The Rats in the Walls

A man visits his sick childhood friend in a crumbling mansion that seems to share its owner's fate. Poe's most famous tale, where the house and the family collapse together.

Edgar Allan Poe

A skeptic spends the night in a London house that no tenant can stand for more than three days, and finds out exactly why. Published in 1859, it is often called the best haunted house story of the Victorian era.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A group of friends rents a house with a bad reputation and each one spends the night in a different room. This 1859 Christmas collection was written by Dickens with Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and other writers.

Charles Dickens

A nurse tells how she and a little orphan girl moved into a cold manor in the fells, where a phantom child knocks at the windows on winter nights. A classic Victorian ghost story about a family secret.

Elizabeth Gaskell

An American family buys an English castle, ghost included, and refuses to be scared. Wilde's comic take on the haunted house, where the ghost ends up being the victim.

Oscar Wilde