Twice-Told Tales

Born at the same 1816 ghost story contest that produced Frankenstein, this tale created the aristocratic vampire with the seductive Lord Ruthven. This annotated edition adds notes on its context and legacy.

John William Polidori

Schoolmaster Ichabod Crane rides home through a haunted Hudson Valley glen and meets the Headless Horseman. Irving's 1820 tale is the founding ghost story of American gothic.

Washington Irving

A man visits his ailing childhood friend at a crumbling mansion that seems to share the family's decay. Poe's 1839 tale is the perfect gothic short story: a doomed house, a buried sister, and a final collapse.

Edgar Allan Poe

A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition wakes in total darkness and faces one torture after another, including a razor-sharp pendulum. Published in 1842, it is Poe at his most suspenseful.

Edgar Allan Poe

A narrator insists he is sane while describing how he killed an old man and hid the body under the floor. Poe's 1843 story is the classic unreliable narrator, undone by the beating of a dead heart.

Edgar Allan Poe