The Big Book of Ghost Stories Read online

  ALSO EDITED BY OTTO PENZLER

  Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

  The Big Book of Adventure Stories

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  Fangs

  Coffins

  The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

  The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

  A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2012

  Introductions and compilation copyright © 2012 by Otto Penzler

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Owing to limitations on space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear on this page to this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The big book of ghost stories / edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80600-0

  1. Ghost stories, English. 2. Ghost stories, American. I. Penzler, Otto.

  PR1309.G5B54 2012

  823′.0873308—dc23

  2012020265

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Edward Kastenmeier

  With gratitude for your support

  and commitment to my

  Big

  books

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  OTTO PENZLER: Introduction

  BUT I’M NOT DEAD YET CONRAD AIKEN: Mr. Arcularis

  WILLIAM FRYER HARVEY: August Heat

  I’LL LOVE YOU—FOREVER (OR MAYBE NOT) ELLEN GLASGOW: The Shadowy Third

  ELLEN GLASGOW: The Past

  DAVID MORRELL: But at My Back I Always Hear

  O. HENRY: The Furnished Room

  PAUL ERNST: Death’s Warm Fireside

  ANDREW KLAVAN: The Advent Reunion

  R. MURRAY GILCHRIST: The Return

  RUDYARD KIPLING: The Phantom Rickshaw

  AMBROSE BIERCE: The Moonlit Road

  LAFCADIO HEARN: The Story of Ming-Y

  LAFCADIO HEARN: Yuki-Onna

  THIS OLD HOUSE AMYAS NORTHCOTE: Brickett Bottom

  E. F. BENSON: How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery

  G. G. PENDARVES: Thing of Darkness

  EDWARD LUCAS WHITE: The House of the Nightmare

  HECTOR BOLITHO: The House in Half Moon Street

  DICK DONOVAN: A Night of Horror

  VINCENT O’SULLIVAN: The Burned House

  KIDS WILL BE KIDS ROSEMARY TIMPERLEY: Harry

  MICHAEL REAVES: Make-Believe

  A. M. BURRAGE: Playmates

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL: Just Behind You

  A. E. COPPARD: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

  STEVE FRIEDMAN: The Lost Boy of the Ozarks

  THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY AROUND HERE

  MARK TWAIN: A Ghost’s Story

  DONALD E. WESTLAKE: In at the Death

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: The Ghost of Dr. Harris

  “INGULPHUS”: The Everlasting Club

  ISAAC ASIMOV AND JAMES MACCREIGH: Legal Rites

  ALBERT E. COWDREY: Death Must Die

  FRANK STOCKTON: The Transferred Ghost

  OSCAR WILDE: The Canterville Ghost

  A NEGATIVE TRAIN OF THOUGHT AUGUST DERLETH: Pacific 421

  ROBERT WEINBERG: The Midnight El

  STOP—YOU’RE SCARING ME FREDERICK COWLES: Punch and Judy

  HENRY S. WHITEHEAD: The Fireplace

  H. F. ARNOLD: The Night Wire

  FRITZ LEIBER: Smoke Ghost

  WYATT BLASSINGAME: Song of the Dead

  I MUST BE DREAMING WILKIE COLLINS: The Dream Woman

  WASHINGTON IRVING: The Adventure of the German Student

  A SÉANCE, YOU SAY? JOSEPH SHEARING: They Found My Grave

  EDGAR JEPSON: Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance

  JOYCE CAROL OATES: Night-Side

  CLASSICS M. R. JAMES: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad”

  W. W. JACOBS: The Monkey’s Paw

  W. W. JACOBS: The Toll-House

  EDITH WHARTON: Afterward

  WILLA CATHER: Consequences

  CYNTHIA ASQUITH: The Follower

  CYNTHIA ASQUITH: The Corner Shop

  H. P. LOVECRAFT: The Terrible Old Man

  ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN: The Murderer’s Violin

  SAKI: The Open Window

  SAKI: Laura

  FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN: What Was It?

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT: Full Fathom Five

  H. R. WAKEFIELD: He Cometh and He Passeth By

  PERCEVAL LANDON: Thurnley Abbey

  THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES ALGERNON BLACKWOOD: The Woman’s Ghost Story

  VICTOR ROUSSEAU: The Angel of the Marne

  OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR: The Shell of Sense

  MARJORIE BOWEN: The Avenging of Ann Leete

  BEATEN TO A PULP GREYE LA SPINA: The Dead-Wagon

  URANN THAYER: A Soul with Two Bodies

  ARTHUR J. BURKS: The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee

  THORP MCCLUSKY: The Considerate Hosts

  CYRIL MAND: The Fifth Candle

  AUGUST DERLETH AND MARK SCHORER: The Return of Andrew Bentley

  M. L. HUMPHREYS: The Floor Above

  MANLY WADE WELLMAN: School for the Unspeakable

  A. V. MILYER: Mordecai’s Pipe

  JULIUS LONG: He Walked by Day

  DALE CLARK: Behind the Screen

  MODERN MASTERS M. RICKERT: Journey into the Kingdom

  H. R. F. KEATING: Mr. Saul

  CHET WILLIAMSON: Coventry Carol

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  OTTO PENZLER

  TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL have been a fixture of the storytelling tradition since preliterate times, and the most popular form they have taken is the ghost story. This should not be at all surprising, as the fear of death and its aftermath has abided in the breasts of humans ever since they became cognizant of what it meant to no longer be alive in the manner in which it is traditionally understood. Animals, down to the most primitive invertebrates, share this fear without precisely being aware of what it means in a conscious sense, but they nonetheless do all they can to stay alive. The question of what follows the extinguishing of life probably does not keep mosquitoes or squirrels awake at night, but more than a few homo sapiens have pondered their uncertain futures with trepidation in the dark of night.

  All cultures on the planet have superstitions about the dead returning as spirits or phantoms—belief systems memorialized in drawings and writings from the very beginnings of civilization. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, departed people are shown to return, not merely looking as they did in life, but dressed in similar garments. Therefore, apparently not only do dead people have the ability to materialize, making themselves visible again after they are gone, but so do textiles, leather, and metal.

  In the Bible, the story of King Saul calling on the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of Samuel has been recorded, as have the questions surrounding whether Jesus after his resurrection was a living being or a ghost. From ancient texts in Greek mythology, various types of ghosts are described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
and Romans, notably Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, wrote about haunted houses.

  Literature of all eras abounds in ghosts stories. William Shakespeare often used ghosts in his plays, most famously in Hamlet and Macbeth, and Charles Dickens wrote the greatest pure ghost story of all time in A Christmas Carol. Others among the world’s greatest authors who have written in the genre include Ben Jonson, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald—well, really too many to continue.

  What is the great attraction of supernatural fiction in general, and the ghost story in particular? From the time of childhood, we have a fear of the dark (and rightly so, as we don’t know exactly what is lurking out there, wrapped in the black cloak of invisibility). Although it frightens them, children still love to hear scary stories at bedtime; just consider such fairy tales as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood. We never outgrow our love of fairy tales, even if in adulthood they take a more complex form as stories about vampires, serial killers, werewolves, or terrorists.

  Ghost stories may be told in many different tones and styles, ranging from the excruciatingly horrific to the absurdly humorous. Ghosts, after all, may have widely divergent goals. Some return from the dead to wreak vengeance; others want to help a loved one. Some are the spirits of people who were murdered or committed suicide and so could not rest because their time officially had not yet come and therefore walked the earth instead of stretching out comfortably in their graves. Some were playful, enjoying the tricks and pranks their invisibility allowed them, while others delighted in their own cruelty, committing acts of violence and terror for the sheer inexplicable pleasure of it.

  All these ghosts, and more, appear in this volume. You will meet ghosts who frighten you, who make you laugh, and for whom you will feel sorry. And they are true ghosts. I have tried to remain true to the notion that ghosts are spirits or specters of the dead. Some stories that frequently have appeared in other ghost story anthologies have nothing at all to do with ghosts. They may be trolls, or evil plants, vile fungi, monsters, or other creatures of that ilk. Rightly or not, I have attempted to be a bit of a narrow-minded purist about it all, not that it created a problem. There have been an astonishing number of outstanding ghost stories written by some of the finest authors who ever dared allow their dark creations to be set down on paper. It has been a confounding challenge to select the stories for this, the biggest collection of ghost stories ever compiled. It was tempting to include all the great classics but that would have filled to overflowing even this gigantic tome. It was equally tempting to stuff the pages with little-known stories, often every bit the equal of the cornerstone titles, but it is impossible to attempt to produce the definitive collection of ghost stories and omit M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, or Edith Wharton. Although I admire some of the supernatural tales of Henry James, especially “The Turn of the Screw,” he won’t be found here because that novella has been anthologized to death, is easy to find elsewhere, and is so long that a half-dozen other stories would have had to be sacrificed. Putting together an anthology is not a pure science, so there are contradictions galore. I’ve included “The Monkey’s Paw,” for example, which has also been anthologized to the point of being a cliché. Still, it’s short, didn’t use up too much space, and it is lively (unlike dear old Henry James—no offense). To make up for the very familiar stories, I’ve included some that you’ve never seen before, several of which appear in book form for the very first time. The Golden Age of the ghost story (the late Victorian and Edwardian eras) is fully represented, and so is the Golden Age of the pulp magazines (the 1920s and 1930s), while the contemporary masters have not been ignored.

  Whether this collection is best enjoyed next to a summer campfire or a winter fireplace is up to you. On the other hand, it is so enormous that it may endure through several seasons. Whenever you read it, I hope you have a shiveringly good time with it. After all, in the dead of night, who would not believe in ghosts?

  Although I read more than a thousand stories to find and identify those that I hope you will most enjoy, it would not have been possible to compile such a comprehensive and wide-reaching volume without the invaluable assistance of those who know a great deal more than I do. Sincere, if hopelessly inadequate, thanks are owed to Robert Weinberg, John Pelan, Chris Roden, Gardner Dozois, Joel Frieman, Harlan Ellison, John Knott, and those I’m forgetting who so freely and generously offered their assistance and expertise.

  MR. ARCULARIS

  Conrad Aiken

  ALTHOUGH CONRAD POTTER AIKEN (1889–1973) wrote well-received novels and about forty short stories, it is his poetry that has provided his primary literary reputation. He wrote his first poem at the age of nine and, four years later, memorized a volume of Poe’s poems, strongly influencing his early work. He was later devoted to the work of John Gould Fletcher and T. S. Eliot, changing his poetry to a more modern, Imagist style. His novels, notably Blue Voyage (1927), are reminiscent of James Joyce. Aiken’s most important book was The Selected Poems of Conrad Aiken (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Shelley Memorial Award.

  Born in Savannah, Georgia, he was the son of an old New England family and attended Harvard, then moved as a child to New Bedford, Massachusetts, later settling in Cambridge. His father, a brilliant but erratic doctor, took his young son to witness an eye operation and later killed his wife and himself while Conrad was still a boy. When World War I broke out, Conrad refused to serve, successfully insisting that writing poetry was an essential industry.

  Among his most important prose works are the novel King Coffin (1935), in which a man plans the perfect crime because of his hatred for humanity, then fails to commit the act; the disturbing short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” in which the protagonist wages an internal battle with reality and frightening fantasy; and “Mr. Arcularis,” both of which were published in his collection, Among the Lost People (1934).

  “Mr. Arcularis” was originally published in the March 1931 issue of Harper’s; Aiken later adapted it as a play, produced in 1949 and published in 1957 by Harvard University Press. It was further adapted for several television dramas, including as episodes of Studio One in Hollywood (June 25, 1956), ITV Play of the Week (September 8, 1959), Great Ghost Tales (July 6, 1961), and as a made-for-television film in West Germany, which aired April 8, 1967.

  Mr. Arcularis

  CONRAD AIKEN

  MR. ARCULARIS STOOD AT the window of his room in the hospital and looked down at the street. There had been a light shower, which had patterned the sidewalks with large drops, but now again the sun was out, blue sky was showing here and there between the swift white clouds, a cold wind was blowing the poplar trees. An itinerant band had stopped before the building and was playing, with violin, harp, and flute, the finale of “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Leaning against the window-sill—for he felt extraordinarily weak after his operation—Mr. Arcularis suddenly, listening to the wretched music, felt like crying. He rested the palm of one hand against a cold window-pane and stared down at the old man who was blowing the flute, and blinked his eyes. It seemed absurd that he should be so weak, so emotional, so like a child—and especially now that everything was over at last. In spite of all their predictions, in spite, too, of his own dreadful certainty that he was going to die, here he was, as fit as a fiddle—but what a fiddle it was, so out of tune!—with a long life before him. And to begin with, a voyage to England ordered by the doctor. What could be more delightful? Why should he feel sad about it and want to cry like a baby? In a few minutes Harry would arrive with his car to take him to the wharf; in an hour he would be on the sea, in two hours he would see the sunset behind him, where Boston had been, and his new life would be opening before him. It was many years since he had been abroad. June, the best of the year to come—England, France, the Rhine�
��how ridiculous that he should already be homesick!

  There was a light footstep outside the door, a knock, the door opened, and Harry came in.

  “Well, old man, I’ve come to get you. The old bus actually got here. Are you ready? Here, let me take your arm. You’re tottering like an octogenarian!”

  Mr. Arcularis submitted gratefully, laughing, and they made the journey slowly along the bleak corridor and down the stairs to the entrance hall. Miss Hoyle, his nurse, was there, and the Matron, and the charming little assistant with freckles who had helped to prepare him for the operation. Miss Hoyle put out her hand.

  “Good-by, Mr. Arcularis,” she said, “and bon voyage.”

  “Good-by, Miss Hoyle, and thank you for everything. You were very kind to me. And I fear I was a nuisance.”

  The girl with the freckles, too, gave him her hand, smiling. She was very pretty, and it would have been easy to fall in love with her. She reminded him of some one. Who was it? He tried in vain to remember while he said good-by to her and turned to the Matron.

  “And not too many latitudes with the young ladies, Mr. Arcularis!” she was saying.

  Mr. Arcularis was pleased, flattered, by all this attention to a middle-aged invalid, and felt a joke taking shape in his mind, and no sooner in his mind than on his tongue.

  “Oh, no latitudes,” he said, laughing. “I’ll leave the latitudes to the ship!”

  “Oh, come now,” said the Matron, “we don’t seem to have hurt him much, do we?”

  “I think we’ll have to operate on him again and really cure him,” said Miss Hoyle.

  He was going down the front steps, between the potted palmettos, and they all laughed and waved. The wind was cold, very cold for June, and he was glad he had put on his coat. He shivered.

  “Damned cold for June!” he said. “Why should it be so cold?”

  “East wind,” Harry said, arranging the rug over his knees. “Sorry it’s an open car, but I believe in fresh air and all that sort of thing. I’ll drive slowly. We’ve got plenty of time.”