Anthologies

This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter’s night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as ‘real’ apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings.

Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands – ‘Fisher’s Ghost’ by John Lang is set in Australia and ‘A Ghostly Manifestation’ by ‘A Clergyman’ is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.

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During the Victorian era, it became traditional for publishers of newspapers and magazines to print ghost stories during the Christmas season for chilling winter reading by the fireside or candlelight. Now for the first time thirteen of these tales are collected here, including a wide range of stories from a diverse group of authors, some well-known, others anonymous or forgotten. Readers whose only previous experience with Victorian Christmas ghost stories has been Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” will be surprised and delighted at the astonishing variety of ghostly tales in this volume.

“In the sickly light I saw it lying on the bed, with its grim head on the pillow. A man? Or a corpse arisen from its unhallowed grave, and awaiting the demon that animated it?” – John Berwick Harwood, “Horror: A True Tale”

“Suddenly I aroused with a start and as ghostly a thrill of horror as ever I remember to have felt in my life. Something — what, I knew not — seemed near, something nameless, but unutterably awful.” – Ada Buisson, “The Ghost’s Summons”

“There was no longer any question what she was, or any thought of her being a living being. Upon a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse were imprinted the traces of the vilest and most hideous passions which had animated her while she lived.” – Walter Scott, “The Tapestried Chamber”

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The Christmas ghost story tradition is usually associated with Charles Dickens and Victorian England, but—apparently unknown to historians and scholars—Christmas ghost stories were extremely widespread and popular in 19th-century America as well, frequently appearing in newspapers and magazines during the holiday season. From legends of old New Orleans and strange happenings on the plains of Iowa and the Dakota Territory to weird doings in early Puerto Rico and ghostly events in Gold Rush-era San Francisco, the tales collected here reveal a forgotten Christmas ghost story tradition in a bygone America that is both familiar and oddly foreign.

This collection features eighteen stories and nine poems, including entries by women and African American writers, plus extra bonus material and an introduction by Christopher Philippo.

“He turned and beheld a low black figure, with a body no higher than his knees, with a prodigious head, in the brow of which was set a single eye of green flame like a shining emerald, and with hands and arms of supernatural length.”—Joseph Holt Ingraham, “The Green Huntsman; or, The Haunted Villa: A Christmas Legend of Louisiana”

“There was a crash of the outer door—then a staggering and uncertain step in the outer room. It approached the sick-room—the latch lifted, the door swung open—and then—my God! what a spectacle! Through the open door there stepped a figure, not of Mrs. Hayden, not of her corpse, not of death, but a thousand times more horrible, a thing of corruption, decay, of worms and rottenness.”—Anonymous, “Worse than a Ghost Story”

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year – time for more rare ghostly tales of Yuletide terror from Victorian England!

For this fifth Valancourt volume of Christmas ghost stories, editor Christopher Philippo has dug deeper than ever before, delving into the archives of Victorian-era newspapers and magazines from throughout the British Isles to find twenty-one rare texts for the Christmas season – seventeen stories and four poems – most of them never before reprinted.

Featured here are gems by once-popular but now-forgotten 19th-century masters of the supernatural like Amelia Edwards, Barry Pain, and Florence Marryat, alongside contributions by totally obscure authors like James Skipp Borlase, a writer of penny dreadfuls who specialized in lurid Christmas horror stories, and Harry Grattan, who made history by writing the first ghost story recorded by Edison for the phonograph. Also included are an introduction and bonus materials, such as 19th-century news articles and advertisements related to Christmas ghosts.

“I endeavoured to call out; I could not utter a sound. As I gasped and panted, there stole into my nostrils a deadly, terrible, overpowering stench . . . It was the dread odour of decomposing mortality . . . I felt that I must break the spell, or die.” – John Pitman, “Ejected by a Ghost”

“It was a coach made of dead men’s bones . . . Behind the awful vehicle stood two fleshless skeletons in place of footmen, the driver was a horned and tailed fiend, and the six coal–black steeds that he drove had eyes of fire, and snorted flame from their nostrils as they tore madly along.” – James Skipp Borlase, “The Wicked Lady Howard”

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