Help! It's the Annual Halloween Horde of Horrible Happenings!

[For previous installments, see 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012. Unfortunately, HorrorMasters links have all gone to the great beyond.]

This year's theme: mid-19th c. terrors, ca. 1840-1865 or so.

• "The Mysterious Stranger" (1860).  Involves vampires, coffins, and a lot of nails.  
• "A Night in a Haunted House" (1848).  Man finds himself in the awkward position of conversing with a ghost.  (You may need to search at the link to find the text.) 
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "The Cold Embrace" (1860).  Don't make undying vows that you don't intend to keep...
• Wilkie Collins, "A Terribly Strange Bed."  It's always a good idea to double-check unfamiliar furniture.  
• Page through Catherine Crowe's Ghosts and Family Legends: A Volume for Christmas (1859), in which several people tell ghost stories, Decameron-style.
• Charles Dickens, "A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second."  On the eve of his execution, a man contemplates the murder that brought him to prison.
• Charles Dickens, ed., The Haunted House (1859).  A Christmas Book.  Includes short fiction by Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Anne Procter (better known as a poet), George Augustus Sala, and Hesba Stretton (best-selling evangelical novelist).
• Amelia B. Edwards, "How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries" (1863).  A working man tells a story of murder and haunting.
• Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story" (1852).  A woman relates a tale of long-ago jealousy and injustice.  
• John Berwick Harwood, "Horror: A True Tale" (1861).  A man finds himself besieged by a series of increasingly inexplicable and terrifying happenings in an old mansion.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown."  Yes, you've all read it before, but why not read it again?
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter."  Yet another entry in the "please check that your bridegroom is alive before you marry him" sweepstakes.
• ---, "The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh."  Mysterious guest arrives; bad things happen.  Anthologized as part of the Purcell Papers.  
• Herman Melville, "The Bell-Tower" (1855).  Something goes not quite right when a mammoth bell is cast.  

Comments

[Sonetka]

Yet another entry in the "please check that your bridegroom is alive before you marry him" sweepstakes.

Lots of Child ballads have this moral too. Was accidental marriage to the undead that much of a social hazard back then?

Thanks for the stories -- I go through books of ghost stories like mad, but while I know a few of these ones I'm obviously very deficient on the mid-19th century variety. I look forward to going through them properly tomorrow.

[tatiana.larina]

I want to add this gem from The Public Domain Review - a novel dictated by Mark Twain from beyond the grave. Via Ouija board, no less.
http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/10/29/jap-herron-a-novel-written-from-the-ouija-board-1917/