Classic Ghost Stories: Eighteen Spine-Chilling Tales of Terror and the… (2003)

I suspect that I've read most of these stories before, but then again that's what a collection of "classic" stories is likely to be - stories which the reader *has* read before precisely because they're classics of their type and have stood the test of time. I'm puzzled as to why some of them were included, however.

Where is the ghost, or at least the presense of the supernatural, in Joseph Conrad's story "The Lagoon"? A woman dies, but there's nothing to suggest it's anything but a natural death resulting from fever.

E F Benson's "The Man Who Went Too Far" isn't a ghost story, either, in the accepted sense of what a ghost story is. Drawing more upon Machen's "The Great God Pan" and other stories of that ilk, this is a tale which properly belongs in a collection of classic horror, rather than ghost, stories.

And I never did finish Poe's "Ligeia" because it was, well, so bloody tedious and self-indulgent in the way of early Victorian writers trying to be profound. Maybe one day I'll give it another go and hope it reads better.

However of the stories which "made" this collection, here's an "honourable mention" for Amelia B Edwards's "The Phantom Coach", Guy de Maupassant's "On the Water" and W F Harvey's "August Heat" - all of them wonderful and atmospheric in a way only old ghost stories seem to be. ( )