Public Domain Horror Stories
This section of the site contains public domain horror stories, ghost stories, dark fairy tales, and texts of a similar nature.
Public domain refers to the body of creative works and knowledge in which no person, government or organization has any proprietary interest such as a copyright. These works are considered part of the public cultural heritage and may be freely used by all.
Most of the texts in this section are short stories, but there are also a few online books, along with some poetry and essays. I read every text before adding it to the site, check for obvious errors, and provide supplementary information where possible.
A Note About Navigating This Page
This a long page that contains many links to public domain horror stories. All the horror stories are grouped by the author’s surname. The long row of letters below is intended to ease the process of navigation and reduce the necessity for a lot of scrolling of the page. So if you want to find Bram Stoker, for example, clicking on the letter “S” for “Stoker” will take you directly to the section of the page that contain all the authors whose surname begins with the letter S. A similar row of letters is used 26 times to mark each of the sections of the page.
John Aikin
____________________
William Harrison Ainsworth
____________________
Anonymous
The Fiend (Russian Fairy Tale)
The Witch Girl (Russian Fairy Tale)
___________________
Louisa Baldwin
Many Waters Cannot Quench Love
___________________
Honoré de Balzac
___________________
John Kendrick Bangs
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
___________________
Sabine Baring-Gould
The Book of Were-Wolves (non-fiction)
___________________
Robert Barr
The Man Who Was Not on the Passenger List
___________________
E. F. Benson
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
___________________
Ambrose Bierce
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch
____________________
Algernon Blackwood
____________________
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
____________________
Rhoda Broughton
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth
____________________
Robert Browning
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (Poem)
____________________
Gottfried August Bürger
Lenore (Gothic Ballad)
___________________
George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)
____________________
Alexandre Chatrian
____________________
Erckmann-Chatrian
____________________
Mary Chomondeley
____________________
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
____________________
Wilkie Collins
Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman
The Haunted Hotel (Online Book)
The Traveler’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed
____________________
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (Mrs Craik)
____________________
F. Marion Crawford
____________________
Bithia Mary Croker
____________________
Elizabeth Gilbert Cunningham-Terry
____________________
Daniel Defoe
____________________
Olivia Howard Dunbar
____________________
Charles Dickens
The Trial For Murder (aka To be Taken With a Grain of Salt)
____________________
Amelia B. Edwards
No. 5 Branchline: The Engineer’s Story
Was it an Illusion? A Parson’s Story
____________________
Émile Erckmann
____________________
Hans Heinz Ewers
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “F”).
___________________
Elizabeth Gaskell
____________________
Théophile Gautier
____________________
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
____________________
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Bride of Corinth (Poem)
____________________
Victoria Glad
____________________
Augustus Hare
____________________
William F. Harvey
____________________
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
____________________
James Hogg
____________________
Robert E. Howard
____________________
Washington Irving
The Adventure of the German Student
The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture
____________________
Joseph Jacobs
Childe Rowland (Folk Tale)
____________________
W. W. Jacobs
____________________
Henry James
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
The Turn of the Screw (Online Book)
____________________
M.R. James
After Dark in the Playing Fields
An Episode of Cathedral History
Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance
‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
The Experiment – A New Years’ Eve Ghost Story
The Malice of Inanimate Objects
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard
____________________
Jerome K. Jerome
____________________
Joseph Rudyard Kipling
____________________
Vernon Lee
____________________
J.S. Le Fanu
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Ghost Stories of Chapelizod (Story Collection)
Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse
Stories of Lough Guir (5 collected tales)
The Child That Went With the Fairies
The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts
What Was It? — often attributed to J. S. Le Fanu in error. See Fitz James O’Brien
____________________
Eleanor F. Lewis
____________________
Frederick George Loring
____________________
H.P. Lovecraft
Azathoth (Fragment)
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (aka Under the Pyramids)
Literary Composition (essay)
Supernatural Horror in Literature (essay)
The Descendant (Fragment)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (novella)
The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Strange High House in the Mist
____________________
Edward Bulwer Lytton
____________________
George MacDonald
___________________
Francis Oscar Mann
____________________
Frederick Marryat
The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains
____________________
Guy de Maupassant
Terror (Poem)
____________________
Prosper Mérimée
____________________
Richard Middleton
____________________
Thomas Moore
The Ring (Poem)
____________________
Hector Hugh Munro
___________________
Jan Neruda
___________________
E. Nesbit
The Mystery of the Semi-Detached
____________________
Hume Nisbet
____________________
Amyas Northcote
____________________
Fitz James O’Brien
___________________
Vincent O’Sullivan
___________________
Heinrich August Ossenfelder
Der Vampir (Early Vampire Poem)
____________________
Charles Perrault
The Popular Story of Blue Beard
____________________
Elia W. Peattie
Story of the Vanishing Patient
____________________
Phlegon of Tralless
____________________
Edgar Allan Poe
Silence – a Fable (Siope – a Fable)
The Assignation (The Visionary)
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Raven (Poem)
The Sleeper (Poem)
____________________
John William Polidori
____________________
F. H. Power
____________________
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
____________________
____________________
Ernst Raupach
____________________
Charlotte Riddell
The Old House in Vauxhall Walk
____________________
Saki
Saki is a pen name. Go to the listing for H. H. Munro
____________________
Frederick P. Schrader
____________________
Sir Walter Scott
___________________
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein (Online Book)
____________________
John Stagg
___________________
Eric Stenbock (Count Stenbock)
____________________
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Online Book)
____________________
Bram Stoker
Dracula (Online Book)
The Secret of the Growing Gold
____________________
William Makepeace Thackeray
____________________
Mark Twain
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “U”).
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “V”).
____________________
Edith Wharton
____________________
H. G. Wells
The Flowering of a Strange Orchid
____________________
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Online Book)
____________________
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
The Little Maid at the Door
The Lost Ghost
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “X”).
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “Y”).
____________________
At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “Z”).
____________________