“I confess I have a particular dislike to remain in a church after dusk; it recalls to my mind the most painful story I ever heard.”

A festering evil lurks in the grotesque carvings of a cathedral’s hallowed inner sanctum; sheltering in an Alpine chapel, a young libertine confronts his eerie monastic doppelganger; locked in a Spanish cathedral, a honeymooning couple bears witness to a fatal procession.

Churches and other sacred sites have inspired writers of the weird and uncanny for centuries as spaces in which death and the afterlife are within touching distance – where ghosts, demons and possessed effigies remain to haunt the living. Through eleven stories published between 1851 and 1935, this new anthology revives a throng of undying spirits from a host of unsung and classic authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, John Wyndham, and Edith Wharton.