A Christmas ghost story - Chronicles of St Mary's style! For fans of Doctor Who and Jasper Fforde... and A Christmas Carol. Where better for the annual festive jump than the chance to experience a real Victorian Christmas? On the longest night of 1895, a terrible storm rages above Harewood Hall. Max, Markham and an injured Peterson are welcomed in by the Harewood family, but soon realise that, in true St Mary's style, they couldn't have arrived at a better moment. For tonight marks the Ordeal of the Haunted Room. Dum ... dum ... dum ... Every Harewood heir must endure one terrifying night alone in the Haunted Room before he can inherit the family seat. Legend says that a ghost will murder anyone who isn't the true successor. Henry Harewood's ordeal will begin at midnight and end at dawn, but it isn't long before everything goes horribly wrong... Readers love Jodi Taylor: 'Once in a while, I discover an author who changes everything... Jodi Taylor and her protagonista Madeleine "Max" Maxwell have seduced me' 'A great mix of British proper-ness and humour with a large dollop of historical fun' 'Addictive. I wish St Mary's was real and I was a part of it' 'Jodi Taylor has an imagination that gets me completely hooked' 'A tour de force'

Strange happenings occur while visiting a haunted house.

Expanded and with great new stories, this is the biggest and best anthology of ghostly hauntings ever. Over 40 tales of visitation by the undead - from vengeful and violent spirits, set on causing harm to innocent people tucked up in their homes, to rarer and more kindly ghosts, returning from the grave to reach out across the other side. Yet others entertain desires of a more sinister bent, including the erotic. This new edition includes a selection of favourite haunted house tales chosen by famous screen stars Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plus a top ranking list of contributors that includes Stephen King, Bram Stoker, Ruth Rendell, and James Herbert - all brought together by an anthologist who himself lives in a haunted house. Stories include: Something unspeakable lurks in a Connecticut apartment closet, in Stephen King's 'The Boogeyman'; An Irish castle holds something truly horrifying in wait, in 'The Whistling Room' by William Hope Hodgson; The lecherous old ghost of a Georgian country house eyes up his latest tenant, in Norah Lofts' 'Mr Edward'; An ancient mansion on a shelf of rock previously occupied by a doomed castle, in 'In Letters of Fire' by Gaston Le Roux; The hunter is hunted in James Herbert's tale of nineteenth-century country mansion, 'The Ghost Hunter'; Psychic phenomena and poltergeists, avenging spirits and phantom lovers - curl up and read on, but never imagine you are safe from a visit...

Long out of print, Rebecca Brown’s brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman’s past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley’s childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed. Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.

Varla Ventura, Coast to Coast favorite, Weird News blogger on Huffington Post, and author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces Weiser Books’ new Collection of forgotten occult classics. Paranormal Parlor is an eerie assemblage of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s sixth sense for tales of the weird and unusual. In the 1859 Christmas edition of his regular publication, All Year Round, Charles Dickens solicited his favorite authors to take up residence in his Haunted House. With an introductory story by Dickens (The Mortals in the House) each author writes from the point of view of the ghost residing in a room. On the Twelfth Night of Christmas, a night believed to hold supernatural powers, the ghost begin to speak. Adelaide Anne Procter, who was Queen Victoria’s favorite poet, delivers the tale of “The Ghost in the Picture Room” entirely in rhyming verse. Wilkie Collins, a lifelong friend of Dickens and a well known author and playwright, delights with his nautical story of “The Ghost in the Cupboard Room.” And Elizabeth Gaskell, in the longest of the stories in the collection, paints a vivid portrait of the ghost of a judge in “The Ghost in the Garden Room.” For any lover of Dickens, Gaskell, or even just a good ghost story, this unique collection will warm the heart and chill the bones.

It was a job any kid would kill for: to play a role in the Historical Society's Haunted House Halloween fundraising event. Ellen Streater was thrilled to play Joan of Arc, burning at the stake. It was for a good cause—to benefit the eerie old Clayton House, soon to reopen as a museum. They said the house was haunted. Ellen didn't believe it—until she felt a strange, icy feeling when she touched the beautiful Fairylustre bowl. Then she saw the ghost in the mirror—a beautiful phantom who beckoned her into a nightmare beyond her wildest dreams. "Entertaining and appealing, with lively and believable young people and a personable ghost." —School Library Journal

Maureen Swanson is the scourge of the neighborhood. At age nine, she already has a reputation as a hard slapper, a loud laugher, a liar, and a stay-after-schooler. The other kids call her Stinky. So sometimes when Maureen passes the crumbling (and haunted?) Messerman mansion, she imagines that she is Maureen Messerman–rich, privileged, and powerful. Then she finds a way into the forbidden, boarded-up house. In the hall are portraits of seven young women wearing elaborate gowns and haughty expressions. Maureen has something scathing to say to each one, but then she notices that the figures seem to have shifted in their frames. So she reaches out her finger to touch the paint–just to make sure–and touches . . . silk! These seven daughters of privilege are colder and meaner than Maureen ever thought to be. They are wicked, wicked ladies, and Maureen has something they want. . . .