Weird Woods Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain

Woods play an important and recurring role in horror, fantasy, the gothic, and the weird. They are places in which strange things happen, where you often can’t see where you are or what is around you. Supernatural creatures thrive in the thickets. Trees reach into underworlds of earth, myth, and magic. Forests are full of ghosts. In this new collection, immerse yourself in the whispering voices between the branches in Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, witness an inexplicable death in Yorkshire’s Strid Wood and prepare yourself for an encounter with malignant pagan powers in the dark of the New Forest. This edition also includes notes on the real locations and folklore which inspired these deliciously sinister stories.

John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. His research ranges across multiple topics in late Victorian and Edwardian literature, including literary depictions of animals, exoticism, and tattoos, as explored in Tales of the Tattooed, published in this series.

1. Anon - The Whisper in the Wood - 1880
Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, Devon

2. Edith Nesbit - Man-size in Marble - 1887
Brenzett, Romney Marsh, Sussex/Kent

3. Gertrude Atherton - The Striding Place- 1896
Strid Wood, Bolton Abbey, West Yorkshire

4. W. H. Hudson - An Old Thorn - 1911
Ingden Village, South Wiltshire Downs

5. Elliott O’Donnell - The White Lady of Rownam Avenue, Near Stirling - 1911
Stirling, Scotland

6. E. F. Benson - The Man Who Went Too Far - 1912
The New Forest

7. Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Lights - 1914
Near Southwater, Sussex

8. Mary Webb - The Name Tree - 1921
Bitterne Hall, Hampshire

9. Walter de la Mare - The Tree - 1922
A mysterious forest at the end of a branch line

10. Marjorie Bowen - He Made a Woman— - 1923
Wales

11. M. R. James - A Neighbour’s Landmark - 1924
Betton Wood, Shropshire

12. Arthur Machen - N - 1936
Stoke Newington, London