One of the classic tropes of Gothic fiction is the haunted portrait: the dusty painting of a grim figure in old-fashioned garb, whose eyes gleam in candlelight and seem to follow—or even blink at—the viewer from the shadows. Originally a feature of early Gothic novels, it later became a favorite device among writers of horror and weird fiction: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Oval Portrait”), E. Nesbit (“The Ebony Frame”), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), H. P. Lovecraft (Charles Dexter Ward,...

Like “Guests from Gibbet Island,” the following tale is both grimmer than Irving’s usual fare and was first published in the Knickerbocker Magazine . Profoundly wistful—melancholy and dreamlike—it seems to offer a female-led counterpart to “The Legend of Don Munio de Sancho Hinojosa,” wherein a spectral company is glimpsed performing solemn rites beyond the veil of ordinary life. Here, instead of armored penitents, we encounter a sisterhood of nuns, preserved in sanctity and memory, whose...

H. P. Lovecraft is today enshrined as the architect of cosmic horror—the cold visionary who stripped the universe of comfort and replaced it with vast, indifferent immensities. Alongside later masterpieces like The Call of Cthulhu  and At the Mountains of Madness , his name has become virtually synonymous with tentacled gods, forbidden tomes, and existential dread on a planetary scale. The pity is that this reputation has, in some respects, obscured the quieter but no less compelling body of...