Famous Modern Ghost Stories

Selected, with an Introduction

By Dorothy Scarborough

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. Even a Lodge in any vast wilderness would have the company of spirits. Man's love for the supernatural, which is one of the most natural things about him, was never more marked than at present. You may go a-ghosting in any company to-day, and all aspects of literature, novels, short stories, poetry, and drama alike, reflect the shadeless spirit. The latest census of the haunting world shows a vast increase in population, which might be explained on various grounds.

- The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

- The Shadows on the Wall by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

- The Messenger by Robert W. Chambers

- Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev

- The Beast with Five Fingers by W. F. Harvey

- The Mass of Shadows by Anatole France

- What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien

- The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce

- The Shell of Sense by Olivia Howard Dunbar

- The Woman at Seven Brothers by Wilbur Daniel Steele

- At the Gate by Myla Jo Closser

- Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe

- The Haunted Orchard by Richard Le Gallienne

- The Bowmen by Arthur Machen

- A Ghost by Guy de Maupassant