An infertile couple escape to Italy for a short break but soon understand they are not alone, and that an ancient evil has awoken.

This is a story from the Four Short Stories collection. In these stories, Conan Doyle draws the listener in to experience drama, suspense and, ultimately, the shock of surprise. Here is a unique combination of a famous analytical intellect telling spine-tingling tales against a background of turn-of-the-century England. Nothing is quite as it seems. What is the secret of "Lot No. 249"? What lies in wait for an aviator in the stratosphere? And what lies inside "The Sealed Room"?

"Brother, do not try to follow me once you have read this. No good can come of it..." When Clifford Fox QC receives a desperate letter from his estranged younger brother, Simon, he departs his comfortable Yorkshire home to locate him. The letter outlines the harrowing events that have led Simon to the very edge of sanity.

From the UK best-selling author of Abbot's Keep comes a new dimension in terror. Spanning four decades, the dark history of Church Farm House is explored within four interlinking horror stories. Welcome to the nightmare... Benedict Ashforth is the author of the UK best-selling Kindle ghost story, Abbot's Keep.

This is a story from the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes II collection.

Three teenagers stumble into a haunted mansion that traps them in a deadly nightmare. In order to escape alive, they must uncover the house's dark secrets of murder and prejudice.

In 1859, the Shawtuck Lunatic Asylum opened in rural Delaware County as the new standard for the treatment of the mentally ill. But now this huge, Gothic structure sits brooding and abandoned, brought down by a long, sordid history of depravity, mistreatment, and murder. It may be rotting up on Shawtuck Mountain, but it's not alone. Oswald "Oz" Patterson is the new sheriff of Delaware County. After a near-death experience as a cop in the South Bronx, he decided to move away from the inner city and live a safer life. Oz will find that he has only traded one nightmare for a worse one.

There is a haunted house up there that squats like a huge wooden toad behind a thick grove of pine trees on the end of a dead end road. Maybe once it was painted, but now it has a gray cadaver-like complexion, and its siding is sagged and splintered as if the devil had been poking at it with his pitchfork. Its windows are streaked and stained, and trying to see through them from the outside is like trying to look a skull in the eye.

Home is where the heart is...or the hatred. You can feel the love and care someone puts into their home just by walking into it. Equally, you can feel the hatred and malice when you step into a home where dark deeds have been done. Alex and his team of so-called paranormal investigators are given the opportunity of a lifetime, when they are able to film inside one of the most haunted, and cursed, locations in their area. The Jackson Mansion.

The dense Michigan forest. Haunting wails. The clip-clop of demon hooves on a bridge to nowhere. It’s more than a tall tale to Brenda Jennings, whose sister disappeared in those woods one fateful night. Three years later, on a solo stakeout in the dark, Brenda goes in after her. She’s desperate for answers, and terrified to find what lies waiting on the other side of that bridge.

In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur, and spine-tingling terror descends to this "edge of paradise". Growing numbers of residents harbor a secret so dark it is sure to cost even more lives.

Thomas Usher has a terrible gift. Following a car crash in which his wife and daughter are killed, he can see the recently departed, and it's not usually a pretty sight. When he is called to investigate the violent death of the daughter of a prominent local gangster, Usher's world is torn apart once more. For the barriers between this world and the next are not as immutable as once he believed.

It's war time, and the Carver family decides to leave the capital where they live and move to a small coastal village where they've recently bought a home. But from the minute they cross the threshold, strange things begin to happen. In that mysterious house still lurks the spirit of Jacob, the previous owners' son, who died by drowning.

Olivia Prior has grown up in Merilance School for Girls, and all she has of her past is her mother’s journal—which seems to unravel into madness. Then, a letter invites Olivia to come home to Gallant. Yet when Olivia arrives, no one is expecting her. But Olivia is not about to leave the first place that feels like home; it doesn’t matter if her cousin Matthew is hostile, or if she sees half-formed ghouls haunting the hallways.

In the secluded Dutch territory of Sleepy Hollow, nebbish schoolmaster Ichabod Crane competes with the town hero for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel's farm one autumn evening, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, an apparition said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper snuffed out by a stray cannonball.