Halloween looms ominously before us, dripping blood from its sharp fangs. How better to spend the next couple of days than being spooked? Below: some early modern and nineteenth-century horrors, both fictional and factual, famous and otherwise.
- A sampling of Victorian ghost stories.
- Spring-Heeled Jack.
- Douglas Linder's site devoted to the Salem Witchcraft Trials.
- "Lizzie Borden took an axe..."
- Not, of course, that Lizzie managed Jack the Ripper's body count.
- Elizabeth Bathory (the "Blood Countess").
- You can find accounts of various and sundry hauntings at Mysterious Britain.
- Lots more British hauntings at Haunted London.
- Not exactly scary, but still: a rare nineteenth-century anthology of ghost stories.
- Count August Villiers de L'Isle Adam, "A Torture by Hope."
- Daniel Defoe, "A Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal" (1706).
- For late-Victorian ghost stories, M. R. James is the author to read.
- But see also Vernon Lee, Hauntings.
- Melodrama, anyone? Here's Richard Brinsley Peake's adaptation of Frankenstein, Presumption; Or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823).
- "Poor Polidori": John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819).
- Speaking of vampires, don't forget to visit Dracula's Home Page.
- Believe it or not, Bram Stoker seems to have believed that he had a sense of humor. Witness "The Dualitists."
- In 1885, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published a gay vampire story.
I recently encountered the term Victorian "blood" novels, but I am having no luck figuring out what they are. Thanks for the ghost stories!
Posted by: Chaser | October 31, 2006 at 07:30 AM
very cool and fun post. Thank you or all the info.
Posted by: Melissa | October 30, 2009 at 10:21 PM