Famous Modern Ghost Stories

Book excerpt: Classic ghost stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and others. In 1920, acclaimed author and editor Dorothy Scarborough collected what she believed to be the finest ghost stories of her time. Her quintessential anthology Famous Modern Ghost Stories includes entries from such pioneering horror writers as Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, and Myla Jo Closser. As Scarborough says in her introduction to this volume: “Ghosts are the true immortals, and the dead grow more alive all the time.” The deceased and their mysterious spirits prove to be a source of endless fascination in the stories collected here, including Leonid Andreyev’s biblical speculation Lazarus; Fitz-James O’Brien’s gothic evocation of a New York City boarding house, What Was It?; Mary. E. Wilkins Freeman’s haunting narrative of three sisters, The Shadows on the Wall; and others.