Every year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve published a few classic open access stories of horror for the Halloween season! In recent years, I’ve started to make a theme for each year.

This year, the theme is “communication”: the transmission of information from one point to another, often but not necessarily both ways! This may not seem like a particularly spooky topic for a horror story, but read through the following collection of stories and you can decide for yourself…

Sorry, Right Number (1953), by Richard Matheson. Later retitled “Long Distance Call,” this story about an old woman who receives increasingly unsettling phone calls is a classic with a chilling ending! The link takes you to the Internet Archive issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction.

The Night Wire (1926), by H.F. Arnold. This Weird Tales short story is a gem that I only learned about recently via social media! News telegraph operators pick up a series of dispatches from a doomed city and may represent the end of the world. The link goes to the Internet Archive.

The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920), H.P. Lovecraft. A surprisingly fun and creepy little tale in which Randolph Carter explains to the authorities what happened when his mentor Harley Warren descended into an ancient crypt, trailing a phone line behind him so that he could convey his findings to Carter. The link is to “H.P. Lovecraft dot com.”

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), by M.R. James. This is a classic tale by the master of the ghost story M.R. James, and comes from his first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These stories were written to be read aloud at the King’s College Christmas gathering, and are a mixture of chills and adept humor. The link goes to Project Gutenberg Canada. In this story, a man on holiday finds an ancient whistle in some local ruins and finds that blowing the whistle summons something quite unpleasant to him.

The Confession of Charles Linkworth (1912), E.F. Benson. This is a tale by another master of the ghost story, and appeared in his collection The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. The link is to a wikisource version of the story. In the tale, Charles Linkworth is put to death for a heinous crime, but the prison doctor soon feels that Linkworth’s spirit lingers in the area with unknown purpose, and is trying to reach out by telephone…

M.S. Found in a Bottle (1833), by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe submitted this story for a writing contest in a Baltimore magazine and won a prize for it! This nautical horror tale has an unnamed narrator share his experiences as a passenger on an ill-fated ship that is blown off course towards the South Pole by a powerful storm that seems unnatural. The manuscript (M.S.) is put in a bottle and thrown into the sea at the very end, as the narrator prepares to meet his doom. (Link to the Poe Museum.)

Candle Cove (2009), by Kris Straub. The best internet creepypasta story of all time, in my humble opinion! People on an internet forum discuss a children’s show that they vaguely remember watching years earlier, and as they discuss it, increasingly unsettling memories and details arise. This was actually expanded into a a season of the horror anthology series Channel Zero in 2016!

The Signal-Man (1866), by Charles Dickens. A classic ghost story by a classic author! The story narrator meets a railway signal-man who lives in fear of a spectral apparition that always seems to appear before tragedy strikes on the rails. Link to Project Gutenberg.

Let’s end with one somewhat creepy real-life event: That Time Demons Possessed the Telegraph. In 1859, the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history occurred, causing telegraph systems to seem haunted and allowing people to communicate via telegraph even when the power was out at both ends! A mildly creepy illustration of the power of the sun.

An honorable mention goes to Larry Blamire’s story “Heliograph Station No. 24,” which appears in his western horror collection More Tales of the Callamo Mountains. In this tale, soldiers at heliograph station number 24 in the haunted mountains receive increasingly strange communications via light signals from their compatriots on a distance peak. This story isn’t available for free online, but it is one of the first I thought about when thinking of horror and communication!

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That’s all for this edition of Halloween Treats: have a happy and safe Halloween!