The Haunted Omnibus

Edited by Alexander Laing

Well, this is just a dandy book of horror stories and ghost stories published in 1937. It has a lot of the old classic stories: "The Yellow Wall Paper", "Perez", "The Wendigo" ("Oh,oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!"), "The Monkey's Paw", "The Beast with Five Fingers", "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", and "The Tell-Tale Heart" along with many others.
I first read the above-mentioned stories in school so I guess they must have been considered literature. I wonder if students now days are given these stories to read? If so, they probably find them rather tame compared to the gruesome slasher movies that are so popular today.
I enjoyed reading this collection of stories and since it is a long book, about 800 pages, I was enveloped by a solemn and gloomy atmosphere for more than a week, which was rather fun. A couple of the stories are quite amusing, namely, "The Ghost Ship" and "Green Thoughts". In "Ghost Ship" a ghost ship (naturally) gets blown into a town that has a lot of ghosts and ends up corrupting the local ghosts with its supply of excellent ghost rum, much to the disapproval of the town elders. In "Green Thoughts" a fussy old man and his old maid companion get eaten by a rare orchid the man raises in his green house, along with the cat and a mouse. They find themselves reconstituted in the carnivorous orchid as huge blossoms that look just like them.
It really is a marvelous collection of not so scary stories and it was fun revisiting those old stories from my childhood. (Of course, they were a lot scarier back then!)