The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK PDF - Arthur Conan Doyle

The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK®: 25 Classic Haunts! is an English-language anthology of classic supernatural fiction associated in listings with Arthur Conan Doyle, although it is not a single-author novel by Doyle. It was first issued by Wildside Press, LLC in 2014 as part of the MEGAPACK ebook series, with a later paperback listing appearing in 2020. ISFDB identifies the book as an anthology edited by John Gregory Betancourt, and Wildside’s own sample notes that the MEGAPACK volumes are generally a group effort by the publisher’s team.

The book brings together twenty-five ghost and horror stories by well-known and lesser-known authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Amelia B. Edwards, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jerome K. Jerome, B. M. Croker, Fiona Macleod, and Frank H. Spearman. Doyle’s contribution is “The Bully of Brocas Court,” originally published in The Strand Magazine in November 1921, while the collection also includes older nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century pieces such as Dickens’s “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain,” Kipling’s “My Own True Ghost Story,” and Edwards’s “The Four-Fifteen Express.”

Because The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK is an anthology, it does not follow one continuous plot. Instead, it offers a wide tour through the classic ghost story tradition. The stories use haunted rooms, railway mysteries, strange dreams, spectral visitors, old houses, uncanny portraits, and emotional reckonings with the dead to explore fear, guilt, memory, grief, and the possibility that the past never fully disappears. This makes the book useful for readers searching for classic ghost stories, Victorian supernatural fiction, public-domain horror tales, and short fiction connected to Arthur Conan Doyle.

The collection opens with Amelia B. Edwards’s “The Four-Fifteen Express,” a railway ghost story built around testimony, timing, and a mystery that seems to cross the boundary between ordinary travel and supernatural warning. Other early selections widen the tone: some stories lean toward melancholy reflection, while others use suspense or a puzzle-like structure. Henry van Dyke’s “The Night Call” and Olivia Howard Dunbar’s “The Shell of Sense” focus less on shock than on spiritual unease and the fragile connection between the living and the dead.

Rudyard Kipling’s “My Own True Ghost Story” adds a colonial-era setting and a narrator confronted by sounds and impressions that suggest a haunting. Charles Dickens’s “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” is one of the major works in the volume. Rather than presenting a simple ghostly visitation, Dickens frames the supernatural as a moral test: the desire to forget pain may appear attractive, but memory, sorrow, and compassion are deeply connected. The result is a ghost story with a strong ethical and emotional center.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Bully of Brocas Court” gives the anthology an important link to one of the best-known names in English fiction. Readers expecting Sherlock Holmes should note that this is not a detective novel, but Doyle’s storytelling skills still suit the atmosphere of old wrongs, menace, and retribution. The piece contributes to the book’s range by placing Doyle among writers who treated the supernatural as both entertainment and a way to examine human behavior.

Later stories such as Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Ghost of the Blue Chamber,” B. M. Croker’s “To Let,” Fiona Macleod’s “Green Branches,” and Frank H. Spearman’s “The Ghost at Point of Rocks” continue the anthology’s movement through different styles of haunting. Some tales are eerie and atmospheric, some are ironic, and others are shaped like legends or reports. Together, they show how the ghost story developed across decades, from Gothic inheritance to magazine fiction and literary supernatural tales.

Overall, The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK®: 25 Classic Haunts! is best described as a curated collection of classic ghost stories rather than a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle alone. Published by Wildside Press and featuring Doyle among many contributors, it offers readers a broad, accessible selection of supernatural fiction centered on haunted places, unresolved memories, and encounters with the unknown.