Apart from his famous novels of espionage and high adventure like The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, John Buchan was also a brilliant writer of supernatural short stories. These tales of ghosts, monsters, supernatural beings and events are to be found scattered through several of his short story collections (most long out of print) or else in the pages of magazines where they were first published and have remained, uncollected, to this day.

This collection brings together for the first time in one volume all these excellent supernatural tales with their varied backgrounds from the Highlands of Scotland to the veldts of South Africa and the wilderness of Canada. The stories are introduced with details of their creation and the frequently true stories and legends on which John Buchan based them. The editor's foreword also details Buchan's lifelong fascination with the supernatural which enabled him to continue writing in this genre right up to the time of his death.