The Cold Embrace

A ghost who has terrorized an English castle for three centuries meets an American family that refuses to be scared. Wilde turns the haunted house story into comedy and then, in the last pages, into something genuinely moving.

Oscar Wilde

A man loses the wife he worshipped, remarries without love, and watches the second wife die. Poe's own favorite among his tales, and the purest version of his obsession with the beautiful dead woman.

Edgar Allan Poe

A wounded traveler shelters in an abandoned chateau and reads the history of the portrait hanging beside his bed. Four pages, one idea, and an ending that lands like a slap.

Edgar Allan Poe

A woman is confined to an upstairs room for a rest cure and begins to see something moving in the wallpaper. Gilman wrote it from experience, and it works as a ghost story and as an indictment of a marriage at the same time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Ichabod Crane courts a wealthy farmer's daughter and rides home past the bridge where the Headless Horseman is said to wait. Irving's illustrated tale is as much about a rivalry over a girl as it is about the ghost.

Washington Irving