Halloween Historical Horrorama

Halloween looms ominously before us, dripping blood from its sharp fangs.  How better to spend the next couple of days than being spooked?  Below: some early modern and nineteenth-century horrors, both fictional and factual, famous and otherwise. 

• A sampling of Victorian ghost stories.   



• Spring-Heeled Jack. 



• Douglas Linder's site devoted to the Salem Witchcraft Trials. 



• "Lizzie Borden took an axe..." 



• Not, of course, that Lizzie managed Jack the Ripper's body count. 



• Elizabeth Bathory (the "Blood Countess").



• You can find accounts of various and sundry hauntings at Mysterious Britain. 



• Lots more British hauntings at Haunted London. 



• Not exactly scary, but still: a rare nineteenth-century anthology of ghost stories.



• Count August Villiers de L'Isle Adam, "A Torture by Hope."



• Daniel Defoe, "A Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal" (1706).



• For late-Victorian ghost stories, M. R. James is the author to read.



• But see also Vernon Lee, Hauntings. 



• Melodrama, anyone? Here's Richard Brinsley Peake's adaptation of Frankenstein, Presumption; Or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). 



• "Poor Polidori": John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819). 



• Speaking of vampires, don't forget to visit Dracula's Home Page. 



• Believe it or not, Bram Stoker seems to have believed that he had a sense of humor.  Witness "The Dualitists." 



• In 1885, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published a gay vampire story.