Project Gutenberg's Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4), by Various

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Title: Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4)
Ghost Stories

Author: Various

Editor: Joseph Lewis French

Release Date: January 6, 2009 [EBook #27722]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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MASTERPIECES OF MYSTERY

Masterpieces of
Mystery

_In Four Volumes_

GHOST STORIES

Edited by
Joseph Lewis French

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

NOTE

The Editor desires especially to acknowledge assistance in granting the
use of original material, and for helpful advice and suggestion, to
Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, to Mrs. Anna
Katherine Green Rohlfs, to Cleveland Moffett, to Arthur Reeve, creator
of "Craig Kennedy," to Wilbur Daniel Steele, to Ralph Adams Cram, to
Chester Bailey Fernald, to Brian Brown, to Mrs. Lillian M. Robins of the
publisher's office, and to Charles E. Farrington of the Brooklyn Public
Library.

FOREWORD

The ghost story is as old as human speech,--and perhaps even antedates
it. A naive acceptance of the supernatural was unquestionably one of the
primal attributes of human intelligence. The ghost story may thus quite
conceivably be the first form of tale ever invented. It makes its
appearance comparatively early in the annals of literature. Who that has
read it is likely to forget Pliny's account in a letter to an intimate
of an apparition shortly after death to a mutual acquaintance? Old books
of tales and legends are full of the ghost story. It has persisted
throug