Tag Archives: British Ghost Stories

May 1, 2018 · 8:58 am

Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange

Selecting a Ghost: The Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange (aka The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange)

by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883)

READING FICTION BLOG

Tuesday’s Tale of Ghosts May 1, 2018 May is National Short Story Month! Week One.

Readers here are fond of ghost stories and this one by Arthur Conan Doyle is a must read for ghost lovers. Mr. Silas D’Odd buys a feudal mansion named Goresthorpe Grange. The man loves the historical trimmings inside the castle filled with armors and ancestral portraits. But, he desires a ghost, for what is a castle without a daily haunting for entertainment? He soon discovers that by the use of potion, he can conjure a ghost for Goresthorpe Grange. D’Odd drinks the potion and the apparitions begin.

A 15-minute read and great fun! Read the short story at Adelaide.edu:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/doyle/arthur_conan/selecting-a-ghost/

Audio of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at Librivox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K37NxXtaStk

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

A. C. Doyle and Houdini

Arthur Conan Doyle was a friend of Houdini, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Doyle was a born storyteller and revered for his high-quality fiction, especially his Sherlock Holmes detective fiction. His style of writing is clear, clever, and direct. On July 7, 1930, Doyle died in his garden, clutching his heart with one hand and holding a flower in the other. His last words were to his wife. He whispered “You are wonderful.”

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free reading. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, supernatural, ghost stories, suspense, crime, sci-fi, and ‘quiet horror.’ Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month.

Comments are welcome!

Feel free to click “LIKE.”

MAY IS NATIONAL SHORT STORY MONTH!

It Is the Haunted Who Haunt

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) for Women In Horror Month 2018

Tuesday’s Tales of Terror February 13, 2018

Followers of this blog know that ghosts draw us together. We choose to be haunted by reading ghost stories. We are all haunted houses in our own minds. Elizabeth Bowen was a distinguished author of ghost stories, often compared to Henry James and Virginia Woolf for craft. Some liken her to Alfred Hitchcock. You will find a moral vision and social commentary in all her fine fiction. One thing is certain, whether you think ghosts are not real or ghosts are real nonphysical consciousness, Bowen had total acceptance of the reality of ghosts and the occult—a woman I can certainly identify with for that belief.

“Ghosts exploit the horror latent behind reality …. Our irrational darker selves demand familiars …. We are twentieth century haunters of the haunted.”

Elizabeth Bowen is my Women In Horror Month selection for 2018, which always includes the finest ghost tale writers. Bowen’s stories are a legacy to the Gothic, Sapphic, psychological, and the ghostly realms in our minds. She knew how to use the idea of a ‘living ghost’ —a ghost who could appear in one place and at the same time be a living person walking around in another place. I consider her required reading for any ghost story lover.

“Each time I sat down to write a story I opened a door; and the pressure against the other side of that door must have been very great, for things — ideas, images, emotions — came through with force and rapidity, sometimes violence …. Odd enough in their way — and now some seem very odd — they were flying particles of something enormous and inchoate that had been going on. They were sparks from experience—an experience not necessarily my own.”

If you want to read about how she handled cracks in the psyche, read The Demon Lover—paranoia or paranormal in wartime London. You be the judge.

Her three most famous ghost stories are the following. The Cat Jumps (1934 ), a country house, a previous murder, new owners. The Happy Autumn Fields (1941), a dreamy psychologically damaged young woman’s story akin to Turn of the Screw. Green Holly (1941), the ghost of a woman speaks out on Christmas Eve.

Read the short story The Demon Lover at BiblioKlept.org.

Listen to the audio of The Demon Lover

here on YouTube.com.

You can download her famous novel The Last September. The story depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual. Life in the 1920s at the country mansion in Cork during the Irish War of Independence. A young woman’s coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.

Get the FREE ebook here at MaconCountyPark.com.

The 1999 British film, screenplay by John Banville, starring Maggie Smith.

Do you think it is the haunted who haunts?

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such Bibliophilica NewYorkerFictionOnline

Lovecraft Ezine Parlor of Horror

HorrorNews.net Fangoria.com

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

HorrorAddicts.net Horror Novel Reviews HorrorSociety.com

Monster Librarian HorrorTalk.com

Rob Around Books The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers: The Writer Unboxed

A Horrible Grey Loneliness: The Little Ghost

The Little Ghost by Hugh Walpole (1933)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror July 25, 2017

Death is an amazing adventure, yes? If you’ve ever lost a loved one, dear friend or relative, you know that “horrible grey loneliness” that can haunt you in the most subtle of ways. Our narrator has a ghost story to tell you. He is a journalist, happily married with two children and living in Wimbledon. When his greatest friend Charlie Bond, a man with a charming personality, dies suddenly, the reality hits hard. Missing Charlie in his life becomes a pervasive ache for our narrator, and he escapes for a short holiday to the seaside. Sometimes when you fight a memory, the strangest things can happen. Like when you think you are alone in a room—but are not alone at all.

Read The Little Ghost at Gutenberg.net . Scroll down to click the title.

This short story was published in the collection All Souls’ Night. Sir Hugh Walpole was a best-selling British novelist. He published 36 novels and 6 volumes of short stories. Virginia Woolf praised his writing: “It is no disparagement to a writer to say that his gift is for the small things rather than for the larger. If you are faithful with the details the large effects will grow inevitably out of those very details.”

Joseph Conrad said of him, “We see Mr. Walpole grappling with the truth of things spiritual and material with his characteristic earnestness, and we can discern the characteristics of this acute and sympathetic explorer of human nature.”

You might also like The Silver Mask or the vampire narrative Tarnhelm, included in All Souls’ Night.

Hugh Walpole Portrait, by Stephen Bone, oil on canvas.

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free Tales of Terror. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, supernatural, ghost stories, crime, sci-fi, and ‘quiet horror.’ Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month.

Comments are welcome.