As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic.

This collection of supernatural tales includes "The Talking Corpse"; "The Hound of Goshen"; "The Ring"; "The Phantom Rider of Bush River"; "The Witch Cat"; "The Gray Man"; "Tsali, the Cherokee Brave"; "The Ghost of Litchfield"; "City of Death"; "Treasure Hunt"; "House of the Opening Door"; "The Ghosts of Hagley"; "Return from the Dead"; "Whistle While You Haunt"; "The Brown Mountain Lights"; "Alice of the Hermitage"; "The Night the Spirits Called"; and "Swamp Girl".

This collection features such stories as "Passenger Train Number 9"; "The Little People"; "The Phantom Rider of the Confederacy"; "The Demon of Wizard Clip"; "Room for One More"; "Tavern of Terror"; "The Surrency Ghost"; "The King's Messengers"; "The Haunted Gold Mine"; "The Singing River"; "The Gray Lady"; "Railroad Bill"; and "The Haunted Car".

To her group of classic stories, Mrs. Roberts has added three new tales about the Carolina coastal areas. The mountains, Piedmont, Eastern Carolina, and the Outer Banks all provide settings for the unique and haunting accounts found in this book. Six of the stories take place in the Outer Banks - a particularly inspiring location and the perfect place to meet the ghost on Blackbeard's last voyage.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative flows like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.

A self-proclaimed skeptic, the food writer dismissed rumors of a mischievous resident poltergeist named Lucy when he moved in, but he quickly found himself at a loss to explain the disembodied footsteps and mysterious odors that seemed to plague the old house. Soon, he was talking to neighbors and fellow homeowners, and it seemed that everyone had stories of strange events and supernatural occurrences in their own dwellings. As a result, David set out to document and research these reports...

In late March 1944, as Stalin’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel must make a terrible decision: Do they wait for the Soviet bear’s intrusion and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluctantly follow the wolves - murderous Nazi officers who have pledged to protect “pure-blood” Germans? The Martels are one of many families of German heritage whose ancestors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a century.

New Orleans - the Big Easy, the birthplace of jazz, home of Cafe du Monde, and what some call the most haunted city in America. Beneath the indulgence and revelry of the Crescent City lies a long history of the dark and mysterious. From the famous "Queen of Voodoo," Marie Laveau, who is said to haunt the site of her grave, to the wicked LaLauries, whose true natures were hidden behind elegance and the trappings of high society, New Orleans is filled with spirits of all kinds. Some of the ghosts in these stories have sordid and scandalous histories, while others are friendly specters.

It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi, as well.

In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.

Narrated by Patton Oswalt, Melissa McBride, and Alex Brightman, this collection includes all three of Alvin Schwartz's classic story collections: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3. Walking corpses, dancing bones, knife-wielding madmen, and narrow escapes from death - they're all here in this chilling collection of ghost stories, collected and retold by folklorist Alvin Schwartz. These horrific tales are guaranteed to raise goosebumps. Let the faint of heart beware.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Sadie Grace is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bonafide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward Rabbit. On the road to Burden County, they’re joined by two vagabond cowboys with a strong sense of adventure–but no sense of purpose–and a recently widowed schoolteacher with nothing left to lose. And as their posse grows, so too does the danger.

Del Wensley, wife of the most celebrated preacher in Harlan County, tries to mind her place. Until her husband’s infidelity pushes an already strained marriage to a breaking point. Clinging to her last hope for self-respect, Del turns her back on the rigid life she’s known. A coal train is rolling through the valley. With her eyes wide open to the unfamiliar, and to the freedom she craves, Del takes to the rails.

This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds listeners of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this audiobook are such classics as "A Bear Hunt", "A Rose for Emily", "Two Soldiers", and "The Brooch".

In the tiny timber town of Cordelia, Idaho, 99-year-old Weldon Applegate recounts his life in all its glory, filled with tall tales writ large with murder, mayhem, avalanches, and bootlegging. It’s the story of dark pine forests brewing with ancient magic, and Weldon’s struggle as a boy to keep his father’s inherited timber claim, the Lost Lot, from the ravenous clutches of Linden Laughlin.

Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.

Nevada, 1869: Beyond the pitiless 40-Mile Desert lies Golgotha, a cattle town that hides more than its share of unnatural secrets. The sheriff bears the mark of the noose around his neck; some say he is a dead man whose time has not yet come. His half-human deputy is kin to coyotes. The mayor guards a hoard of mythical treasures. A banker's wife belongs to a secret order of assassins. And a shady saloon owner, whose fingers are in everyone's business, may know more about the town's true origins than he's letting on.

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets.

The Civil War made him a man. The battle of Shiloh made him a hero and gave him a nickname that stuck. The notorious Union prisoner of war camp made him a killer of his fellow prisoners in "Gladiator" contests in order to survive. But the killings brought haunting nightmares that wouldn't end until he settled an old score with a Union Colonel determined to see Shiloh dead.

Mike Mignola's award-winning series Hellboy has earned fans all over the world, among them some of the most respected horror, fantasy, and mystery novelists in the field as well as some of Hollywood's most talented writers and directors. Now a who's who list of these writers are drawn together to tell their own tales of Hellboy, to play with the characters and worlds Mignola has created. As part of Dark Horse's celebration of Hellboy in 2004, Christopher Golden has brought together a stellar array of talents.

To the wild and fabulous country where the Rio Grande makes its big bend, J. O. Langford came in 1909 with his wife and daughter in search of health and a home. High on a bluff overlooking the spot where Tornillo Creek pours its waters into the turbulent Rio Grande, the Langfords built their home, a rude structure of adobe blocks in a land reputed to be inhabited only by bandits and rattlesnakes. Big Bend is the story of the Langfords' life in the rugged and spectacularly beautiful country which they came to call their own.

An Oprah's Book Club Selection regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest and most accessible novels, Light in August is a timeless and riveting story of determination, tragedy, and hope. In Faulkner's iconic Yoknapatawpha County, race, sex, and religion collide around three memorable characters searching desperately for human connection and their own identities.

No one could understand why Colin and Roy were best friends. Colin was so shy; Roy was so popular. Colin was fascinated by Roy - and Roy was fascinated by death. Then one day, Roy asked his timid friend: “You ever killed anything?” From that moment on, the two were bound together in a game too terrifying to imagine - and too irresistible to stop.

Owen Wister’s The Virginian pre-dates the classic novels of Zane Grey and Max Brand and is considered by many to be the original Western. Dedicated to Wister’s friend and fellow outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt, this timeless tale almost single-handedly established the cowboy archetype in literature. A quiet, noble foreman of a Wyoming cattle ranch in the 1870s, the Virginian falls for pretty schoolteacher Molly Wood. But when a rival suitor challenges his honor, the Virginian struggles to make his beloved Molly understand the harsh justice of the West.

The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales - both never-before-published in print or audio - that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition. Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.

Johnny Shooter was sentenced to hang at noon. But Judge Isaac Parker, widely known as the "Hanging Judge", made Johnny an offer he couldn't refuse. The judge made him a Deputy United State Marshal, then sent his new deputy after the worst-of-the-worst outlaws the Indian territory had to offer, with the orders not to burden the court by bringing them back for trial. Now, rumor has it that whenever outlaws gather around a campfire, the word is: "The only thing worse than standing before the Hanging Judge is hearing that Johnny Shooter is on your trail!"

It is called Crota...and it has awakened. Sheriff Skip Harding is called out to investigate a double homicide unlike any he has seen before. The bodies have been torn to pieces in the woods. Some think it's a bear. But others whisper something different. "It is the Crota," they say, - the great beast of Native American legend that one day will reawaken. Now that day has arrived.

Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa's revolution to the days of Prohibition in California.