In the second part of our four-part series on the best ghost stories in Western literature, we zero in on a single, excessively prolific period of some thirteen or so years: the elegant Edwardian Era. Defining this tiny, micro-age can be challenging: the obvious range, by literal definition, directly parallels the brief reign of the avuncular Edward VII – just the sort of fashionable, clubbable peace-loving, aristocratic playboy associated with a romping Wodehouse farce – from 1901 to 1910.
However, from a cultural and literary standpoint, I agree with David Brooks, Simon Nowell-Smith, and many other historians who favor a definition which places it between the 1901 ascent of Edward and the 1914 commencement of World War One. Indeed, the three-year period between George V’s coronation and the assassination of the Austrian Archduke – which included the sinking of the Titanic, the doomed Scott Discovery Expedition, Emily Davison’s horse-track death, and the premiere of Pygmalion – largely carried on the luxurious-but-doomed ethos of Edward’s reign.
It was an era of easy unease and anxious indulgence, dominated by authors who embodied this shadowy, grimly comic blend of dark and light: J. M. Barrie, the Benson brothers, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, William Hope Hodgson, W. W. Jacobs, M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Oliver Onions, Edith Nesbit, Saki, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and P. G. Wodehouse. For such a short period of time, it generated some of the most stunning and unforgettable masterpieces of supernatural horror.
A quick word on the stories contained in this list: it is hardly exhaustive and I don’t claim it to be canonical – please feel free to type your own favorites down below (I may even shoe-horn them in as “Honorable Mention” in a future re-edit). It will also contain a mixture of time-honored, famous favorites and some niche choices, so neither should you expect it to only consist of the rarest of rare gems, nor the biggest of big names.
To be included, these stories had to fit five criteria:
They were specifically short tales of a supernatural haunting (a spiritual presence, message, or vision) written in English between 1901 and 1914.
They are very well-written (not overly purple or meandering) and engaging with quality prose, atmosphere, and characters
They have a memorable, often entirely unique, quality or plot point that makes them stand out from other contemporary stories
They are widely regarded enough by critics, editors, and the reading public to have been anthologized at least ten times (as can be ascertained on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database)
They have a particularly moving climax – either because of profound emotion (“The Woman’s Ghost Story”) or intense creepiness (“The Other Bed”) that makes them linger in the imagination
If someone wanted to get the very best out of Edwardian ghost stories, these would be my picks. Now, there are many, many, many unforgettable and irreplaceable tales which did not make this list (particularly those by lesser-known and lesser-anthologized writers) which I hope show up in the comments, but since this article (which is actually rather long as far as listicles go) will be limited to one for each day of an average-sized month (particularly those long nights in October and December), I am limited in how generous I can be to authors who deserve to be looked up. Unfortunately, there aren’t many anthologies dedicated solely to supernatural fiction from the Edwardian era, but if you consult our Classic Horror Research Database, you can get a very capable guide to the very best writers and stories of this era beyond the present article.
1. Afterward by Edith Wharton
A nouveau riche American couple buy an English manor with a curious supernatural legend – it is haunted, and the residents always encounter the ghost, but they don’t realize it until after they have left – and while they initially delight in the spookiness, things turn dark when the husband, a secretive businessman, disappears in the midst of a scandal, causing the wife to come to a startling realization about a friend of theirs.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Moving Finger
2. The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions
A washed-up novelist rents a common, London townhouse in search of solitude in hopes of being able to finish his troublesome novel, but a female spirit haunting the place has different ideas, and – in a terrifying conclusion that calls to mind “The Shining” and has been considered one of the best in supernatural literature – he gradually succumbs to her seductive siren call, and to a violent, murderous psychosis.
Bonus Story from this Author: Rooum
3. The Bus Conductor by E. F. Benson
A man suffers a disturbing nighttime experience: he sees a hearse driver, dressed as a bus conductor, pulling up to his bedroom window, gesturing to the coffin, and calling out “Just room for one inside!” – a vision that becomes all the more terrifying when he hears the same words – in the same voice and coming from the same face – being spoken to him by the driver of the overcrowded omnibus he is about to board.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Terror by Night
4. Count Magnus by M. R. James
An isolated travel-writer pours unexpectedly himself into researching a sadistic, 17th century Swedish alchemist who lived in the area he is visiting – staying at his home, digging into his writings, prowling his tomb, and conversing with his corpse – but when padlocks start falling off the coffin and figures begin trailing him home, he learns all too late that while he has been longing to meet the Count, the feeling has been mutual.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
5. The Door in the Wall by H. G. Wells
A successful but depressed man is haunted by his childhood memory of stumbling upon a strange green door set in a white wall – a door that opened up to a surreally paradisiacal garden – and one which he has never been able to find since (a failure that has overshadowed his political and financial success), until the fateful day when he once again stumbles upon it, opens the door, and walks through to his fate.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Country of the Blind
6. The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood
A ghost-hunter and his equally enthusiastic elderly aunt break into an abandoned house with an infamous reputation, determined to find the stereotypical phantoms rumored to be lingering there, but what they encounter – when they become lost in what proves to be a tremendously deceptive liminal space – is far more disorienting, mystical, and otherworldly than a simple specter.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Occupant of the Room
7. The Eyes by Edith Wharton
This Hawthorne-esque ghost story follows a man from youth to old age, during which he is regularly haunted by a vision of two elderly eyes – warped, wrinkled, and wicked, glaring at him through the dark of his bedroom – always manifesting at moments of moral failure, and not fully explaining their horrible significance until he has reached the end of his life and finds himself face to face with the eyes.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Triumph of Night
8. Father Macclesfield's Tale by R. H. Benson
In this subtly creepy, mysterious tale – one which realistically hints at the supernatural but closes without a clear resolution – a priest consoles a young widow to an elderly crank (a hard-living, outspoken man who was nevertheless terrified of death) over the course of a few days and recounts three strange episodes from his time with her (including unnerving encounters with a seemingly sentient swirl of leaves) which led him to suspect that the man’s ghost was trying to make itself known.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Watcher
9. The Four-Fingered Hand by Barry Pain
A man is haunted by the apparition of a four-fingered hand – a hereditary phantom that all the men in his family have seen and whose appearance they have respected as a sign to turn back on whatever high-stakes ambitions they are presently engaged in – until his skeptical friend mocks him when it shows up during a simple game of cards; ultimately he listens to his friend, laughs it off, and becomes the first (and last) in his family to find out what it means.
Bonus Story from this Author: Rose Rose
10. The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson
The crew of a doomed ship gradually become aware that they are being pursued by something otherworldly, and a sense of dread creeps up over them until they begin to see the misty hulls of phantom ships closing in on them from all sides, but the borders who are about to take them over are not simple maritime wraiths: they are shadowy, parasitic, multi-dimensional raiders with unknown and unknowable motives.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Whistling Room
11. How it Happened by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A cock-sure aristocrat decides to take his new speedster for a drive down a dangerous hill, but his lack of familiarity with the vehicle puts him and his manservant in peril, and the identity of the patient visitor who awaits him at the bottom of the hill will be nothing less than the shock of his life.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Leather Funnel
12. In the Dark by Edith Nesbit
A mild-mannered man impulsively murders an odious acquaintance in a fit of righteous anger and successfully disposes of the body, but his troubles truly start when he begins encountering the cold cadaver on the floor of his apartment during the night, in the seat across from him when his train enters a tunnel, and in his own bed when he flees to a hotel – a series of escalating apparitions that infect him with a terror of ever being left alone in the dark.
Bonus Story from this Author: The House of Silence
13. The Jolly Corner by Henry James
An aging expatriate with no living relatives returns to his family home intent on restoring it to glory and selling it with the help of the childhood sweetheart who waited for him all these years, but as renovations get underway, he finds himself haunting his own house, in search of the sinister ghosts of who he may have become had he not left, and who he has become, and the story builds up to the awful confrontation with his doppelganger.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Beast in the Jungle
14. The Lady’s Maid’s Bell by Edith Wharton
A young woman is hired (suspiciously easily) as a lady’s maid for Mrs. Brympton after the previous maid, Emma – a faithful servant for 20 years – died the previous year. She quickly learns that Mr. Brympton is a horrible husband and that her mistress seems to be carrying on an affair with the neighbor, but what really terrifies her is the spectral ringing of her service bell, the ghostly visions of Emma anxiously appealing to her, and the implication that Mrs. Brympton used her loyal Emma to cover up a tragedy.
Bonus Story from this Author: The House of the Dead Hand
15. The Listener by Algernon Blackwood
A boarder in a dingy apartment finds himself being pulled into a strange, otherworldly experience – a psychosis almost – where he finds himself hounded by cats, startled by the appearance of a strange, disfigured face in the mirror, bothered by odious stenches, and consumed with the same spiral of loneliness and depression that had once tormented a previous tenant, now deceased.
Bonus Story from this Author: Keeping His Promise
16. The Magic Shop by H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells himself ventures into a eccentric magic shop with his young son in pursuit of merriment and diversion, but the sly smiles of the wolfish owner and the store’s increasingly bizarre, otherworldly wares rapidly shift from surreal to sinister when his little boy disappears from sight in the impossibly labyrinthine aisles of the Magic Shop.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Valley of Spiders
17. Man Overboard! by F. Marion Crawford
An old salt relates a ghost story of his own about twin brothers – one cheerful, one morose – who sailed on a ship with him, how they feuded over a woman back on shore, how the gloomy one was washed overboard in a storm while working beside his brother, how the cheery brother’s personality seemed to change overnight, and how – after he wedded the girl years later – their love triangle was ghoulishly restored by the arrival of a surprise wedding guest, and the uncovering of a crime.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Screaming Skull
18. The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce
A seemingly close family – mother, father, and adult son – is torn apart by the murder of the matriarch by an apparent stranger, but things get worse one moonlit night when father and son are walking home and the elder man suddenly sees something in the road and runs away in terror never to be seen again – a scene which, thanks to a medium and a confession, we hear from three points of view.
Bonus Story from this Author: Beyond the Wall
19. Mr. Humphrey and His Inheritance by M. R. James
Bourgeois Mr. Humphrey doesn’t know what to do when he inherits an estate from an elderly relative he has never met, but quickly finds himself engrossed with the property’s overgrown, padlocked hedge maze – one with a strange, Satanic globe at its center – though it doesn’t take him long to find out why the maze had been locked up, or which of his ancestors was so eager to induct him into its mystical mysteries.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Tractate Middoth
20. The Other Bed by E. F. Benson
A grumbly English tourist at an alpine hotel is repeatedly disturbed by the conflicting assertions of his hosts that there is no other guest in his two-bed room, and the clear evidence that someone else is bedding with him – a suspicion that boils up to a terrifyingly gruesome revelation about a previous guest. Written four years after “Oh, Whistle,” this story’s sheer ickiness and emotional power excuse its obvious recycling of Monty’s plot.
Bonus Story from this Author: The House with the Brick-Kiln
21. Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James
James’ most famous story follows the obnoxiously skeptical Professor Parkins on his winter holiday to an East Anglian beach resort where – after ill-advisedly poking around in the ruins of an abbey – he finds a medieval whistle among the graves and blows it, beginning a terrifying pursuit of escalating frights whereby he is hounded in his dreams and senses by the spirit he has unintentionally summoned from the inexplicable Beyond – an eager bedfellow who gradually manifests in the empty bed beside him.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Ash-Tree
22. The Portent of the Shadow by Edith Nesbit
A group of young ladies snowed in at Christmas, beg a gloomy, middle-aged maid reluctantly to tell them a ghost story; reluctantly, she tells of how she was in a love triangle with her best friend’s husband during her fatal pregnancy, and of how she and the husband were hounded by a primal, shadowy phantasm leading up to the death – a specter which, to her horror, she will see again that very night, exposing a hidden identity among the girls.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Haunted House
23. The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson
The narrator is tormented by recurring nightmares wherein he is visiting a strange family over the summer holiday, and is led to a gloomy turret chamber by the sinister matriarch, Mrs. Stone. The dreams progress over time, with the characters aging, and Mrs. Stone dying (though she still bodily leads him upstairs each time), and things boil to a head when a friend of his invites him to summer with his family; of course the house is the same, but none of the family are. This doesn’t stop Mrs. Stone from finally introducing herself to him in person – and explaining her plans for him.
Bonus Story from this Author: How Fear Departed the Long Gallery
24. The Shadows on the Wall by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
After the sudden death of their lay-about brother, Edward, following a violent quarrel with their turbulent brother, Henry, three sisters are disturbed by the recurring appearance of a disembodied shadow on their wall – one strikingly similar to Edward – though it isn’t until a second shadow emerges, acting out a tragedy with the first, that they are able to validate their terrifying conviction that the shadows are trying to send a message.
Bonus Story from this Author: Luella Miller
25. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral by M. R. James
Told through the diary of a clergyman who rose to power after the accidental death of his ancient predecessor, we hear of how – after taking the old man’s place and sitting in his ornately carved stall – he finds himself haunted by flesh-and-blood representatives of the ghoulish carvings (Death, a demon, and a black cat), who drive him from depression to desperation, causing the editor to uncover the murder of the elder cleric and the curse which was put on the stall, should a murderer’s hand ever touch it.
Bonus Story from this Author: Number 13
26. The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost by H. G. Wells
A jingoistic, Edwardian fop relates his comic encounter with a weak-willed ghost who, having recently died, has not yet learned the secrets of appearing and disappearing, and coaches him into mastering the trick by urging him to give it the old college try, but what begins as a “Wodehouse” comedy takes a dark and unexpected “Jacobs” turn when the story teller tries to demonstrate the ghost’s technique.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Truth About Pyecraft
27. Thurnley Abbey by Perceval Landon
In one of the most terrifying tales of the period, a traveler explains to a stranger why he has asked him to share his room (to keep him from being alone at night): he describes how years ago he visited an old friend and his new bride at their new home – an abbey reported to be haunted by the ghost of a nun – and while they laugh off the legends, the laughter ceases when he wakes up in the middle of the night with a loathsome visitor watching him from the foot of his bed.
Bonus Story from this Author: Railhead
28. The Toll-House by W. W. Jacobs
Four friends take a dare to spend the night in a haunted house known for exacting the toll of a single life anytime it is inhabited overnight, and while things start off merrily enough, when, one by one, three of the adventurers go silent and are incapable of being woken up – even by the scorch of candle flame – it is too much for the fourth, who runs for his life – straight into the waiting arms of one of Jacobs’ classic tragic endings.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Vigil
29. The Violet Car by Edith Nesbit
Evoking the simmering horror of “The Turn of the Screw” and “Jane Eyre,” this story follows a nurse who is brought in to care for an ailing man and his wife, both of whom try to convince her that the other is crazy, but it is the man – who is haunted by apparition of the driverless car that was destroyed when its drunken driver ran over his daughter and careened off the road – who attracts the nurse’s sympathy, and whose absorbing spiral of hatred, guilt, and misery make this an especially emotional story about loss.
Bonus Story from this Author: Number 17
30. The Well by W. W. Jacobs
After murdering his blackmailing, reprobate cousin, our harried protagonist dumps his body in an unused well and thinks that he has avoided accountability, but his fiancée’s inexplicable attraction to the shadowy spot, her unfortunate loss of an heirloom bracelet into his muddy hiding place, and his midnight attempt to discreetly retrieve it bring him literally into the embrace of his vengeful oppressor.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Three Sisters
31. The Woman’s Ghost Story by Algernon Blackwood
A female ghost-hunter is challenged to regale her male colleagues with an exploit that will chill their blood, and she has a strange, unsettling tale that might do the trick, but it is less one of horror and dread and more one of the spiritual agony of loneliness, the mystical bond of love between two sympathetic strangers, and the absolving peace that she was able to give to one miserable phantom.
Bonus Story from this Author: The Kit-Bag
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