A Book of Ghosts
1904
S. Baring-Gould brings the methods of a Victorian antiquarian to the supernatural, and the result is ghost stories that feel excavated rather than invented. These aren't wandering phantoms of generic dread but rather specters with histories, grudges, and very specific complaints. The collection opens with a marvel: a scholar researching Joan of Arc in Orléans encounters the ghost of Jean Bouchon, a waiter who died in 1869 and has been haunting the café ever since, not with shrieks or chains but with an obsessive insistence that patrons pay their coffee bill. It's darkly comic and genuinely unsettling at once, setting the tone for tales that blend the eerie with the absurd. Baring-Gould knew his English and French locales intimately, and his ghosts are rooted in particular churches, coaching inns, and country lanes. The man wrote hagiographies and medieval studies by day; by night, he conjured the dead with scholarly precision. For readers who want their ghosts/haunted with personality and place.
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