HAUNTING MUSIC HORROR: ‘Dead Singer’ by Edgar Daniel Kramer
He is gone
Like the ghost of the dew on the mountain,
Like the dawn
That gleamed a red flame on the fountain.
–Edgar Daniel Kramer (Dead Singer)
Category: ghost
Greatest Horror Master Dedication: Peter Straub GHOST MOUNTAIN
“I dwell with a desire—a longing in my aching heart, you know
Centered on that vanished home the snow covered centuries ago
The trail is forgotten and lost in blueberry thickets
That hasn’t a leaf now to feed our friends the singing crickets
The moon rises; the tittering bats tumble and dart through the moonlit trees
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Ghost Mountain)
Haunting Christmas Tale: “Phantoms of Skeleton Lake”
Haunting Christmas Horror: “Lazarus” (Leonid Andreyev)
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the mysterious thraldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a long time before anyone noticed the evil peculiarities in him that were later to make his very name terrible. His friends and relatives were jubilant that he had come back to life. They surrounded him with tenderness, they were lavish of their eager attentions, spending the greatest care upon his food and drink and the new garments they made for him. They clad him gorgeously in the glowing colors of hope and laughter, and when, arrayed like a bridegroom, he sat at table with them again, ate again, and drank again, they wept fondly and summoned the neighbours to look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead.—Leonid Andreyev (Lazarus)
Haunting Cave Tale: Jeffrey LeBlanc’s “Final Resting Place For An Urn”
“I walked the ridge with a dead man in tow,
He’s not a ghost but someone I did know,
Under the celestial stars we both gazed on the sky,
Together we are finding the perfect grave to let his soul lie.”
—Jeffrey LeBlanc (Final Resting Place For An Urn)
Rare Haunted House Horror: Farnsworth Wright’s “The Closing Hand”
“Haunted houses are nothing but superstition. They exist only in the imagination.”
—Farnsworth Wright (The Closing Hand)
Best Halloween Horror–Episode 23: “Spirits of the Dead” & “Stonehenge”
“Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.”— Edgar Allan Poe (Spirits of the Dead)
Best Halloween Horror–Episode 8: Lord Byron’s “The Vampyre”
“Unquenched, unquenchable,
Around, within, thy heart shall dwell;
Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell!
But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:–Lord Byron (The Vampyre)
Best Halloween Horror–Episode 7: Lord Byron & Robert Burns
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;–Lord Byron (Darkness)
Best Halloween Horror–Episode 3: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Lake”
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.–Edgar Allan Poe (The Lake)
The Most Horrific Ghost Tales: Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Stranger’
“The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly purpose.”—Ambrose Bierce (The Stranger)
The Most Horrific Haunted House Novel: Jeffrey LeBlanc’s “Hell’s Forge” (PROLOGUE)
Long were the mansion’s mysteries, horrendous were its horrors, and vague were the details of the missing and presumed dead across the mansion grounds. For the past, and the forgetful dead had now hidden much of the sinister, and fogged the memory of the evil that had scorched the manor with a more devious name—Hell’s Forge. Jeffrey LeBlanc (Hell’s Forge)
The Most Horrific Ghost Tales: George Thomas Spillman’s ‘Retribution’
Mighty is the storm that rages in the sky; but it is as nothing to the storm that rages in the heart of the murderer. —George Thomas Spillman (Retribution)
Haunting Oil Field Horror: John H. Green’s “Seven Men in a Tank”
“Omar Khayyam was right: Hell is the reflection of a soul burning.”–John H. Green (Seven Men in a Tank)
Cthulhu Mythos Vampire Horror: Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot”
“And the Latin was replaced by an older tongue, ancient when Egypt was young and the Pyramids built, ancient when this Earth still hung in an unformed, boiling firmament of empty gas: “Gyyagin vardar Yogsoggoth! Verminis! Gyyagin! Gyyagin! Gyyagin!”–Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 