A Scholar From Texas
Dorothy Scarborough was born in Texas in 1878. She attended Baylor College then the University of Chicago 
before going onto Oxford. She taught literature at Columbia, beginning in 1916. Her dissertation became her first book on the supernatural: The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). Dorothy is probably better remembered for her work on life in the Southwest and her novel, The Wind (1925), which made into a movie with Lillian Gish. But mainstream success did not keep her from the ghostly. She published two collections with G. P. Putnam in 1921.
Famous Modern Ghost Stories (G. P. Putnam, 1921) begins her introduction “The Imperishable Ghost” with:
Ghosts are the true immortals, and the dead grow more alive all the time. Wraiths have a greater vitality to-day than ever before. They are far more numerous than at any time in the past, and people are more interested in them. There are persons that claim to be acquainted with specific spirits, to speak with them, to carry on correspondence with them, and even some who insist that they are private secretaries to the dead. Others of us mortals, more reserved, are content to keep such distance as we may from even the shadow of a shade. But there’s no getting away from ghosts nowadays, for even if you shut your eyes to them in actual life, you stumble over them in the books you read, you see them on the stage and on the screen, and you hear them on the lecture platform.
Famous Modern Ghost Stories
This volume includes many of the very best classic tales.
“The Willows” By Algernon Blackwood (The Listener and Other Stories, 1907) More on Algernon Blackwood
“The Shadows on the Wall” By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Everybody’s Magazine, March 1903)
“The Messenger” By Robert W. Chambers (The Mystery of Choice, 1897)
“Lazarus” By Leonid Andreyev (1906)
“The Beast with Five Fingers” By W. F. Harvey (The New Decameron, 1919) More on this story here
“The Mass of Shadows” By Anatole France ( L’étui de nacre, 1892)
“What Was It?” By Fitz-James O’Brien (Harper’s Magazine, March 1859)
“The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” By Ambrose Bierce (San Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1890) More on Bierce
“The Shell of Sense” By Olivia Howard Dunbar (Harper’s Magazine, December 1908)
“The Woman at Seven Brothers” By Wilbur Daniel Steele (Harper’s Magazine, December 1917)
“At the Gate” By Myla Jo Closser (Century Magazine, March 1917)
“Ligeia” By Edgar Allan Poe (The American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts, September 1838) More on Poe
“The Haunted Orchard” By Richard Le Gallienne (Harper’s Magazine, January 1912)
“The Bowmen” By Arthur Machen ( London Evening News, September 29, 1914) More on this story here
“A Ghost” By Guy de Maupassant (Le Gaulois, April 4, 1883) More on this story here
Looking at specific dates, the oldest story is Poe’s from 1838 and the latest is Wilbur Daniel Steele’s from 1917. The majority come from American magazines between 1903-17. She does not include many from the British golden age of Dickens, which many later anthologists would. Where are the Amelia B. Edwards, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rhoda Broughton and J. Sheridan Le Fanus? Even M. R. James? She did include the word ‘Modern’ in the title so perhaps we were warned.
Humorous Ghost Stories
Despite M. R. James’ advice to the contrary, she also published a second collection of lighter material, Humorous Ghost Stories (G. P. Putnam, 1921). In this book she points out the humorous ghost is a much newer phenomenon. She could have also said an American one:
The humorous ghost is distinctly a modern character…Ancient ghosts were a long-faced lot. They didn’t know how to play at all. They had been brought up in stern repression of frivolities as haunters—no matter how sportive they may have been in life—and in turn they cowed mortals into a servile submission… But in these days of individualism and radical liberalism, spooks as well as mortals are expanding their personalities and indulging in greater freedom.
“Introduction: The Humorous Ghost”
“The Canterville Ghost” by Oscar Wilde (Court and Society Review, February 23, 1887)
“The Ghost-Extinguisher” by Gellett Burgess (The Cosmopolitan, April 1905)
“‘Dey Ain’t No Ghosts'” by Ellis Parker Butler (Century Magazine. October, 1913)
“The Transferred Ghost” by Frank R. Stockton (Century Magazine, May, 1882)
“The Mummy’s Foot” by Theophile Gautier (One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances, 1882)
“The Rival Ghosts” by Brander Matthews (Harper’s Magazine, May 1884)
“The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” by John Kendrick Bangs (Harper’s Magazine, June 27, 1891)
“Back From That Bourne” by Anonymous (originally in The New York Sun)
“The Ghost-Ship” by Richard Middleton (The Century, April 1912)
“The Transplanted Ghost” by Wallace Irwin (Everybody’s Magazine, January 1911)
“The Last Ghost in Harmony” by Nelson Lloyd (Scribner’s Magazine, March 1907)
“The Ghost of Miser Brimpson” by Eden Phillpotts (Tales of the Tenements, 1910)
“The Haunted Photograph” by Ruth McEnery Stuart (Harper’s Bazar, June 1909)
“The Ghost That Got the Button” by Will Adams (Collier’s, May 24, 1913)
“The Spectre Bridegroom” by Washington Irving (The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819)
“The Spectre of Tappington” by Richard Barham (Bentley’s Miscellany, February 2, 1837)
“In the Barn” by Burges Johnson (Century Magazine, June 1920)
“A Shady Plot” by Elsie Brown (original to this collection)
“The Lady and the Ghost” by Rose Cecil O’Neill (The Idler, August 1903)
Again Scarborough’s choices are largely American literary magazine choices: Harper’s, Century, Collier’s, Cosmo, Everybody’s…. This is less surprising because funny ghost stories were not big in England. Oscar Wilde (who was Irish) is the exception, of course, along with Richard Barham and his humorous collection The Ingoldsby Legends and Richard Middleton. Bangs and Stockton, like O’ Henry, made their career telling funny or ironic stories.
What Does Lovecraft Say?
Let’s take a look at her selections based on what H. P. Lovecraft chose in his own treatise on the weird fiction, The Supernatural Horror in Fiction (1927). From her first book, HPL mentions: Blackwood, Wilkins-Freeman, Chambers, O’Brien, Bierce, Poe, Machen and de Maupassant. (Eight out of fifteen). From the humorous list, HPL also mentions: Wilde, Gautier and Irving (three out of nineteen). Scarborough’s picks, especially in the second volume, show a familiarity with more current material than Lovecraft. This isn’t always to her advantage. Stories like “‘Dey Ain’t No Ghosts'” suffer from period racism and aren’t all that funny to a modern audience. I suspect Lovecraft was familiar with such chestnuts as Stockton and Bangs but since their work strives for laughs it fails to create the weird frisson HPL requires.
Scarborough’s books are a good read for those who want classics like “The Willows” but also other tales you haven’t read before. She has a nice variety between British and American authors with Europeans like de Maupassant, Gautier and Andreyev in the first collection. Unlike later anthologists, her selections aren’t all over-familiar. She also pre-dates Weird Tales, so there aren’t any of those Pulpier stories here like Christina Thompson would fill her Not at Night series with. Pulpsters like H. P. Lovecraft. Scarborough also ignores the Soft Weeklies like Munsey’s and Argosy. She was a lady who enjoyed the literary magazines of the turn-of-the-century, which still published ghost stories by top writers.
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