Edith Wharton (originally Edith Jones) was born in 1872 in New York City, New York to an upper class family. Her long marriage to Edward Wharton was an unhappy one that ended in divorce in1913. She enjoyed much mainstream success as a writer, publishing The House of Mirth in 1902, Ethan Frome in 1911, and became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1920 for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was good friends with many luminaries of the times, most notably being writer Henry James.

During Robert Bloch’s long career as a writer, he produced several decades’ worth of great fiction that spanned a variety of genres, including horror, crime, pulp and science-fiction. Born in Chicago, IL in 1917, he became enraptured by the stories he found in Weird Tales Magazine. It was there he discovered legendary author, H.P. Lovecraft, and was inspired to write to him. From then on the two began an ongoing correspondence. Lovecraft encouraged the young Bloch to keep writing. Soon afterwards he published his first work. Bloch eventually became a regular contributor to Weird Tales.

I've just added two new films to the Horror Films section.  Watch Bela Lugosi in The Dark Eyes Of London, and the horror classic The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari now!

The Vintage Horror Horde community at vintagehorror.ning.com will be closing down soon.  Ning, the company that hosts the site, will begin charging monthly for their service and since that site is very rarely used, I've decided to shutter the windows and lock the doors.

Any information, pictures, etc. you've uploaded to that site will be deleted very soon!  If there is something there you don't have a copy of, please grab one as soon as possible.

Oliver Onions was born on November 13th, 1873. He was an English artist who later turned to writing. He began doing artwork for posters, books and magazines and even did cover art for some of his own books after becoming a writer. He produced several novels as well as short stories. His collection of ghost stories Widdershins (1911) contained some of his best, including his novella “The Beckoning Fair One”, which has been named one of the greatest ghost stories ever written by a number of horror masters such as H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, and Editor E.F. Bleiler. Onions himself did not believe in the supernatural which may account for his propensity to make his tales subjective as to weather or not anything truly paranormal was occurring.

There are some great horror films that have slipped into the public domain, and it's just plain wrong that we're not watching some of them here!  I've started a section featuring these films, titled of all things Horror Films.  Visit that link to find a listing of what's available to watch.

Start off with Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth, and Christopher Lee in City Of The Dead.  Two classics to get the moving pictures moving, and more to come!

Carnacki the Ghost Finder is the creation of author William Hope Hodgson. He was a sort of paranormal super-sleuth who recited the events of each case to a group of friends who regularly gathered at his house to hear them. Carnacki would employ pseudo-science as well as arcane magic rituals, often mixing the two, to identify and combat these forces. Some of these investigations turned out to be elaborate hoaxes, but a number of them pitted him against terrifying supernatural entities. The device he used most often was the electric pentacle, which he invented. It was used as protection against otherworldly forces (most often dark spirits he referred to as Saiitii). Most of the Carnacki stories appeared in The Idler magazine in 1910.