The Top 10 Short Stories - Victorian Ghost: The top ten Victorian ghost short stories of all time.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?

The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme. Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature.

Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

Across these decades of Imperial pomp another force lurks in the shadows, in the darkness, in the minds of these authors strange concoctions are brewed into deadly attacks upon our nerves. These very familiar names bring very familiar torments.

1 - The Top 10 - The Victorian Ghost Story - An Introduction

2 - A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins

3 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens

4 - The Phantom Coach by Amelia Edwards

5 - The Old Nurses Story by Elizabeth Gaskell

6 - The Mezzotint by M R James

7 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling

8 - Thurnley Abbey by Perceval Landon

9 - Strange Event in the Life of Schalken by Sheridan Le Fanu

10 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson

11 - The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde