A novelist moves into an empty London house and gradually chooses its elusive presence over his loyal friend and the ordinary world. The tale's slow psychological enclosure makes the haunted house feel less like an attack than a seduction.
Sources for Oliver Onions — The Beckoning Fair One
Oliver Onions — The Beckoning Fair One in First Horror Stories and Novels
Held in the First Horror Stories and Novels chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Pliny the Younger — Letter on Athenodorus and the Haunted House at Athens (Citation) (100)
- William of Malmesbury — The Witch of Berkeley (from Gesta Regum Anglorum) (Citation) (1125)
- Marie de France — Bisclavret (Citation) (1180)
- Horace Walpole — The Castle of Otranto (1764)
- William Beckford — Vathek (1786)
- Ann Radcliffe — The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance (1794)
- Matthew Gregory Lewis — The Monk (1796)
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- John William Polidori — The Vampyre: A Tale (1819)
- Washington Irving — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (from The Sketch Book) (1820)
- Charles Robert Maturin — Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
- Victor Hugo — Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831)
- Jane C. Loudon — The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Black Cat (1843)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Raven (1845)
- Thomas Preskett Prest / James Malcolm Rymer — Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1847)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Green Tea (from In a Glass Darkly) (1869)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Carmilla (1872)
- Robert Louis Stevenson — Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
- Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- Bram Stoker — Dracula (1897)
- Gaston Leroux — The Phantom of the Opera (1910)
- Alexander Belyaev — Professor Dowell's Head (Citation) (1925)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — In a Glass Darkly (1872)
- Ambrose Bierce — Can Such Things Be? (1893)
- Algernon Blackwood — The Willows (1907)
- Algernon Blackwood — The Wendigo (1910)
- M. R. James — Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904)
- Arthur Machen — The Great God Pan (1894)
- Richard Marsh — The Beetle: A Mystery (1897)
- William Hope Hodgson — The House on the Borderland (1908)
- F. Marion Crawford — The Upper Berth (1894)
- W. W. Jacobs — The Monkey's Paw (1902)
- Guy de Maupassant — Le Horla (1887)