Great Ghost Stories
Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A. T. Quiller-Couch, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Erckmann-Chatrian, Fiona Macleod, Amelia B Edwards, H. B. Marryatt, Joseph Lewis French, James H. Hyslop
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, March 19, 2015)
One Dozen Terrible Encounters And Paranormal Short Stories By The Masters of the Craft. âGhost stories lend themselves well to fiction. They leave the imagination entirely free. In ordinary fiction, especially of the realistic type, we expect some concessions to be made to facts but when it comes to a ghost story we assign no limits to the imagination. This is because the supernatural world offers us no standards for curbing our fancy. Icarus is given impunity in that atmosphere and there is no sun to melt his wings. Whatever our wishes, we do not expect ghosts to be real, and we are fancy free to invent or distort as we may. But in the twilight of human knowledge it was not thus. The boundaries of the real and the unreal were undefined and the belief in the supernatural, while it allowed the imagination free reins, revealed little difference between its creations and the ideas men held of the actual world. In this overlapping of the real and the imaginary, the ghost story arose and has never lost its interest for men, though the cold judgment of science deprived the real thing of its terrorsâŠ. âPerhaps in this age when we are beginning to break down the barriers which science has set to the imagination, and this by an expansion of science itself, which is the Nemesis of its own prejudices and arbitrarily imposed limits, we may find the salvation of both the intellect and the will. However this may be, with apparitions as a proved fact, and on any theory not due to chance in all instances, the fancies of the past may prove to have been founded in fact, however dressed to suit the purposes of literary art.â -James H. Hyslop, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research CONTENTS Foreword. James H. Hyslop The House and the Brain. Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Roll-Call of the Reef. A. T. Quiller-Couch The Open Door. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant The Deserted House. Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann The Mysterious Sketch. Erckmann-Chatrian Green Branches. Fiona Macleod The Four-Fifteen Express. Amelia B. Edwards The Were-Wolf. H. B. Marryatt The Withered Arm. Thomas Hardy Clarimonde. ThĂ©ophile Gautier The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. Montague Rhodes James What Was It? Fitz-James O'Brien