by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sometimes a story sticks around for a hundred years or more because English teachers like to use it to demonstrate point of view or theme. Sometimes a story sticks around because it gives everyone who reads or hears it a little frisson of horror. Stevenson is a consummate storyteller, such that this...
First published in the Christmas 1884 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette.EVERY night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlourof the George at Debenham - the undertaker, and the landlord,and Fettes, and myself. A fictionalised account of a very real trade in Auld Reekie
I read this story out of a Classic Ghost Stories collection. This is one of those horror stories that is supposedly a supernatural tale, but really it's psychological, dealing with the depths that humans will sink to out of greed and desperation. It's pretty bleak and ugly, but it had a good message...
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