Mrs. Oliphant 1 hr 42 min read

Returned from India, a colonel takes an old house near Edinburgh, and his young son Roland is haunted by a heartbroken voice crying at a ruined doorway that opens onto nothing.

Mrs. Oliphant's 1881 collection pairs two of her finest supernatural tales. Atmospheric, tender, superbly told. Read it for a masterful Victorian ghost story, a father's search for the sorrowful spirit tormenting his sick child, and a haunted portrait, from a subtle mistress of the uncanny.

In its time

Published in 1881, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

1 hr 42 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).