Short Ghost

It is the tale of a DC cop's on and off-duty ghostly encounters with a childhood friend who died in his youth. Hauntings can be murder.

Every year, on the same night in November, a bouquet of flowers, a vintage bottle of wine, and a handwritten note appear next to a small wooden cross on the side of a lonely country highway. Year after year, it's the same offering at the same time. On his way home from work at the factory, Tom notices these roadside tributes and wonders who the mysterious mourner might be.

Madeline was rich and arrogant. She fired all her human servants and purchased robotic "ServBots". Everything is great until she realizes all is not as perfect as it seemed. Find out why some jobs are better left to humans.

Frederick and Joan Mirfield have purchased the house in order to enjoy the peace of retirement in solitude. When Frederick encounters a delirious and wounded man when walking in the woods, he helps him back to Hope House and the couple nurse him back to health. They soon realize, however, that there is more to the man than meets the eye, and as the evil embedded in the walls of the property begins to stir and exert its influence, it will take control of all three lives with devastating and brutal results.

A young couple goes on their first date together, to an old abandoned house. It is known throughout this small college town that it's haunted, and insanity once ruled the woods where this eerie house resides. The stories have twisted and turned but no one knows the real truth.

Luke walked up to the girl in the playground and asked, "Why aren't you swinging?" The girl looked at him and said nothing for a minute. He was struck by the darkness of her irises, which were almost impossible to distinguish from her blacker-than-black pupils. He swallowed. He was about to turn away when she said, "I was swinging, but I don't swing any more."

This collection of short stories displays Ed Gorman's talents as a masterful storyteller across a range of genres.

A mysterious and beautiful girl who teaches arrogant young men about true love, a lonely traveling salesman who learns that his passenger is Death, children who can absorb the psychic pain of their parents, a desperately pursued serial killer who hides his face under gauze in a hospital room, and a woman who loves the alien infant nobody else wants - these stories and 10 others make up this collection by award-winning author Ed Gorman. Here are stories that led him to be called "one of the best" by Dean Koontz and "one of the most original writers in crime fiction today" by Kirkus Reviews. Here, you'll find the extraordinary range of storytelling skill and powerful emotions that won Gorman the prized International Fiction Award.

Included in Different Kinds of Dead, and Other Tales are "Different Kinds of Dead", "Deathman", "A Girl Like You", "Loverboy", "Muse", "Riff", "The Brasher Girl", "Survival", "Masque", "Second Most Popular", and others.

This collection reveals the extraordinary range of storytelling skill and powerful emotions that won Gorman the prized International Fiction Award. His protagonists, gritty and gruff, are strangely likable, and his writing, according to Mystery News, is "powerful, disturbing, [and] often poetic".

When an author helps the police to identify symbols carved into two dead bodies, he becomes the focus of a murderous cult. He has to become the hunter to survive.

Rachel can't understand the strange sounds and goings-on in her house or why her son, all of a sudden, has an imaginary friend, until he mentions the name Paul and what this friend wants. Rachel's deadly secret that she's kept buried for many years has now worked its way to the surface, only to take everything from her. Bodies will drop like flies if she doesn't come to terms with her past and give into the horrible demands of the dead.

Malcolm R. Campbell's Spooky Stories include Cora's Crossing which was inspired by the now-abandoned Bellamy Bridge over the Chipola River near the town of Marianna in the Florida Panhandle. The local folk legend that claims the bridge is haunted by a 175-year-old ghost who died tragically on her wedding night when her dress caught fire. In Moonlight and Ghosts, Randy's intuition is drawing him back to an abandoned psychiatric hospital where he once worked.

Here are tales of mystery, the supernatural, and the paranormal, all moulded by Robin Bailey's very smooth and rolling tones. These intriguing stories include "The Man of the Night" by Edgar Wallace, "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman" by Charles Dickens, "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, "Sredni Vashtar" by Saki, "The Werewolf" by Frederick Marryat, "The Mezzotint" by M.R. James, and "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe.

Small Bites is a collection of 14 short stories of the paranormal, horror, science fiction and fantasy. Each a tale of curiosity, hunger, longing, fear and love.

Mystery surrounds a certain Mr. Karswell. He has purchased an old abbey, is a known alchemist, and has written a ludicrous history of witchcraft. Are these mysterious behaviors those of an irascible eccentric or a coldhearted murderer?

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was one of the most popular and prolific English authors of his time, best known for his historical fiction and novels for boys. But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of 16 tales contains many of his finest.

A house inches 800 miles to confess its horrible crime. The last resident of a mental institution discovers he's not alone. A middle-schooler performs an experiment to determine how much time we fit in dreams. Boys looking for wonder find more than they're expecting in the Adirondacks with Charles Fort. A detective learns everything he's ever wanted to know...and some things he hasn't. In Will Ludwigsen's short stories of strangeness and mystery, the universe has a way of being weird in just the ways we need it to be.

In "The Dunwich Horror" (1928), Wilbur Whateley, the son of a deformed albino mother and an unknown father, matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. All the while, his sorcerer grandfather indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft. "The Thing at the Doorstep" was written five years later. Confessing to the killing of his friend Edward Derby, Daniel Upton hopes his account will prove he is not a murderer.

Unspeakable rituals are performed by an occult group residing in the Red Hook region of New York City in this haunting short story by H P Lovecraft, and told by Mike Vendetti.

The Doll Maker tells the tale of Clare Lydgate, a young woman studying at boarding school for her Oxford scholarship examinations. In the evenings she escapes the school grounds by climbing over the wall of Brackenbine Hall. It is here that she encounters the charismatic and mysterious Niall Sterne, the Doll Maker. This is a subtle, intelligent, and compelling tale of horror.

Don't go to sleep. You never know where you'll wake up. Little Darcy Walker is getting the bed she's always dreamed about. A black bed that's one-of-a-kind. But Darcy's bed may not be as new as it looks, and she could be falling into a deathly slumber. From the Amazon best-selling author of Kransen House comes a horrific tale that takes the listener into the depths of an ancient evil. There's no turning back once you've slept in The Bed.

A superbly crafted Dickens classic, masterfully narrated - a ghostly apparition supervises the trial of his murderer.