William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) is little read today, but was known in the first half of the nineteenth century as the leading novelist of the Southern United States. His novels include the all but forgotten "The Vision of Cortez" (1829), "The Tricolor" (1830), and "Atlantis, a Story of the Sea" (1852). But he penned an excellent ghost story that Edgar Allan Poe called "the best ghost story ever written by an American. . . ." Tomorrow I will post a link to it as I continue counting down the Top 40 scary ghost stories from 1800-1849.
