A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A newspaper reporter spends the night alone in a Cincinnati house that crowds believe is haunted.
Separated from his wife, a man wandering a country road sees an impossible light and a familiar figure.
A Confederate sympathizer stands on a railroad bridge with a rope around his neck. Then the rope breaks.
A boy sets out for water on a snowy night; his footprints end halfway to the spring.
A physician arrives after a sudden death and finds the family's account impossible to reconcile with the room.
Staley Fleming sees a dog beside his bed every night, but it vanishes when he sits up.
Neighbors keeping vigil beside a dead woman in her mountain cabin witness something they cannot explain.
A hunter dies after an attack by something his companion cannot see.
A plantation owner vanishes while walking across an open field in view of several witnesses.
A corpse appears in a locked third-floor bedroom, and no one can identify it.
A married woman tries to end a friend’s pursuit, only to discover that her principles are less secure than his attention makes them seem.
A bored lover gains a child’s confidence, then turns the boy’s secret meetings with his father into ammunition for an adult quarrel.
A married young woman crosses the river at night to meet an idle village watchman, knowing the morning will demand an answer.
An impoverished young woman supports a medical student who treats her body, labor, and loyalty as conveniences.
A student asks his volatile father for money to return to Moscow, turning an ordinary family dinner into a reckoning none can resolve.
A gravely ill soldier sails home from the Far East, sustained by memories of snow, family, and a village impossibly far away.
While servants play cards in a dark coach-house, a lodger dies nearby and an old tale turns a child’s unease into terror.
Returning to his changed hometown, an aging architect confronts the cost of a divorce he once left others to arrange.
A sick Moscow waiter returns with his wife and daughter to the village he remembers, only to find a family trapped by poverty, drink, and fear.
A thirteen-year-old servant forced to work without sleep drifts between chores, memories, and visions as a baby cries through the night.
Driving his gravely ill wife through a blizzard, a drunken turner discovers remorse only when time is almost gone.
A landowner confides his fear that ordinary life is incomprehensible, unaware that his closest friend desires his wife.
During Holy Week, an ailing bishop longs to meet his visiting mother as a son rather than as the distant office everyone sees.
A chorus girl opens her door to her lover’s desperate wife and is made to answer for money she never received and choices she did not make.
