
All Souls by Edith Wharton
We call it Halloween. Its older name is All Souls' Eve — a night in the old calendar when the membrane between the living and the dead grows thin. Edith Wharton knew this night well. Every All Souls' Eve she sat alone by the fire and named her dead, one by one, until the room felt less empty. In her last story, written six months before her own death, she imagined what that night might look like from the other side. A woman alone in a large house. The servants gone. The telephone silent. The snow piling up outside. And somewhere in the lane, a figure who should not be there. "All Souls'" is not quite a ghost story. It is something quieter, and harder to shake. "All Souls'" was first published in Ghosts (D. Appleton-Century Company, New York, 1937), the only story in that collection to have had no prior magazine publication. It was Wharton's last completed work of fiction. Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She remains one of the finest practitioners of the ghost story in the American tradition. Ad Free Stories! Become A Patreon ! https://patreon.com/barcud


















