Public Domain Horror Stories
This section of the site contains public domain horror stories.
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.
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.
William Harrison Ainsworth
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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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E. F. Benson
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
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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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Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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Robert Browning
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (Poem)
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George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)
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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 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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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
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 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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Vernon Lee
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J.S. Le Fanu
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse
The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts
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H.P. Lovecraft
Azathoth (Fragment)
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (aka Under the Pyramids)
Literary Composition (essay)
Supernatural Horror in Literature (essay)
The Descendant (Fragment)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (novella)
The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Strange High House in the Mist
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Edward Bulwer Lytton
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George MacDonald
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Francis Oscar Mann
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Guy de Maupassant
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Richard Middleton
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Jan Neruda
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E. Nesbit
The Mystery of the Semi-Detached
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Amyas Northcote
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Vincent O’Sullivan
Heinrich August Ossenfelder
Der Vampir (Early Vampire Poem)
Charles Perrault
The Popular Story of Blue Beard
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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 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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Sir Walter Scott
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John Stagg
The Vampyre (Poem)
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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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H. G. Wells
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Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Online Book)
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