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. On this page you will find the work of famous authors, such as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft, You will also find stories by authors that you are unlikely to be familiar with, such as Bernard Capes, William Harvey, and Huge Walpole.
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
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William Harrison Ainsworth
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J. Y. Akerman
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Louisa May Alcott
Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse
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William Allingham
The Fairies (Poem)
The Witch-Bride (Poem)
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Leonid Andreyev
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Anonymous
The Fiend (Russian Fairy Tale)
The Twa Corbies (Poem)
The Witch Girl (Russian Fairy Tale)
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Gertrude Atherton
The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number
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Gertrude Bacon
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Louisa Baldwin
Many Waters Cannot Quench Love
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Honoré de Balzac
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John Kendrick Bangs
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
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Sabine Baring-Gould
The Book of Were-Wolves (non-fiction)
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Robert Barr
The Man Who Was Not on the Passenger List
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E. F. Benson
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
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R. H. Benson
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J. D. Beresford
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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
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Algernon Blackwood
Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp
Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House
The Damned (Novella)
The Wendigo (Novella)
The Willows (Novella)
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Marjorie Bowen
The Extraordinary Adventure of Grace Endicott
The Extraordinary Adventure of Mr. John Proudie
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Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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Rhoda Broughton
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth
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Robert Browning
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (Poem)
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Gottfried August Bürger
Lenore (Gothic Ballad)
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George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)
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Bernard Capes
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Robert W. Chambers
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Alexandre Chatrian
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Erckmann-Chatrian
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Mary Cholmondeley
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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Wilkie Collins
Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman
The Haunted Hotel (Online Book)
The Traveler’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed
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Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (Mrs Craik)
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F. Marion Crawford
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Bithia Mary Croker
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Elizabeth Gilbert Cunningham-Terry
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Daniel Defoe
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Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death (Poem)
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (Poem)
I Years had been from Home (Poem)
The Only Ghost I Ever Saw (Poem)
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire
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Olivia Howard Dunbar
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Charles Dickens
The Trial For Murder (aka To be Taken With a Grain of Salt)
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Amelia B. Edwards
No. 5 Branchline: The Engineer’s Story
Was it an Illusion? A Parson’s Story
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Émile Erckmann
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Hans Heinz Ewers
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Anatole France
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Richard Le Gallienne
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Elizabeth Gaskell
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Théophile Gautier
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Bride of Corinth (Poem)
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Victoria Glad
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Augustus Hare
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William F. Harvey
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Wilhelm Hauff
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Robert Stephen Hawker
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
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William Hope Hodgson
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James Hogg
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Tom Hood
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Robert E. Howard
A Song of the Werewolf Folk (Poem)
Arkham (Poem)
Dead Man’s Hate (Poem)
Forbidden Magic (Poem)
Moon Mockery (Poem)
The Dead Slaver’s Tale (Poem)
The Fear That Follows (Poem)
The Gates of Nineveh (Poem)
The Grisly Horror (aka Moon of Zambebwei)
The Harp of Alfred (Poem)
The Moor Ghost (Poem)
The Ride of Falume (Poem)
The Riders of Babylon (Poem)
The Song of the Bats (Poem)
The Tavern (Poem)
Up, John Kane! (Poem)
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Fergus Hume
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Washington Irving
The Adventure of the German Student
The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture
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Joseph Jacobs
Childe Rowland (Folk Tale)
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W. W. Jacobs
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Henry James
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
The Turn of the Screw (Online Book)
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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
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Jerome K. Jerome
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling
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Leopold Kompert
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Vernon Lee
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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
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Eleanor F. Lewis
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Frederick George Loring
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H.P. Lovecraft
Azathoth (Fragment)
Fungi from Yuggoth (Poem)
Hallowe’en in a Suburb (Poem)
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (aka Under the Pyramids)
Literary Composition (essay)
Nemesis (Poem)
Supernatural Horror in Literature (essay)
The Ancient Track (Poem)
The Cats (Poem)
The Descendant (Fragment)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (novella)
The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
The Outpost (Poem)
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Wood (Poem)
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Edward Bulwer Lytton
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Arthur Machen
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George MacDonald
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Francis Oscar Mann
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Frederick Marryat
The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains
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Brander Matthews
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Guy de Maupassant
Terror (Poem)
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Prosper Mérimée
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Abraham Merritt
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Richard Middleton
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Thomas Street Millington
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Mary Louisa Molesworth
The Story of the Rippling Train
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Thomas Moore
The Ring (Poem)
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Hector Hugh Munro
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Louisa Murray
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Jan Neruda
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E. Nesbit
The Mystery of the Semi-Detached
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Hume Nisbet
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Amyas Northcote
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Fitz James O’Brien
The Demon of the Gibbet (Poem)
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Vincent O’Sullivan
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Heinrich August Ossenfelder
Der Vampir (Early Vampire Poem)
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Charles Perrault
The Popular Story of Blue Beard
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Elia W. Peattie
Story of the Vanishing Patient
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Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
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Phlegon of Tralless
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Edgar Allan Poe
Silence – a Fable (Siope – a Fable)
The Assignation (The Visionary)
The Doomed City (Poem – Also Known as The City in the Sea)
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Raven (Poem)
The Sleeper (Poem)
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John William Polidori
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F. H. Power
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Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
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Ernst Raupach
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Charlotte Riddell
The Old House in Vauxhall Walk
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Saki
Saki is a pen name. Go to the listing for H. H. Munro
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Frederick P. Schrader
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Sir Walter Scott
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein (Online Book)
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M. P. Shiel
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John Stagg
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Eric Stenbock (Count Stenbock)
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Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Online Book)
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Bram Stoker
Dracula (Online Book)
The Secret of the Growing Gold
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William Makepeace Thackeray
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Mark Twain
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At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “U”).
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At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “V”).
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Hugh Walpole
Tarnhelm, or the Death of My Uncle Robert
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Edith Wharton
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H. G. Wells
The Flowering of a Strange Orchid
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Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Online Book)
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Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
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Mrs. Henry Wood
The Punishment of Gina Montani
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At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “X”).
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At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “Y”).
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At the moment, the site does not have any public domain horror stories in this category (author’s surname begins with “Z”).
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