost Stories

Lost Hearts by M R James (1862-1936)

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There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable.

M. R. James wrote this story in 1895. His erudition encompassed the respectable and the less so, and he knew the darker currents of the archive as well as any man alive.

Something — or someone — has been waiting in that house. Waiting, with considerable patience, for the third.

"Lost Hearts" was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895, and collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904.

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval manuscript scholar, Provost of King's College Cambridge and later of Eton, and the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the twentieth century.

On a forgotten platform at a junction no map records, a man waits for a train he half-remembers from childhood nightmares. In his hands, a battered red book falls open, again and again, to the same impossible picture: a tunnel mouth, a lamp, a solitary figure who will not quite turn his face to the light. As the night thickens and the pages repeat themselves, memory and prediction begin to trade places, and the question of who is watching whom will not stay safely inside the story.

First published in The London Mercury in November 1935; later collected in the volume The Sun Cure (1936).

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) was a British poet and prose writer, best known for poems such as “The Highwayman”.

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A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on in ways that are difficult to explain.

Edith Wharton set this story not in her usual territory of New York drawing rooms, but somewhere in North Africa, in a crumbling pile of Crusader stonework and Arab plasterwork, where the palms rattle like rain above an ancient well, and the desert stretches out in every direction, golden and merciless. She wrote it without a single ghost. She didn't need one.

First published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1926 under the title "A Bottle of Evian," the story was collected in Certain People (1930) and later reprinted in Wharton's posthumous ghost story anthology Ghosts (1937).

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She published more than forty books across four decades.

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The moon lifts off the water and climbs the sky over Calabria.

Two men sit on the stones of an old tower above the coast, sipping the local wine, basking in the warm dark. Below them, where the rock runs down toward the sea, there is a mound in the earth.

One of them notices something in the gorge far below. He descends to look. The other sits, and watches, and says nothing.

When the first man climbs back up, his companion turns to him quietly and asks: do you want to hear the story of what you saw there, and also what you didn't?

First published in Collier's Weekly, 16 December 1905. Collected in Wandering Ghosts, 1911.

F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909) lived most of his adult life in Italy. In his own time he was one of the most widely read novelists in the English language. He is less remembered now than he deserves.

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In an old private chapel attached to a country house, a trusted servant keeps night watch beside the ancient altar, alone behind a locked door. By morning he is found dead, a dagger from the chapel’s peculiar mechanism driven clean through his heart—though no human hand should have been able to strike the blow. No tracks, no witnesses, only the oppressive sense that something in that dim, little sanctuary has moved unseen. As Thomas Carnacki retraces the dead man’s final hours and tests the chapel’s sinister contrivance for himself, the silence around the altar begins to sound like an answer of its own.

First published in the 1909 collection The Ghost Pirates, A Chaunty, and Another Story, “The Thing Invisible” later appeared in The New Magazine (January 1912) before being collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913). The story is in the public domain.

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English writer of sea stories, supernatural fiction, and weird horror. He is best known for his visionary novels The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, as well as his stories featuring the occult detective Carnacki.

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There is a house at the end of a lane. You have seen it before — or something like it. Palladian, still, its pale stone holding the last of the May light as if reluctant to let the evening come. The chestnut trees stand tall around it. The air is warm and gold and very quiet.

Charles Dash stops his car. He is trespassing, he knows, but the house is empty, surely? And it is such a beautiful house. Worth seeing, if only for a few minutes.

And then the car key goes missing. He cannot find it anywhere. And the owner appears — such a welcoming man, such a pressing, generous, will-not-take-no-for-an-answer kind of man. Do come in. Stay for dinner. The night is drawing in. Why not stay?

Why not?

A Recluse was first published in 1926 and collected in On the Edge, Faber and Gwyer, 1930.

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, novelist and short story writer, regarded as one of the supreme masters of the uncanny in the English language. His ghost stories occupy a singular place in the tradition — atmospheric, oblique, and finally inexplicable.

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“The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural world and half in something older and less defined. The piece is more mood than story: a sequence of images about darkness, wings, and unease, letting pauses and emphases do most of the work. 

After arriving in the United States as a stateless immigrant in 1920, Lugosi struggled with the English language, often memorising his lines phonetically. His big break came in 1927 when he was cast as the lead in the Broadway production of Dracula.

His performance was so magnetic that Universal Pictures cast him in the 1931 film adaptation. Lugosi’s portrayal—characterised by his slow, melodic Hungarian accent, intense gaze, and formal evening wear—transformed the vampire from a finished, rat-like monster into a seductive, sophisticated villain. This performance became the template for every vampire depiction that followed.

While Dracula made him a superstar, it also trapped him. Lugosi found it nearly impossible to land roles outside of the horror genre.

The Rivalry: He was frequently paired with Boris Karloff (who played Frankenstein’s monster), though Karloff often received higher billing and better pay, which reportedly frustrated Lugosi.

The Roles: He gave notable performances in White Zombie (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and as the broken-necked Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939).

Health Struggles: Chronic sciatica led to a severe dependency on painkillers. As his health declined and his "classic" style of horror fell out of fashion, he found himself relegated to low-budget "B-movies."

In the 1950s, Lugosi experienced a strange career coda through his friendship with cult director Ed Wood. He appeared in films now famous for being "so bad they're good," such as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space (released posthumously).

Lugosi passed away in 1956 at the age of 73. In a final tribute to the role that defined him, he was buried in his full Dracula cape at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Despite his difficult later years, he remains one of the most recognisable and influential icons in cinema history.

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Link to Audio version

“The Bat” is a short horror monologue recorded by Bela Lugosi, built around his spoken persona rather than a conventional plot. In it he addresses the listener directly and describes the bat as a creature of night and hush, a watcher at windows and eaves, half in the natural world and half in something older and less defined. The piece is more mood than story: a sequence of images about darkness, wings, and unease, letting pauses and emphases do most of the work. 

After arriving in the United States as a stateless immigrant in 1920, Lugosi struggled with the English language, often memorising his lines phonetically. His big break came in 1927 when he was cast as the lead in the Broadway production of Dracula.

His performance was so magnetic that Universal Pictures cast him in the 1931 film adaptation. Lugosi’s portrayal—characterised by his slow, melodic Hungarian accent, intense gaze, and formal evening wear—transformed the vampire from a finished, rat-like monster into a seductive, sophisticated villain. This performance became the template for every vampire depiction that followed.

While Dracula made him a superstar, it also trapped him. Lugosi found it nearly impossible to land roles outside of the horror genre.

The Rivalry: He was frequently paired with Boris Karloff (who played Frankenstein’s monster), though Karloff often received higher billing and better pay, which reportedly frustrated Lugosi.

The Roles: He gave notable performances in White Zombie (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and as the broken-necked Ygor in Son of Frankenstein (1939).

Health Struggles: Chronic sciatica led to a severe dependency on painkillers. As his health declined and his "classic" style of horror fell out of fashion, he found himself relegated to low-budget "B-movies."

In the 1950s, Lugosi experienced a strange career coda through his friendship with cult director Ed Wood. He appeared in films now famous for being "so bad they're good," such as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space (released posthumously).

Lugosi passed away in 1956 at the age of 73. In a final tribute to the role that defined him, he was buried in his full Dracula cape at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Despite his difficult later years, he remains one of the most recognisable and influential icons in cinema history.

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A young doctor, recovering from illness, is sent to the Derbyshire hills for his health. He takes lodgings at a remote farm, where he notices the family's reluctance to discuss the valley below. There's a Roman mine nearby that no one acknowledges, and a particular opening in the earth that unsettles him.

His diary records what starts as mild interest in local folklore. But as he explores the mine workings beneath the Blue John caverns, his entries shift. The question becomes less about what might exist in the old tunnels, and more about what happens to a man who goes looking for it.

First published in The Strand Magazine in August 1910, “The Terror of Blue John Gap” was later collected in The Last Galley: Impressions and Tales in 1911. It draws on the real Blue John Cavern near Castleton, with its distinctive banded fluorite.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician and author, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Beyond detective fiction, he wrote historical novels, science‑fiction romances, and a rich vein of ghostly and weird tales.

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A man takes a sunlit shortcut through an English wood and finds that something is missing. There is no thrush, and no blackbird, and no rustle of wings – only a strange dimming of the light, and a silence that feels willed, and watchful, and almost hungry. At his friend's house the dogs will not cross the tree-line, and they bare their teeth at empty air. In the evenings, that grey band of trees seems to lie under a shadow that falls from nowhere anyone can see.

There is something in the wood, something that makes the dogs keep away and the birds fall silent. His friend suspects it, and his friend's wife avoids talking about it, and neither will say what they believe it might be.

First published in Woman magazine in December 1926, and later collected in Spook Stories (Hutchinson, 1928). Public domain text sourced from Project Gutenberg Canada.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was an English novelist, and biographer, and master of the uncanny short story. Best known for his Mapp and Lucia comedies and his eerie tales of the supernatural, he wrote across nearly every genre of early twentieth-century popular fiction.

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