Short Horror Stories to Read Tonight (If You Dare)

A prince seals his court inside an abbey while a plague eats the country outside, and throws a masked ball in seven coloured rooms. Somebody arrives who wasn't invited. It reads like a painting that moves.

A nervous visitor waits in a country drawing room while the niece of the house explains why the French window is always left open. Not much over a thousand words, half a joke, and the last line still lands.

An inquest in a backwoods cabin, a body torn apart, and a dead man's diary about something in the wild oats that he could hear but never see. Bierce got to the invisible monster decades before anyone else made a habit of it.

A retired soldier leaves a shrivelled paw with an elderly couple and their son, and warns them not to use its three wishes. They wish for two hundred pounds. The most perfectly built horror story in English, and the knock at the door is still the scariest sound in fiction.

A lonely railway signalman at the bottom of a cutting keeps seeing a figure by the tunnel mouth before every disaster. Dickens wrote it the year after he survived the Staplehurst train crash, and you can feel it.

A man explains to a friend why he won't ride the Boston subway anymore: he's seen the studio of a painter whose ghouls looked too real. The most approachable Lovecraft, with almost none of his usual overwriting.

A fussy Cambridge professor on a golfing holiday picks up an old bronze whistle in the ruins of a Templar church, and blows it. The thing that answers is made of bedsheets, which should be silly and isn't. The template for the English ghost story.

A man tells why he'll never again sleep in stateroom 105 of a transatlantic liner, whose porthole keeps opening by itself at night and whose previous passengers went overboard. Damp, cold and very physical.

An American restores his family's ruined English priory and hears rats scrabbling inside the walls, though nobody else can. It ends deep underground with a famous descent into madness. Content note: the narrator's cat has a racist name, used repeatedly.

A woman tells her life story, first kiss to marriage to motherhood, and her husband keeps asking about the green ribbon she wears around her neck. It works old campfire tales into a story about women's bodies. Sexual content throughout; collected in Her Body and Other Parties.

An old man remembers a summer afternoon in 1914 Maine when, aged nine, he went fishing alone and met the devil by the stream. Quiet, almost gentle, and it won the O. Henry Award. Collected in Everything's Eventual.

A Cornish farmhand notices the gulls behaving strangely after a cold snap. Then the smaller birds start coming through the windows. Bleaker than the Hitchcock film it inspired, with no explanation and no rescue.

Two friends canoeing the Danube camp on a sandbank island in the marshes, and the willows around them start to move without wind. Novella-length (our novella explainer covers where the line is), and the purest fear of nature anyone has put on paper.