Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899 Anthology by Andrew Barger is Published!

October is the month for ghosts on the scariest ghost stories blog. That's why I'm happy to announce my latest anthology: Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899: A Phantasmal Ghost Anthology is now published! It contains the best ghost stories from the last half of the 19th century. It includes shocking tales from popular American and Victorian authors.

Andrew Barger (that would be me), award-winning author and editor of Phantasmal: Best Ghost Short Stories 1800-1849 and The Divine Dantes trilogy, has researched the finest ghost stories for the last half of the nineteenth century and combined them in one haunting collection. He has added his familiar scholarly touch by annotating the stories, providing story background information, author photos and a list of ghost stories considered to settle on the most frightening and well-written tales.

Victorians: Victors of the Ghost Story (2016) by Andrew Barger - Andrew sets the stage for this haunting ghost anthology.

The Upper Berth (1886) by Francis Marion Crawford - You will never think of cruising on a ship the same way after reading "The Upper Berth."

In Kropfsberg Keep (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram - A gothic setting yields a nightmare for a couple of "ghost hunters."

Lost Hearts (1895) by M. R. James - This early M. R. James classic ghost story is one of his best.

The Familiar (1872) by Joseph Le Fanu - Ever feel like you are being watched?

The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly (1886) by Rosa Mulholland - You will never view an organ the same way again.

No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal Man (1865) by Charles Dickens - Are the nervous habits of a train tracks operator all in his mind?

Hurst of Hurstcote (1893) by Edith Nesbit - A moldering house and--of course--ghosts.

The Judge's House (1891) by Bram Stoker - The author of Dracula never disappoints.

The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert Chambers - A painter sees someone watching him from a busy New York street.

The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The oldest and most haunting ghost short story in the anthology and one that H. P. Lovecraft deemed the best haunted house story ever.

I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world--a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us--a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. 

"The Familiar" 1872 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Buy today at Amazon: Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899


#BestGhostShortStories #BestGhostStoriesBook

Bag 40% Off My Scariest Ghost Stories Books at Barnes & Noble!

40% Off

Barnes & Noble

Through September 5th you get 40% off my book at Barnes & Noble using coupon code: LMQCJGX26KQFK  Plus bag free shipping on orders over $25. Happy Labor Day weekend for those of you in the States. Here are great choices to use your 40% off B&N coupon:

Best Ghost Short Stories

Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899: A Phantasmal Ghost Anthology contains the best ghost stories from the last half of the 19th century. Published in August of 2016, it includes scary short stories from popular American and Victorian authors including: Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Joseph Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Nesbit, and Francis Marion Crawford. The ghost story anthology is annotated and includes story backgrounds and author photos. Boo!

Best Horror Short Stories Anthology

Thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, Honore de Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, the half century from 1800-1849 is the cradle of all modern horror short stories. Andrew Barger, the editor of this book as well as Edgar Allan Poe Annotated and Illustrated Entire Stories and Poems, read over 300 horror short stories to compile the 12 best. At the back of the book he includes a list of all short stories he considered along with their dates of publication and author, when available. He even includes background for each of the stories, author photos and annotations for difficult terminology. A number of the scary short stories were published in leading periodicals of the day such as Blackwood's and Atkinson's Casket. Read The Best Horror Short Stories 1800-1849 today!

Leo Tolstoy's 20 Greatest Short Stories Annotated

"Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" branded Tolstoy as one of the greatest writers in modern history. Few, however, have read his wonderful short stories. Now, in one collection, are the 20 greatest short stories of Leo Tolstoy, which give a snapshot of Russia and its people in the late nineteenth century. A fine introduction is given by Andrew Barger. Annotations are included of difficult Russian terms. There is also a Tolstoy biography at the start of the book with photos of Tolstoy's relatives.

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Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899 Anthology Cover Reveal

Excuse me while I interrupt my countdown of the 20 best horror short stories for the last half of the 19th century to drop a my new ghost short stories cover. I wanted a simple cover that would stand out even when a thumbnail-sized image on the Internet, hence the Victorian ghost woman on the front.

The full title is Best Ghost Short Stories 1850-1899: A Phantasmal Ghost Anthology and it officially launches in two weeks. But you can buy it now on Google Books by clicking the link above.

More on the contents later along with a haunting countdown of what I believe to be the top 20 ghost stories for the last half of the Victorian Age.

#bestghostshortstories #NewGhostAnthology

Review of Phantasmal: The Best Ghost Short Stories 1800-1849 by the Examiner

Phantasmal: The Best Ghost Short Stories 1800-1849

Every so often a review of one of my books is so well-reasoned that I share with my friends. This week was no exception when Denise Longrie of the Examiner posted a review of Phantasmal: The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849.

Ms. Longrie does a nice job in pointing out the scope of the anthology: story backgrounds, list of scary ghost stories considered, preface (though not mentioning annotations and author photos). She goes on to review each story in the collection and concludes by giving it 5 out of 5 stars.

The review was a positive light on a very hard day for me. Thanks, Ms. Longrie, for caring about the early machinations of ghost short stories.

#BestGhostShortStories #ExaminerGhostReview

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Werewolf or Ghost Story?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote scary stories in a number of supernatural genres. He did not invent the horror short story, but he took it to unbelievable heights. Poe penned ghost stories. He was the first to invent a closed room murder mystery (The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841) and a founding father of science fiction short stories. Poe also was the first to take us inside the head of a crazy man in The Tell-Tale Heart of 1843.

Yet Edgar Allan Poe failed to cover a few crucial genres in his short stories. For instance, he did not write a vampire or monster story. I have blogged on the former in the past. That is unfortunate as I am convinced that no one could have written a vampire story like Poe.

Unfortunately, Poe also did not write a werewolf story. Below is a list of werewolf stories originally published in the English language during Poe's lifetime, which he may have read. They are found in Transformation: The Best Werewolf Short Stories 1800-1849:

1831 The Man-Wolf by Leitch Ritche (1800-1865)
1846 A Story of a Weir-Wolf by Catherine Crowe (1790-1872)
1828 The Wehr-Wolf: A Legend of the Limousin by Richard Thomson (1794-1865)
1839 The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848)
1838 Hugues the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages by Sutherland Menzies [Mrs. Elizabeth Stone] (1806-1883)

#WerewolfStories #BestWerewolfStories

"Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination" at the British Library

The British Library is doing what hundreds of other libraries around the world should be doing this time of year. It is hosting "Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination" that focus on the literary Gothic.

The exhibit contains rare manuscripts of fragments of the literary Goth over the past 250 years. It is running now until January 20, 2015 and sure to feature some of the scariest ghost stories ever penned in the English language.

If you are near London, you have to pay it a visit!

Did Edgar Allan Poe Write a Ghost Story?

Edgar Allan Poe is America's forefather of Gothic literature and responsible for its most popular poem, "The Raven." I have argued in a past post that Poe did not (unfortunately) write a vampire story. But what about a ghost story? Poe had a mostly pitiful life where he suffered through poverty (much of it self-inflicted for his art) and the deaths of his mother, father, foster mother, foster father (John Allen), wife (Virginia Poe), former fiancee (Sarah Helen Whitman) and close friends. Who better to write a ghost story than the forefather of Goth who had lost so many relatives?

In my view he wrote at least four ghost stories:

1835 Morella;
1838 Ligeia;
1842 The Mask of the Red Death (Included in The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849); and
1842 The Oval Portrait.

Arguments have been made (spoiler alert) that the revived sister in The Fall of the House of Usher is a ghost, and I get that. She is either someone who was laid to rest by her brother when she was near death (ala The Premature Burial) or locked away, which explains Roderick Usher's nervous condition. Anyway, yes Poe did write a ghost story or two or four. All are fantastic and worth a slow read.

Did Edgar Allan Poe Have a Favorite Ghost Story?

Poe was a connoisseur of the supernatural. As the author of Coffee with Poe: A Novel of Edgar Allan Poe's Life, I am sometimes asked if Poe had a favorite ghost story.

Truth be told, Poe was quiet clear on his favorite ghost story--or at least his favorite by an American, which I believe is a dig at Charles Dickens and his bias toward British literature. The pick is also, perhaps a dig at Washington Irving whose "The Legend of  Sleepy Hollow" and "A Tale of the German Student" (both included in the best ghost stories anthology for the first half of the 19th century) branded him the best American ghost story writer during Poe's day.

The ghost story is by William Gilmore Simms and is titled Murder Will Out. I don't, however, agree with Poe since I placed it in spot 35 in my Top 40 countdown of the scariest ghost stories from 1800-1849. This is what Poe had to say about the scary ghost story in his review (published posthumously in 1850) of Simm's collection of short stories: "The Wigwam and the Cabin."

     All the tales in this collection have merit, and the first has merit of a very peculiar kind. “Grayling, or Murder will Out,” is the title. The story was well received in England, but on this fact no opinion can be safely based. “The Athenæum,” we believe, or some other of the London weekly critical journals, having its attention called (no doubt through personal influence) to Carey & Hart’s beautiful annual “The Gift,” found it convenient, in the course of its notice, to speak at length of some one particular article, and “Murder Will Out” probably arrested the attention of the sub-editor who was employed in so trivial a task as the patting on the head an American book — arrested his attention first from its title, (murder being a taking theme with a cockney,) and secondly, from its details of southern forest scenery. Large quotations were made, as a matter of course, and very ample commendation bestowed — the whole criticism proving nothing, in our opinion, but that the critic had not read a single syllable of the story. The critique, however, had at least the good effect of calling American attention to the fact that an American might possibly do a decent thing, (provided the possibility were first admitted by the British sub-editors,) and the result was first, that many persons read, and secondly, that all persons admired the “excellent story in ‘The Gift’ that had actually been called ‘readable’ by one of the English newspapers.”

Now had “Murder Will Out” been a much worse story than was ever written by Professor Ingraham, still, under the circumstances, we patriotic and independent Americans would have declared it inimitable; but, by some species of odd accident, it happened to deserve all that the British sub-sub had condescended to say of it, on the strength of a guess as to what it was all about. It is really an admirable tale, nobly conceived and skilfully carried into execution — the best ghost-story ever written by an American — for we presume that this is the ultimate extent of commendation to which we, as an humble American, dare go.

The other stories of the volume do credit to the author’s abilities, and display their peculiarities in a strong light, but there is no one of them so good as “Murder Will Out.”

Fear of Ghosts by The Cure is a Visual Scary Ghost Story

Well, this post is all about the best ghost stories in audio and video form. One of the best songs about ghost is "Fear of Ghosts" by The Cure. Enjoy!

Fear of Ghosts - Disintegration (Deluxe) - "The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get . . .."

Score 15% Off My Ghost Stories Book This Weekend at Barnes & Noble

Score 15% off my scary ghost stories book at Barnes & Noble through Sunday, May 4th by using coupon code: MJ64ACYYD36YS at checkout.

A best bet is the best ghost stories book, Phantasmal: The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849, the classic ghost short story collection I edited.

Or, if you are not in the mood to be scared, try out Tolstoy's short stories book, Leo Tolstoy's 20 Greatest Short Stories Annotated. You can't miss.