Twenty-Three Stories

Published in 1913, this anthology gathers twenty-three tales of dread from the golden age of British ghost fiction. The Scott brothers, pioneering editors of The Adelphi, assembled stories that operate less as simple scares and more as incursions of the uncanny into ordinary life. The collection includes contributions ranging from established masters to forgotten voices of the era, unified by a commitment to atmospheric unease rather than outright terror. Here you'll find haunted houses whose secrets whisper across centuries, spectral visitations that may or may not be imagined, and the quiet horror of things left unsaid between the living. These are ghost stories for readers who find the suggestion more unsettling than the spectacle. The anthology captures a literary moment when the form was evolving from gothic excess toward psychological subtlety, making it a fascinating window onto early twentieth-century anxieties about death, memory, and what refuses to stay buried.