Here lie four remarkable ghost stories, carefully culled from a genre that had a great flowering in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.

They have been chosen because they are skillfully written; the reader - like the protagonists - is drawn slowly and inexorably into a nightmare that seems all the more credible because the world in which it happens is an ordinary everyday one, filled with realistic detail. In addition, each of the four authors employs considerable psychological insight, so that the tales operate on far more than one level.

The length of these stories has prevented them from being frequently anthologized. Aficionados of ghost stories are in for a treat!

*The Beckoning Fair One* by Oliver Onions
This has been called "one of the finest and most terrifying ghost stories" ever written. It appeared in Onions's volume Widdershins in 1911. It is a classic of the haunted house sub-genre, and is actually a novella.

*How Love Came to Professor Guildea* by Robert Hichens
This very long story has been called "unsurpassed for its subtle unfolding of a particularly loathsome horror." But it is not a horror story; it is a story of a sort of visitation. Robert Hichens (1864-1950) was the author of many popular novels, among them The Green Carnation, The Garden of Allah and The Paradine Case.

*The Old Nurse's Story* by Elizabeth Gaskell.
This story (1853) is the earliest of the four. This too is a haunted house tale, and it is interesting to compare it with The Beckoning Fair One. It can also be compared to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw because a child is at the heart of the haunting. Mrs Gaskell is of course a well-known Victorian novelist (1810-1865), the author of Mary Barton, North and South, Wives and Daughters and Cranford, among others.

*Couching at the Door* by D. K. Broster.
This is the rarest of the four stories in our collection, and the most recently written. It appeared in Couching at the Door in 1942. It too is a visitation story. It was chosen for its merit, but the editor was pleased to discover that D(orothy) K(athleen) Broster (1877-1950) was a woman, so that our collection can be evenly balanced: two men, two women. Ms Broster was a well-known writer of historical novels and fantasy.