A turreted castle sits overlooking a small German village, very picturesque, and very evil.
The narrator is on a walking tour across Germany in the year 1933. While following his maps, he somehow takes a wrong turn and loses his way but eventually manages to find himself in a very rural and primitive village called Kaldenstein. The traveler asks an innkeeper about the old castle on the cliff, but disbelieves him and a priest who warn him the Count of Kaldenstein is a vampire.
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A mysterious lady, who is just as deadly as she is lovely.
Written by Hammer actress Ingrid Pitt, Hisako San is a heart-pounding, gripping story of two detectives searching for a mysterious, small figure, inflicting a horrifying plague against all of those who obstruct her revenge. 
A diplomatic mission turns into a nightmare trip in order to battle the darkest evil.
Princess of Darkness is a short story by Frederick Cowles, first published in 1940 as part of his collection Fear Walks the Night. A British agent is sent to investigate the mysterious and seductive Princess Bessenyei, not realizing what she truly is. 
A remote, Cornish village where people and animals occasionally go missing, the only thing they have in common is being in the vicinity of the Hunting Stone.
The story was written by E. R. (Ernest Robertson) Punshon, first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1939, and later collected in his book, Black Magic, Bloodshed & Burglary. The story is about a mysterious megalith that causes disappearances in a village. 
Even if you are the creator, life finds a way.... to eat you, take over your lab and ultimately try to rule the world.
Louise J. Strong's short story An Unscientific Story was first published in February 1903 in the magazine Cosmopolitan. The story has been noted for its significance in the history of the science fiction genre.
What resists purity and the presence of the Divine? The unholy of course.
Written by Violet Paget using her pen name of Vernon Lee. A broken effigy of Christ washes up on a beach in Flanders, it is displayed in the local church. Strange miracles start drawing people to the town to worship, but then these unexplainable events start to turn sinister… 
Three tales of dark women, whose method is seduction, and whose end is death.
Hume Nisbet is the author of three stories. First The Vampire Maid is a classic vampire story about a traveler who takes lodgings with an apparently kind landlady and her pale invalid daughter, who instantly casts a spell upon him. The Old Portrait was first published in 1890 in Stories Weird and Wonderful. It is a supernatural mystery about an artist who acquires an old and very sinister painting. Hume Nisbet wrote The Demon Spell in 1894, where he incorporated elements of spiritualism, murder and madness. 
In a time when brutality was rarely punished, even the darkest soul finds that they can become a victim, at the mercy of something unspeakable.
"One of the most picturesque objects of the valley of the Engadin is the ruined castle of Gardonal, near the village of Madaline. In the feudal times it was the seat of a family of barons, who possessed as their patrimony the whole of the valley, which with the castle had descended from father to son for many generations. The two last of the race were brothers; handsome, well-made, fine-looking young men, but in nature they more resembled fiends than human beings--so cruel, rapacious, and tyrannical were they." 
Perhaps the vampire's deadliest ability is to have its victims come willingly and give more than blood.
The story Luella Miller, written by Mary Wilkins Freeman and included in her 1903 short story collection The Wind In The Rose Bush, tells the tale of a mesmerizing but dangerously seductive woman, who always takes more than she gives. 
How thin is the line between life and death, love and hate, between sanity and destruction?
Services Rendered is a novelette by Louise Cooper. It tells the story of Penny, who desperate to save her dying husband hires a vampire to save him. Interwoven are themes of jealousy, vulnerability and dark magic. Too late she learns the truth of the old adage: "Be careful what you wish for." 
A gothic mansion that holds a family secret, both terrible and seductive at once.
The Master of Rampling Gate by Anne Rice is set in 1888 and follows Julie and her brother Richard, the heirs to the ancient and foreboding Rampling Gate mansion, a 400-year-old family estate. Despite their father’s dying wish to destroy the property, the siblings visit the house and are enchanted by its beauty, especially Julie who discovers the truth behind the house and learns the identity of the master who has long awaited her. The story blends gothic atmosphere with themes of forbidden love and ancestral legacy, set against the backdrop of gaslit London and the wild moors of the countryside. 
Two classic ghost stories about places where the dead have driven the living out, and where angels fear to tread, and the over imaginative as well.
My Own True Ghost Story by Rudyard Kipling: "...but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one. There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black." Number Ninety is a ghost story by B. M. Croker, originally published in the Christmas Number of Chapman's Magazine of Fiction in 1895. The story follows John Hollyoak, a skeptical man who accepts a wager from friends to spend a night in a notoriously haunted house, number ninety, located in the vicinity of Charleston's Battery in South Carolina. 
A cargo ship named the "Wandering Star" plies her trade on the seven seas, refusing all passengers, perhaps because the last ones that sailed with her are still there.
Written by B.M. Croker (Bithia Mary Croker) in 1893, the story tells of Mr. Lawrence, who is on his way to Singapore to give his sister away at her wedding. As he finds he has missed the steamer he intended to catch, he persuades Captain Blane to take him in his cargo boat, which has a dubious reputation. Despite warnings to the contrary, his accommodation turns out to be sumptuous, and he thinks he's rather lucky to be travelling on the Star - until the steamer hits bad weather, and strange events take hold of the ship. 
Deep in the jungles of India sits a desolate hunting lodge, once the scene of brutality, and ever since cursed by the blood spilled there.
This tale from B.M. Croker (Bithia Mary Croker) was included in the 1893 collection To Let. If You See Her Face tells the story of Daniel Gregson, political agent to a rajah, and his assistant, Percy Goring, who are travelling to the Delhi durbar when their train is prevented from going on by a break in the line. Gregson decides they should head for the rajah's isolated hunting palace in Kori on foot. They are warned by an old woman not to enter the Khana palace; a warning they ignore. 
Malevolent spirits find no peace, but afford no peace to the living either.
This tale from B.M. Croker (Bithia Mary Croker) was included in the 1893 collection To Let. The Khitmatgar tells the story of the Jacksons, whose finances are at a very low ebb. They have come to Panipore in search of employment. The only lodgings they can find are at the long-uninhabited bungalow in the Paiwene Road, but the bungalow is haunted by a sinister murdered servant. 
An abandoned bungalow in a remote village known as the place where the devil lives.
Written by B.M. Croker (Bithia Mary Croker) it tells the story of Nellie Loyd, and her friend, Julia Goodchild, young wives who decide to trek through the Indian countryside to visit their husbands for Christmas. They dismiss the warnings of Mrs. Duff, a matron who they believe is trying to scare them so they would spend the holiday with her. They laugh when she comments: "“Isn’t there some queer story about a bungalow near there — that is unhealthy — or haunted — or something?” 
After the midnight hour there is no place to escape when the dead come calling.
When I Was Dead is a short story by Vincent O'Sullivan, first published in his 1896 anthology A Book of Bargains. The story follows a man who, after a mysterious event, realizes he has died but refuses to accept his death, leading to a series of increasingly desperate attempts to prove his existence to those around him, who perceive him as a corpse. Included in the anthology is The Business of Madame Jahn a macabre ghost story. It features a reanimated corpse and explores themes of suicide, murder, and revenge. O'Sullivan's works are characterized by their decadent and morbid tone. 
These two ghostly tales prove that even beyond the grave the shades of those who are not at peace will not be silenced.
In Black Gold by Thorp McClusky, Henry Cabot Wade's seafaring family, once wealthy has fallen on hard times. He follows a map left by a sea captain ancestor, and so he hires a ship and diver to retrieve the hoped for treasure. With his fiancée Evelyn by his side he goes fortune hunting, question is: will it be good or bad? In the Burned House by Vincent O'Sullivan a lost traveler discovers a desolate, deserted house in the middle of nowhere. What mysteries haunt the large, abandoned building, and why does it suddenly burst into flames? 
A convict on the run makes his way into Chinatown, not realizing that he has not escaped after all.
Written by Ronal Kayser using the pseudonym of Dale Clark, who started getting published in 1934. His stories appeared in Weird Tales, The Unique Magazine, Argosy, Terror Tales, Detective Story Magazine, Detective Fiction and Detective Fiction Weekly among others. 
All families have their secrets, including the ones that are alive and passed on from generation to generation, like a human talisman.
Myth and madness feature in "Walking Aunt Daid," one of the few truly creepy stories written by Zenna Henderson. The story involves a family curse/tradition, and the coming of age of the viewpoint character who must take his turn to walk Aunt Daid. What happens to them — what has happened many times, in fact — is both wonderful and terrible. The pair's moonlit journey changes them both, one of them forever, and the knowledge that it must happen again and again adds a tinge of bitterness. 
What does a newly sentient "thing" desire more than anything else in the world? Communion with a human being of course.
The story is noted for its ability to build to a climax of breathtaking menace with overtones of dislocation and loss. The story has been recognized for its evocative and unsettling narrative. |
Nightshade Diary Podcast MP3 Files
MarleneFrom the pages of Nightshade Diary come the haunting and hair-raising tales of ghosts, murder and mayhem. Who's hiding in the closet? What's under the bed? You'll be asking yourself these questions after you listen to these creepalicious tales that'll have you leaving the lights on when you go to sleep. Sources & Credits
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