Classic Short Horror Stories You Can Read for Free

J. Sheridan Le Fanu. A painting is the starting point for a story about a young artist, the woman he hopes to marry, and a suitor who arrives after dark. Settle in for the way candlelight can decide what an observer learns. Read it in J. S. Le Fanu’s Ghostly Tales, Volume 1, on Project Gutenberg.

E. F. Benson. For years a dream ends with the same invitation to an upstairs room. The furnishings, weather, and people can change, which makes the one detail that stays the same increasingly hard to dismiss. Read it as the opening story in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg.

Algernon Blackwood. Two canoeists pitch camp on a river island where the willows seem to move with a purpose of their own. Give this one a longer evening. The story makes the water, branches, and wind increasingly hard to read as ordinary weather. Find The Willows on Project Gutenberg.

Algernon Blackwood. A hunting party in the Canadian wilderness hears calls that unsettle a guide who normally knows what to make of the woods. Choose this longer story when you want the distance between camps to feel frightening on its own. The voices and the tracks give you different things to dread. Find The Wendigo on Project Gutenberg.

Bram Stoker. A student rents an empty house for a quiet place to study and finds his attention drifting to a rat and a heavy old bell rope. Give the story a little time to establish what used to happen in the house. Each practical decision the student makes gives the ghost more room. Read it in Dracula’s Guest on Project Gutenberg.

Bram Stoker. A traveler leaves his driver to explore a road near Munich, despite warnings about the night. The story is short enough to take its journey in one go, with darkening weather and a tomb doing much of the work. Read it as the opening tale of Dracula’s Guest on Project Gutenberg.

Edith Wharton. An American couple asks whether its English country house comes with a ghost and learns that they wouldn’t recognize it until afterward. The longer setup lets you see how little there is to separate a stranger on the grounds from everything you think you know about a marriage. Read it in Tales of Men and Ghosts from Project Gutenberg.

Edith Wharton. A newly hired maid sees somebody in a quiet corridor and hears a bell she begins to understand differently from those around her. It’s a slower household ghost story, especially rewarding if you like noticing what a servant can see and what she can’t safely ask. Find it in The Descent of Man and Other Stories on Project Gutenberg.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A woman explains how her neighbor Luella depended on one caregiver after another and what happened to the people who helped her. This short story makes the pattern slowly clear through village talk. Its horror is close to home for anyone who has watched care turn into an obligation. Read it in The Wind in the Rose-Bush on Project Gutenberg.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A family tries to explain a shadow that stays on the wall after the obvious things that might be casting it are moved. Choose this short ghost story for the uneasy gap between what everyone sees and what they can admit. Read it in The Wind in the Rose-Bush on Project Gutenberg.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A bedroom in a boardinghouse seems to take on the habits of someone who once occupied it. You can read the story in one sitting, with time to notice how many ordinary things, from a mirror to clothing, become unacceptable in that one room. Find it in The Wind in the Rose-Bush on Project Gutenberg.

W. W. Jacobs. A man’s cousin needs money and threatens to tell a secret that could end an engagement. Watch how quickly a disused well becomes the only place that matters. It’s a concise story with a threat that stays close to ordinary life. Read The Well on Project Gutenberg.

F. Marion Crawford. A passenger in a ship’s cabin learns what it means to have the upper berth and a porthole that keeps turning up open. This story has time to make the voyage feel routine before it changes the meaning of a night’s sleep. Find it in the Project Gutenberg edition paired with By the Waters of Paradise.

Rudyard Kipling. A man in Simla begins to see the rickshaw of a woman he wronged. Give this one more time than the shortest pieces so you can hear how he talks about being haunted. His insistence on what other people ought to see makes the ordinary traffic part of the story. Read it in The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories on Project Gutenberg.

Wilkie Collins. A traveler wins money gambling in Paris and accepts an offer of a bed. Once he’s settled, the construction of the room begins to matter more than the money. Choose this for a brisk piece of physical suspense with a threat you can picture. Find it in After Dark from Project Gutenberg.

E. Nesbit. A couple takes a country cottage and hears a warning about the stone figures in the nearby church. Read this compact ghost story for the way a tale that can be laughed off in daylight begins to govern the hours after dark. Look for it in Grim Tales from Project Gutenberg.

E. Nesbit. Folks gather for a wedding after the groom promises to be there whatever happens. The story is short, and knowing that a promise will be kept makes the duration of a wedding service a good measure of unease. Read it in Grim Tales from Project Gutenberg.

Robert Louis Stevenson. An old medical student recognizes a man from his past, which sends the story back to a city where corpses for anatomy lessons arrive without close questions. In a single sitting, Stevenson turns a practical arrangement into a menace on a dark road. Read it in volume 3 of the Swanston edition from Project Gutenberg.

H. G. Wells. A visitor tests the reputation of a haunted castle room by bringing in light. Watch what all that effort at preparation buys him as the candles go out. The story is short enough to read with the room around you still looking much as it did when you started. Read The Red Room on Project Gutenberg.

Guy de Maupassant. A diary records the writer’s growing suspicion that an unseen presence has taken over his home and begun to influence him. Give it a longer sitting so you can follow how household tests turn into a private argument about what can be seen. Read the English translation in Short Fiction from Standard Ebooks.

Elizabeth Gaskell. An old nurse tells what happened when she cared for a girl in a house where music comes from an organ nobody admits to playing. Settle in for the longer shape of a tale told aloud. The nurse’s job gives her a reason to keep going when a visitor could have left. Read it in Curious, If True from Project Gutenberg.