Victorian Ghost Stories

Werewolves, vampires and things that will not stay in the grave, gathered in 1933 by an English clergyman who insisted that every one of them was perfectly real.

Victorian Ghost Stories was assembled by Augustus Montague Summers (1880-1948). Summers was a clergyman and scholar of the demonic who produced the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1928 and wrote at length on vampires, werewolves and witches, all of which he held to be matters of fact. His choices reflect that. Alongside conventional hauntings sit Sutherland Menzies's 'Hugues, the Wer-Wolf', F. G. Loring's vampire story 'The Tomb of Sarah', and several pieces by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, among them 'A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family'.

Catherine Crowe appears too, and the range is wider than the title suggests: an Irish family curse, a Kentish legend, hauntings of a more domestic kind. For anyone who came to the genre through M. R. James and wants to know what he was reading, this is the shelf next door.