Michael Sims – Dracula’s Guest

Michael Sims (ed.) – Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (Bloomsbury, 2010)

Cover illustration: Victoria Sawdon

Michael Sims – Introduction: The Cost Of Living

Part One: The Roots

Jean-Baptise de Moyer, Marquis d’Argens – They Opened The Graves
Antoine Augustin Calmet – Dead Persons In Hungary
George Gordon, Lord Byron – The End Of My Journey
John Polidori – The Vampyre
Johann Ludwig Tieck (attributed [almost certainly wrongly]) – Wake Not The Dead
Theophile Gautier – The Deathly Lover

Part Two: The Tree

Aleksei Tolstoy – The Family Of The Vourdalak
James Malcolm Rymer – Varney The Vampyre (extract)
Fitz-James O’Brien – What Was It?
Anonymous – The Mysterious Stranger
Anne Crawford – A Mystery of the Campagna
Emily Gerard – Death And Burial – Vampires And Werewolves
Mary Cholmondeley – Let Loose
Eric Count Stenbock – A True Story of a Vampire
M. E. Braddon – Good Lady Ducayne
Augustus Hare – And The Creature Came In
F. G. Loring – The Tomb of Sarah
Hume Nisbet – The Vampire Maid

Part Three: The Fruit

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman – Luella Miller
M. R. James – Count Magnus
Alice and Claude Askew – Aylmer Vance and the Vampire
Bram Stoker – Dracula’s Guest

Acknowledgements
Bibliography & Further Reading

From the Blurb
Before Twilight and True Blood, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.

Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Aleksei Tolstoy’s tale of a vampire family to Fitz-James O’Brien’s invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sinister widow Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and rounds out the collection with Stoker’s own Dracula’s Guest – a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.

Ernest Rhys & M. Larigot – The Haunted And The Haunters

Ernest Rhys & M. Larigot (ed.) – The Haunted And The Haunters (Donald O’Connor, 1921;  Aegypan, 2007)

Reissued by Aegypan Press of North Hollywood, 2007. Prefer to read it all online? Short, Scary Ghost Stories

Cover of 2007 reissue

Ernest Rhys – Introduction

I. GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES

Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall Of The House Of Usher
George MacDonald – The Old Nurses Story
Thomas Hardy – The Superstitious Man’s Story
Boccaccioa – A Story Of Ravenna
Douglass Hyde [Trans] – Teig O’Kane And The Corpse
E. Bulwer Lytton – The Haunted And The Haunters
R. S. Hawker – The Bothanan Ghost
Arnold Bennett – The Ghost Of Lord Clarenceux
Arthur Machen – Dr Duthoit’s Vision
John Wilson – The Seven Lights
Anonymous – The Spectral Coach Of Blackadon
William Hunt – Drake’s Drum
William Hunt – The Spectre Bridegroom
Greville MacDonald – The Pool In The Graveyard
William Carleton – The Liahan Shee
Sir George Douglas – The Haunted Cove
Sir Walter Scott – Wandering Willie’s Tale

II. GHOST STORIES FROM LOCAL RECORDS, FOLK LORE, AND LEGEND

Anonymous – Glamis Castle
Anonymous – Powys Castle
Augustus Hare – Croglin Grange
Joseph Glanvil – The Ghost of Major Sydenham
Anonymous – Miraculous Case of Jesch Claes
Anonymous – The Radiant Boy of Corby Castle
Anonymous – Clerk Saunders
Mrs Catherine Crowe – Dorothy Durant
C. K. Sharpe – Pearlin Jean
Anonymous – The Denton Hall Ghost
Anonymous – The Goodwood Ghost Story
Dale Owen – Captain Wheatcroft
Mrs Catherine Crowe – The Iron Cage
William Hunt – The Ghost of Rosewarne
Joseph Glanvil – The Iron Chest of Durley
Anonymous – The Strange Case of M. Bezeul
Anonymous – The Marquis de Rambouillet
Anonymous – The Altheim Revenant
Anonymous – Sertorius and His Hind
E. W. Godwin – Erichto

III. OMENS AND PHANTASMS

E.H. Blakeney [Trans] – Patroklos [from The Iliad]
“Arise Evans” – Vision of Cromwell
Rev. John Mastin – Lord Stafford’s Warning
Ferrier – Kotter’s Red Circle
Anonymous – The Vision of Charles XI of Sweden
Drummond – Ben Jonson’s Prevision
Anonymous – Queen Ulrica and the Countess Steenbock
Anonymous – Denis Misanger
Anonymous – The Pied Piper
Ferrier – Jeanne D’Arc
Anonymous – Anne Walker
Henderson – The Hand of Glory
Anonymous – The Bloody Footstep
Anonymous – The Ghostly Warriors of Worms
Anonymous – The Wandering Jew in England
Edmund Jones – Bendith Eu Mammau
John F. Campbell – The Red Book of Appin
Anonymous – The Good O’Donoghue
William Hunt – Sarah Polgrain
William Godwin – Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester

The Aegypan edition drops the co-credit although it’s clear from Rhys’ introduction that this compilation of folklore, fact, ‘fact’, legend and fiction is all the mysterious M. Larigot’s work!

In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good. Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature, which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if every person is not liable to be “possessed.”