Thirteen ghost stories, set not in English abbeys but in ordinary America: a Kansas homesteader whose dead collie still sleeps across his feet, a skater led over the ice at Sault Ste. Marie by a white figure he cannot catch, a young bride on the plains who keeps seeing a cottage her husband will not talk about, a room in an old rectory that passes on the thought once had in it, and a genteel Philadelphia ghost with opinions about grammar. Elia Wilkinson Peattie was a working newspaperwoman in Chicago and Omaha, and the collection, published in 1898, has a reporter's eye for plain detail. Fifty-six plates of American streets, ice and winter light, by painters including George Bellows and Childe Hassam, give these plain haunted places their weather.
