Contents: Introduction. 1. The ghost/Walter de la Mare. 2. A pair of hands/Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. 3. A school story/M.R. James. 4. The room/Eleanor Scott. 5. Nobody’s house/A.M. Burrage. 6. The judge’s house from Dracula’s guest/Bram Stoker. 7. In the crowd at the station/Ruskin Bond. 8. The decoy/Algernon Blackwood. 9. The story of Yand Manor house/E. and H. Heron. 10. The story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith/E. and H. Heron. 11. The haunted doll’s house/M.R. James. 12. The gardener/E.F. Benson. 13. The staircase/Hugh Walpole. 14. Thurnley Abbey/Perceval Landon. 15. The unbolted door/Belloc Lowndes. 16. Gone fishing/Ruskin Bond. 17. Nothing/Walter de la Mare.

"Haunted houses are injurious to health. With few exceptions, the occupants of the houses in these stories have come to an unpleasant, sometimes messy end. Ghosts resent being disturbed. They are fussy about who they must have as a neighbour.

From his haunted rocking chair, Ruskin Bond takes you on a goose-pimply tour of some famous haunted houses in fiction. There’s Thurnley Abbey, with its terrifying midnight apparition; M.R. James’s haunted doll’s house; Hugh Walpole’s sinister staircase; and the old manor houses whose hauntings are investigated by Flaxman Low, the Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural. And there’s Bram Stoker, who gives Dracula the night off and replaces him with an equally terrifying hanging judge." (jacket)