It’s October (and Friday the 13th!) and spook season is upon us! All those creepy collections you like to drag out this time of year, the Hainings, the Van Thals and the Chetwynd-Hayes, took much of their contents from the old Victorian and Edwardian magazines. Many stories are used over and over but the modern reader has no idea that these tales originally had illustrations to go with them. Magazines like The Strand, The Windsor Magazine and The Idler were popular for their fiction but also the art that accompanied it. Here are thirteen ghosts (and their illustrations) to add a chill to your trick-or-treat season.
Where possible I have added a link to an audio version of the story. It should not be surprising that there are many such as these are well-known and popular ghost stories.
No surprise to anyone, the first stories here appeared in The Strand. Newnes’ super-success aimed to have a picture on every page. Because of that, these stories didn’t get a single picture but eight! And, of course, we have to have one by Arthur Conan Doyle!
“Good Lady Ducayne” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (The Strand, February 1896) has been anthologized at least twenty times not including Bradden collections. This vampire story appeared before Dracula (1897) and has a lady’s companion being bled dry to keep her elderly employer alive. Braddon was famous for her sensation novels and really knew her audience. What servant woman could not identify with having her life drained off by the rich? Listen to this story.
“The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells (The Strand Magazine, November 1898) has been reprinted at leas six times including Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. There are so many Wells stories available but this one has a more supernatural appeal. I also like that it later appeared in Pulp magazines. The tale has an experimenter in astral projection getting his body taken by a spirit. With the help of a medium, he finds his abandoned corpse. Listen to this story.
“The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White (The Strand Magazine, September 1899) has been reprinted at least fifteen times. Not the first killer plant story but perhaps the best of them before The Day of the Triffids (1951). A band of soldiers go in search of lost men and find a horror. For more on early plant monsters, go here.
“Playing With Fire” by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Strand, March 1900) has been anthologized at least eleven times not including Doyle collections. There are many great monster stories from ACD but this one is perhaps the most directly related to his own beliefs on Spiritualism. Foolish people meddle with things best left alone. They even encounter a unicorn! (And, of course, the illos are by Sidney Paget.) Listen to this story.
By 1900, The Strand had many competitors. Not all used illustrations but the best ones did, usually not as many.
“The Tomb of Sarah” by F. G. Loring (The Pall Mall Magazine, December 1900) has been collected at least twenty-five times. This one-off vampire tale is a classic reaction to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It inspired Seabury Quinn to reuse the idea in a tale of his own. For more on Jules de Grandin and “The Tomb of Sarah”, go here. Listen to this story.
“The Haunted Chair” by Richard Marsh (The London Magazine, January 1902) has been reprinted three times not including Marsh collections. Evil furniture doesn’t belong to Marsh alone. Charles Dickens (“The Queer Chair”) did it before him and Elliott O’Donnell (“The Ghost Table”, Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine, June 1923) after him. Marsh is famous in his own right for The Beetle (1897) and for being the grandfather of Robert Aickmann.
“The Toll House” by W. W. Jacobs (The Strand, April 1907) has been reprinted at least thirteen times not including Jacobs collections. Jacobs is, of course, the author of probably the most reprinted story of them all (well over a hundred times), “The Monkey’s Paw” but his work is more often in a humorous nature. Listen to this story.
“The Whistling Room” by William Hope Hodgson (The Idler, March 1910) has been reprinted at least twenty-nine times not including Hodgson collections. Probably Carnacki’s most famous case though several others are popular as well. His specialized ghostbreaking equipment: a ladder. Listen to this story.
“The Hand” by Guy de Maupassant (The London Magazine, April 1910) originally appeared in Le Gaulois, December 23, 1883. This story is sometimes called “The Englishman”. It is not to be confused with de Maupassant’s other hand story “The Flayed Hand”. For more on severed hand stories, go here. Listen to this story.
“How Fear Departed the Long Gallery” by E. F. Benson (The Windsor Magazine, December 1911) has been anthologized at least ten times not including Benson collections. I have always thought of this one as the best ghost story ever ruined by a happy ending. The killer twins may have inspired Stephen King’s duo in The Shining. Listen to this story.
“The Empty Sleeve” by Algernon Blackwood with Wilfred Wilson (The London Magazine, January 1911) has been anthologized at least five times not including Blackwood collections. It’s a werewolf story that borrows its device from another, much older lycanthropic tale, “Niceros’s Tale” by Petronius. Listen to this story.
“The Haunted House” by Edith Bland (E. Nesbit) (The Strand, December 1913) has been reprinted five times, not including Nesbit collections. I don’t usually include “Scooby Doo” ghost stories in a piece like this but Bland does it so well, like a Seabury Quinn tale decades before the Pulps. I think is interesting that Bland used her real name and not her more famous pseudonym. She wrote other ghost stories under both names.
“The Tarn” by Hugh Walpole (Reprinted in The Strand, December 1923) has been reprinted at least fourteen times not including Walpole collections. A tarn, as the author explains, is a small, deep mountain lake. The writer in this story should have stayed away from this one. Walpole had two famous ghost story writers in his family tree: Horace Walpole, who wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Richard Harris Barham, who penned The Ingoldsby Legends (1840-1847). No pressure! Listen to this story.
By 1923, the Victorian ghost story writers were largely gone (though Walpole and Benson persisted…), replaced by a new, more garish style of spooky tales. March 1923 marks the first issue of Weird Tales, the Horror Pulp and a new era in Horror fiction that owed so much to these writers who came before.
Conclusion
Halloween is coming but things don’t calm down after the 31st. The Spook Season starts in October and rolls all the way to Christmas. Most of these stories appeared in December/January issues for the Yuletide reader. It doesn’t really matter when you like to read creepy stories. I’m quite happy to read them in hot weather as much as the autumnal. When I did a cruise around Hawaii, I took M. R. James along for the ride. (The Complete Stories. I still remember the young woman who asked me who ‘Mr. James’ was.) I hope you find something fun here whether it’s new to you or an old favorite…
Many thanks for this feature! I love your opening description of this time of year: “It’s October (and Friday the 13th!) and spook season is upon us! All those creepy collections you like to drag out this time of year, the Hainings, the Van Thals and the Chetwynd-Hayes ….” I discovered ghost stories in my school library at the age of eleven or so, and have loved them ever since, along with other forms of fantastic literature (science fiction, fabulist, etc.) Two other good anthologists are Richard Danby and Alberto Manguel, who edited two wonderful anthologies, Black Water and Black Water 2. Not all the stories there are ghost stories, but many of them are.
Great article! I’ll have to add some of these to my reading list. Is it just me, or were there an unusually large number of horror stories published in 1899?