One Summer Night
Ambrose Bierce
The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.
(more…)
Menu
Gabriel-Ernest
Saki
“There is a wild beast in your woods,” said the artist Cunningham, as he was being driven to the station. It was the only remark he had made during the drive, but as Van Cheele had talked incessantly his companion’s silence had not been noticeable.
(more…)The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot
Ambrose Bierce
It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted.
(more…)The Mass Of Shadows
Anatole France
This tale the sacristan of the church of St. Eulalie at Neuville d’Aumont told me, as we sat under the arbor of the White Horse, one fine summer evening, drinking a bottle of old wine to the health of the dead man, now very much at his ease, whom that very morning he had borne to the grave with full honors, beneath a pall powdered with smart silver tears.
(more…)The Interval
Vincent O'Sullivan
Mrs. Wilton passed through a little alley leading from one of the gates which are around Regent’s Park, and came out on the wide and quiet street.
(more…)Lost Hearts
M. R. James
It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door.
(more…)The Basket
Herbert J. Mangham
Mrs. Buhler told him at first that she had no vacancies, but as he started away she thought of the little room in the basement.
He turned back at her call.
(more…)The Closing Hand
Farnsworth Wright
Solitary and forbidding, the house stared specterlike through scraggly trees that seemed to shrink from its touch.
(more…)The Place Of Madness
Merlin Moore Taylor
“Nonsense. A penitentiary is not intended to be a place for coddling and pampering those who have broken the law.”
(more…)Number 13
M. R. James
Among the towns of Jutland, Viborg justly holds a high place. It is the seat of a bishopric; it has a handsome but almost entirely new cathedral, a charming garden, a lake of great beauty, and many storks. Near it is Hald, accounted one of the prettiest things in Denmark; and hard by is Finderup, where Marsk Stig murdered King Erik Glipping on St Cecilia’s Day, in the year 1286. Fifty-six blows of square-headed iron maces were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.
(more…)Joseph: A Story
Katherine Rickford
They were sitting round the fire after dinner—not an ordinary fire—one of those fires that has a little room all to itself with seats at each side of it to hold a couple of people or three.
(more…)The Beast With Five Fingers
W. F. Harvey
When I was a little boy I once went with my father to call on Adrian Borlsover. I played on the floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed for a subscription. Just before we left my father said, “Mr. Borlsover, may my son here shake hands with you? It will be a thing to look back upon with pride when he grows to be a man.”
(more…)The Occupant Of The Room
Algernon Blackwood
He arrived late at night by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. The village, a single mass of shadow, was already asleep.
(more…)What Was It?
Fitz-James O’Brien
It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence, that I approach the strange narrative which I am about to relate. The events which I purpose detailing are of so extraordinary a character that I am quite prepared to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn.
(more…)The Terrible Old Man
H. P. Lovecraft
It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.
(more…)Sredni Vashtar
Saki
Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years.
(more…)The Shadows On The Wall
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
“Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward died,” said Caroline Glynn.
(more…)A Thousand Deaths
Jack London
I had been in the water about an hour, and cold, exhausted, with a terrible cramp in my right calf, it seemed as though my hour had come. Fruitlessly struggling against the strong ebb tide, I had beheld the maddening procession of the water-front lights slip by, but now I gave up attempting to breast the stream and contended myself with the bitter thoughts of a wasted career, now drawing to a close.
(more…)The Boarded Window
Ambrose Bierce
In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.
(more…)
