Classic Ghost Stories to Read in English for Halloween: Poe, Sleepy Hollow, Jekyll and Hyde
Hiroki Obara · DeveloperABC GeorgeHow-To
Halloween falls on Saturday, October 31 this year. If you have been meaning to read something in English, a scary story suits the season. The nineteenth century left a lot of horror fiction that people still read, and most of it is free on Project Gutenberg.
Scary stories can work well for extensive reading. You want to know what happens next, so you keep going even past words you don’t know. The stories differ a great deal in length and difficulty, though. This post compares five that come up every Halloween, from shortest to longest.
How long the five are
The word counts come from the Project Gutenberg texts and are rounded.
| Story | Author | Published | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Tell-Tale Heart | Edgar Allan Poe | 1843 | about 2,100 |
| The Monkey’s Paw | W. W. Jacobs | 1902 | about 4,000 |
| The Fall of the House of Usher | Edgar Allan Poe | 1839 | about 7,000 |
| The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | 1820 | about 12,000 |
| Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 1886 | about 26,000 |
For one sitting on Halloween night, the first two fit. Jekyll and Hyde has ten chapters and is better spread over several days.
For one night: The Tell-Tale Heart
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is about 2,100 words, the shortest of the five.
The narrator has killed an old man. From the first paragraph he asks the reader, “why will you say that I am mad?”, and he keeps insisting that he is not. The sentences are short and the same words come back again and again, so the thread is easy to hold.
What trips learners up is the old phrasing and word order. “Hearken” is an old way of saying “listen”. “Object there was none.” is today’s “There was no object,” with the word order turned around for emphasis. Read slowly, these sentences make sense.
Next: The Monkey’s Paw
Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” is about 4,000 words, in three parts. On a cold, wet night, an acquaintance who served for years as a soldier in India brings a family a monkey’s paw, dried like a mummy. It is said to grant three separate men three wishes each.
It is mostly dialogue. Nearly everything happens inside the house and moves forward through the family’s conversation, and spoken English is shorter and plainer than narration. The fear comes less from what appears than from what you start to imagine. I will leave the ending alone.
Poe’s best known: The Fall of the House of Usher
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is about 7,000 words. It is one of Poe’s most famous stories, and its English is much heavier than “The Tell-Tale Heart”.
It opens with one long sentence beginning “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year”, and words for mood and atmosphere such as insufferable and pervaded keep coming. There is also a poem in the middle of the story. You can try Poe with “The Tell-Tale Heart” first and pick this one up if you want more.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: a long first half
Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is about 12,000 words. A schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane comes to a village on the Hudson River in New York. The legend of the Headless Horseman is introduced early, but Ichabod meets the horseman only in about the last fifth of the story.
Until then the story describes Ichabod’s character, village life and the tables of a rich farm, in long sentences full of the names of foods and farm things. It can also be read as a comic story rather than a frightening one. If the details of the descriptions escape you, it is enough to know what Ichabod wants.
Jekyll and Hyde, a chapter at a time
Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is about 26,000 words in ten chapters, about 2,500 words per chapter on average. At a chapter a day you finish in ten days.
The story follows Utterson, a lawyer, who grows suspicious about his friend Dr Jekyll and a man called Hyde. Many readers know the twist from the title alone, but the book is written as a mystery, and the explanation comes in the last two chapters, which take the form of written accounts by the characters.
The English is nineteenth-century written prose with fairly long sentences. Utterson’s investigations have plenty of dialogue and are easier going by comparison.
Finding them on Project Gutenberg
On Project Gutenberg, short stories often live inside collections, so a search by story title can come up empty.
- “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are both in Volume 2 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. “Usher” is also listed as a book of its own.
- “The Monkey’s Paw” is listed as The Monkey’s Paw, one part of Jacobs’s collection The Lady of the Barge, which Gutenberg split into separate books.
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a book of its own.
- Jekyll and Hyde is listed as “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, and the same work appears twice. The title is spelled in several ways, so searching for “Jekyll” is quickest.
How Project Gutenberg handles copyright is covered in What Is Project Gutenberg?.
Reading them in ABC George
I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of English books. All five stories above are in it. Search works by title and author without a connection; try “Poe”, “Jacobs”, “Irving” or “Jekyll”. The Poe volumes are also on the Short stories shelf of the Discover screen.
Books are divided into chapters, so once a collection is open you can pick a story from Chapters on the reading screen. For a story full of dialogue like “The Monkey’s Paw”, the Chat view delivers it a sentence at a time, with speech on the right and narration on the left, which suits reading a little at a time at night. Long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses.
There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. Ways to get to the last page are in How to Finish an English Book, and more books are in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners.
