The Best Psychic Stories

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) was a prolific author and psychic researcher. In 1921, he founded the American Psychical Institute which contained a laboratory to examine psychic phenomena. He wrote over a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects including occultism, magic, popular science, health, and diet.

The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan.

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) led a rich and varied life. Storyteller, mystic, adventurer, and radio and television personality, he is best remembered for his two superlative horror stories, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” But in his lifetime he wrote over 150 stories, at least a dozen novels, two plays, and quite a few children’s books as well. By the time of his death, he had become one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–ca. 1914) was an American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Ohio, he served in the Civil War and then settled in San Francisco. He wrote for Hearst’s Examiner, his wit and satire making him the literary dictator of the Pacific coast and strongly influencing many writers. He disappeared into war-torn Mexico in 1913.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1848) transformed the American literary landscape with his innovations in the short story genre and his haunting lyrical poetry, and he is credited with inventing American gothic horror and detective fiction.

Jack London (1876–1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. Before making a living at his writing, he spent time as an oyster pirate, a sailor, a cannery worker, a gold miner, and a journalist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction writing. He is best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike gold rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen.” He was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, including The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.

Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935) was an author and anthologist, with a particular interest in literature dealing with the supernatural.

Joseph Lewis French (1858–1936) was an author and anthologist, with a particular interest in literature dealing with the supernatural.

John Burlinson is an American audiobook narrator.

Amy Soakes is an Australian voice actor with over twenty years of experience both in performing and production. She has produced over eight hundred video segments and voiced over a thousand television shows, corporate videos, training programs, and commercials. An expert in utilizing accents, she has been narrating audiobooks for more than four years.