`The great oaken gate heaved and splintered, and a monstrous beast as huge as a horse appeared at the mouth of the den; his small head was laid back on his hairy shoulders, his little eyes gleamed wickedly, and his red mouth opened snarling fiercely`. Undeservedly, the weird and chilling ghost stories of Arthur Christopher Benson and Robert Hugh Benson have been neglected for far too long. This volume attempts to rectify that situation. This dark banquet of tales take us to strange, unworldly and often archaic environments, far removed from the manic pace and pressures of the twenty-first century, but as exercises in the art of luring the reader into a state of unease, they are as potent as they were when the ink was barely dry on the page.