Ghost Stories & Supernatural Tales
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us! — Scots prayer
Well, wouldn’t you rather have advance warning? My father, who was a superb ghost-storyteller, taught me to appreciate and love a good ghost story. I have found ghost stories around the world, from Japan to England and Scotland, from Persia to Argentina. The United States from its colonial days has been good for “hants,” despite Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fear that we were not old enough (he wrote some terrific ones himself).
This page, because my bias and my suddenly remembering a writer who would qualify, will be frequently updated.
Enjoy! Hope you find something to give you the shivers!
Tales for Twilight: Two Hundred Years of Scottish Ghost Stories
Tales for Twilight: Two Hundred Years of Scottish Ghost Stories
Tales for Twilight offers a spine-tingling selection of unnerving tales by writers from James Hogg in the early eighteenth century to James Robertson, very much alive in the twenty-first. Scottish authors have proved to be exceptionally good at writing ghost stories.
Perhaps it’s because of the tradition of oral storytelling that has stretched over centuries, including poems and ballads with supernatural themes. The golden age was during the Victorian and Edwardian period, but the ghost story has continued to evolve and remains popular to this day.
Includes stories from Sir Walter Scott, George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy Boothby, Algernon Blackwood, Eileen Bigland, Ronald Duncan, James Robertson and Ian Rankin.
Alistair W. J. Kerr was born in Scotland. His father was an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who later became an academic. Alistair studied History and Law at the University of Edinburgh and later became a civil servant. He is the author of Betrayal: The Murder of Robert Nairac GC (Cambridge Academic, 2015).