Twenty Haunting Tales For Halloween

In A Dim Room...Lord Dunsany

The Boy Who Drew Cats...Lafcadio Hearn

The Canterville Ghost...Oscar Wilde

The Water Ghost...John Kendrick Bangs

The Lonesome Place...August Derleth

The Haunted Dolls' House...M. R. James

The Whistling Room...William Hope Hodgeson

Feathertop...Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Devil And Daniel Webster...Stephen Vincent Benet

The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow...Washington Irving

The Monster Maker...William C. Morrow

The Haunted And The Haunters...Lord Lytton

Markheim...Robert Louis Stevenson

A Terribly Strange Bed...Wilkie Collins

An Account Of Some Strange Disturbances In Aungier Street...J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The Phantom Coach...Amelia B. Edwards

Captain Murderer...Charles Dickens

In The Vault...H. P. Lovecraft

The Monkey's Paw...W. W. Jacobs

The Fall Of The House Of Usher...Edgar Allan Poe

Twenty tales tailored by my own (rather old-fashioned) taste. This is the anthology I would like to see put together and published; they are not particularly about "terror" or "horror" but are what I would term "haunting." Both in the usual sense, and in the sense of lingering in the memory and emotions, long after the tale is told. Of course, you could glut the list with many by Lovecraft, Poe, and James, but I thought I should limit it to one apiece.

The Scariest Book In The World

It is a shabby cloth-bound red book. Pop brought it back from the dump in the late sixties. Why had it been thrown away? I begin to wonder, now... Over the forty years it's been in the family it's been in the same shape; ragged, moldy, stained, it always seems on the verge of disintegrating but has never lost even a single page. And it is the scariest book in the whole world.

It's title: Great Ghost Stories. Edited by Herbert Van Thal, illustrated by Edward Pagram, published by Hill and Wang, Inc., of New York in 1960. Here is the list of stories, great classics of the Victorian and Edwardian eras all:

Running Wolf by Algernon Blackwood
The Haunted and the Haunters by Lord Lytton
The Spectre Bridegroom by Washington Irving
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Squire's Story by Elizabeth Clegghorn Gaskell
The Story of Mary Ancel by William Makepeace Thackery
A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The Phantom Coach by Amelia B. Edwards
The Signalman by Charles Dickens

Haunting tales, especially the Lytton and Le Fanu. But what puts the extra horror on these stories are the illustrations. I don't know who this Pagram fellow was, but he manages to fill his pictures with more scabby, nebulous horror than all the air-brushed color pictures I ever saw since. The picture reproduced above is one of the scariest of the lot, from The Phantom Coach.