Classic Ghost Stories

Two noble houses. Centuries of hatred. A prophecy that may mean nothing—or everything.

In medieval Hungary, the young Baron Metzengerstein encounters a horse—gigantic, fiery-colored, unlike any creature in his stables.

He rides it obsessively. Dawn and midnight. Sickness and health. Riveted to the saddle as if becoming one with the creature.

It performs impossible feats. The servants whisper of things they cannot explain.

Some souls dwell only once in flesh. After that—only the scarcely tangible resemblance.

Publication Details:

"Metzengerstein" first appeared anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier on January 14, 1832, making it Edgar Allan Poe's first published tale. It was later revised and included in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840.

Author Biography:

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, poet, and literary critic who pioneered the modern short story and detective fiction. His works of Gothic horror and psychological complexity remain among the most influential in world literature.

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A solitary man, lost in the Welsh hills, stumbles through thick mist—his only companion a mounting sense of unease. The landscape is indifferent; the path vanishes; every familiar landmark dissolves into obscurity. Rescue appears in the form of an enigmatic stranger, whose kindness feels both matter-of-fact and unsettling. A map changes hands, but the mist has a memory longer than any traveller’s, and the hills have their own way of keeping secrets. What follows is not a tale of terror, but a quiet reckoning with the uncanny—a story in which benevolence and danger are not so easily separated.

“An Encounter in the Mist” by A. N. L. Munby, first published in The Alabaster Hand (1949).

A. N. L. Munby (1913–1974) was a British librarian, bibliographer, and author, best known for his ghost stories and scholarly work on rare books.

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A mediaeval abbot leaves behind a cipher—not in his will, but scratched into the glass of his own church. The treasure it guards has lain undisturbed for centuries. Mr. Somerton, a scholar with a taste for puzzles, believes he can solve what others have missed. The Latin is difficult, the clues are scattered, but gold is gold, and curiosity has its own momentum. What waits beneath the stone was put there deliberately. It has been patient. Some things, once disturbed, do not easily return to silence.

"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" was first published in 1904 in M.R. James's second collection, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The story has been widely anthologized and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1974.

Montague Rhodes James was a distinguished mediaeval scholar and Provost of King's College, Cambridge, later of Eton College. He is regarded as one of the finest writers of supernatural fiction in the English language, and his ghost stories continue to define the antiquarian tradition of literary horror.

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A schoolmaster arrives late at night in a remote Alpine village. The inn has no rooms. Then suddenly—there is one. A room that's occupied, yet empty. A room whose previous tenant, an Englishwoman, left two days before and hasn't returned.

As he unpacks his few belongings, the atmosphere begins to press in. Something lingers here—in the faded flowers by the washstand, in the air itself. And when darkness falls, he feels it: a crushing weight of despair that doesn't belong to him. Thoughts that aren't his own. A blackness so complete it whispers of only one escape.

The search party is still out on the mountains. But what if they're looking in the wrong place?

Publication Details:

"The Occupant of the Room" was first published in 1909 in Blackwood's collection John Silence: Physician Extraordinary, featuring the psychic detective Dr. John Silence. The story showcases Blackwood's mastery of psychological horror and the contagion of extreme emotional states.

Author Biography:

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was a British author, occultist, and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His work explored the boundaries between psychological experience and supernatural phenomena, establishing him as one of the most influential writers of weird fiction in the early twentieth century.

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The valley of Cwm Garon is a place of ancient ruins and emerald meadows, tucked deep within the Welsh Borderland. When John Carfax first arrives, it seems a sanctuary, far from the grime of the city. But the stillness here is deceptive; it is a silence that watches. As the mountain shadows lengthen, the beauty of the landscape begins to distort into something more sinister4 Among the brooding crags and shifting mists, a feeling of unwelcome intrusion takes hold In Cwm Garon, the land itself remembers, and the shadows have never truly been empty.

Publication Details

"Cwm Garon" was first published in 1948 as part of L.T.C. Rolt’s landmark supernatural collection, Sleep No More.

It is frequently anthologized as a masterclass in the "antiquarian" ghost story tradition.

Author Biography

L.T.C. Rolt (1910–1974) was a prolific English writer and engineer who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association to preserve Britain's canal heritage.

While famous for his biographies of industrial icons, he is equally celebrated for his atmospheric weird fiction, often set in the isolated landscapes he encountered during his travels.

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