The Library

 

Oliver Onion’s classic tale “The Beckoning Fair One” (Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural), considered by many to be the best ghost story ever written, centers around Paul Oleron, a writer who moves into an old house and falls obsessively in love with the ghost who haunts it.

 

 

 

 

In “The Moonlit Road” (The Phantom Coach : A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Ghost Stories) by Ambrose Bierce (thought of as the best American practitioner of supernatural stories between Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft), Joel Hetman, Jr. learns that his mother has been murdered by an unknown assailant. One night, while he and his father walk a moonlit road, his father sees something that drains the color from his face and causes him to flee. 

 

 

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the leading practitioner of ghost stories during the victorian era, was a major influence on M.R. James, Bram Stoker, and the aforementioned Oliver Onions. One of his best tales is “Schalken the Painter” (The Best Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu). Gerard Douw is told that a rich, mysterious stranger would like to marry Gerard’s niece Rose. After he has agreed to the arrangement he meets the stranger, covered from feet to neck in odd clothing and with a blue hue to his face and a cloudiness in his eyes. Everyone is quietly horrified, and after the stranger and Rose leave they seem to vanish.

 

Le Fanu’s greatest contributed to short fiction is the novella Carmilla (Carmilla). The narrator 18-year-old Laura lives in a castle of the forest in Styria with her father and longs for a friend. A carriage accident nearby bring into her life the beautiful Carmilla, and the girls both recognize each other from a strange dream they had twelve years earlier. The girls’ lives begin to revolve around each other, and all the while the neighborhood is plagued by the mysterious deaths of girls around their age.

 

Some other great supernatural tales for Valentine’s day include “The Story of Salome” by Amelia B. Edwards (The Best Ghost Stories Ever Told), “The Shell of Sense” by Olivia Howard Dunbar (The Big Book of Ghost Stories), “The Cold Embrace” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories), and “Morella” by Edgar Allan Poe (Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe).