Ghost Stories: 36 Spine-Chilling Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

by Bill Bowers (Editor)

Ghost Stories is a ghoulish collection of true classics, long-forgotten and legendary, with frightening stories from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Willa Cather, and many others. Ghost Stories offers tales rooted in their time, place, and topic. This ghostly collection delivers the ghastly, horrifying, and otherwise haunting tales of terror we love to read – late at night, with the lights off.

Included

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe * The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving * An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce * The A Childish Miracle by Nathaniel Hawthorne * A Ghost of the Sierras by Bret Harte * The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford * The Lady’s Maid’s Bell by Edith Wharton * A Ghost Story by Mark Twain * The Night Call by Henry van Dyke * The Furnished Room by O. Henry * The Crime of Micah Rood by Elia W. Peattie * The Cross-Roads by Amy Lowell * Mistress Marian’s Light by Gertrude Morton * Consequences by Willa Cather * The Body-Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson * Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe * The Ghost of Fear by H.G. Wells * The Phantom ’Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling * The Lagoon by Joseph Conrad * On the Water by Guy de Maupassant * and many, many others

Genres: Horror

480 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2020

Reviews

[Jeff McIntosh · Rating 2 out of 5]

A ghost is commonly defined as the spirit of a deceased individual that is believed to be visible or interact with the living.....this will become useful later in this review......

Bill Bowers is no stranger to ghost stories - having edited at least 2 other ghostly anthologies. It's probably difficult to fill an anthology with previously new, undiscovered ghost stories. I can't count the number of anthologies that cover the same old tired ground - "The Old Nurse's Story", Kipling, James, etc.

Part of my consternation with this anthology is that several of the stories simply have NO ghost. "The Crime of Micha Rood", "Tell-Tale heart", "The Body Snatcher" and "August Heat" are all examples of this -simply have NO ghostly protagonist.

I would not suggest that one needs to be a well regarded author to pen a ghost story....and certainly any unknown author could do so.....but I am unfamiliar with close to half of the authors in this volume...and their tales are hardly spine chilling classics.

Certainly not the best ghost story collection I've ever seen....


Jeff Mc

[Sophia Dommer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would say that some of the stories I have read were good to read I would say only two of the stories were not good at all