Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens lifetime. He had always loved a good ghost story himself particularly at Christmas time & was open-minded willing to accept & indeed put to the test the existence of spirits. His natural inclinations toward drama & the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales & in the twenty stories presented here which include his celebrated A Christmas Carol the full range of his gothic talents can be seen. Chilling as some of these stories are Dickens has managed to inject characteristically grotesque comedy as he writeof revenge insanity pre-cognition & dream visions he indulges also in some debunking of contemporary credulity.