A Scare A Day Reading Challenge
Romancing the Gothic founder and organiser, Dr Sam Hirst, is back for another month of A Scare A Day. Dr Hirst curates a daily reading list, and the challenge is to read the story or poem for that day and post your thoughts on social media using the tag #AScareADay (not #ScareADay – don’t forget the ‘A’ at the start like I always do!)
Last year, I posted a creative response to each story or poem featured in the challenge, and turned them into Season 05 of Eldritch Girl, where I talked about the stories and poems, and read my fiction/non-fiction piece inspired by the daily read.
This year, I’m pairing the challenge with #100HorrorMoviesIn92Days so I’m going to be suggesting a film pairing to go with the story/poem, the way I do for my book reviews over on Divination Hollow.
The challenge list is posted on RomancingTheGothic.com, and below. To thank Sam for this service, you can leave them a tip on Ko-Fi!
The “A Scare A Day” Daily Reading List 2026
October 1st – Joanna Baillie – Night Tales of Other Times – 1790 – Read it here
October 2nd – Nikolai Karamzin – The Island of Bornholm – 1794 – Read it here
October 3rd – Anne Bannerman – The Black Knight of the Water – 1802 – Read it here
October 4th – William Harrison Ainsworth – The Spectre Bride – 1821 – Read it here
October 5th – Charles Pigault-Lebrun – ‘The Unholy Compact Abjured’ – 1825 – Read it here
October 6th – Mary Elizabeth Braddon – ‘The Cold Embrace’ (1860) – Read it here
October 7th – Amelia Edwards – ‘In the Confessional’ (1871) – Read it here
October 8th – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps – ‘Since I Died’ (1873) – Read it here
October 9th – Mary Elizabeth Coleridge – ‘The Witch’ (1893) – Read it here
October 10th – Arthur Machen – ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ (1895) – Read it here
October 11th – Gertrude Atherton – ‘The Striding Place’ (1896) – Read it here
October 12th – Elia W. Peattie – ‘From the Loom of the Dead’ (1898) – Read it here
October 13th – Mrs Wilson Woodrow – ‘Secret Chambers’ (1909) – Read it here
October 14th – W W Jacobs – The Well (1911) – Read it here
October 15th – Violet Hunt – ‘The Prayer’ (1911) – Read it here
October 16th – Rabindranath Tagore – ‘The Lost Jewels’ or Monihara (trans. 1917) – Read it here
October 17th – Ellen Glasgow – ‘The Past’ (1920) – Read it here
October 18th – Mikhail Bulgakov – ‘The Red Crown’ (1922) – Read it here
October 19th – John Masefield – ‘The Haunted’ (1923) – Read it here
October 20th – Elsa Morante – The Secret game (1941) – Read it here
October 21st – Dorothy Quick – ‘After an Air Raid’ (1943) – Read it here
October 22nd – Mayra Montero – ‘Corinne, Amiable Girl’ (1991) – Read it here
October 23rd – Ahmed Khaled Tawfik – ‘The Wall’ – Read it here
October 24th – Mariana Enríquez – ‘The Little Angel’s Exhumation’ (2014) – Read it here
October 25th – A. C. Wise – ‘The Stories We Tell About Ghosts’ (2017) – Read it here
October 26th – Brandon O’Brien – ‘The Lagahoo Speaks For Itself’ (2017) – Read it here
October 27th – Darcie Little Badger – ‘Those Hitch-hiking Kids’ (2023) – Read it here
October 28th – Tyler Sookralli – ‘The Devil Wears Skin’ (2024) – Read it here
October 29th – Eleanna Castroianni – ‘They Return’ (2025) – Read it here
October 30th – Ash Vale – ‘consumed’ (2026) – Read it here
October 31st – Quincy Lee – ‘The Dark Follows Me’ (2026) – Read it here
A Scare A Day: Day 19
Day 19: “The Haunted” by John Masefield (1923). Read it here.
Another poem, another day, another trauma. This man is a haunted house, and he contains multitudes. From what little I know of Masefield, his work often explore the poetics of loss, hauntings, grief, and human fragility – this is one of those poems.
Masefield was poet laureate 1930-1967. I can see why.
A Scare A Day: Plot Summary
The narrator is a student, sitting in a decaying house, haunted by all its previous occupants; the simpering old man who was learned, but swapped his learning for a puce coat to be seen by others who wouldn’t appreciate his mind; the rake who broke women’s hearts, including his mother’s, and was the death of her; the gambler, who died deep in his vice.
The poem portrays this on the surface as the student being haunted by these figures of the past, and they could be people he knew haunting him specifically; it could be previous inhabitants of the house, unrelated to him and unknown to him before he too became one of them.
I think all these people are versions of himself – what he is, what he might have been, what he has been in the past, what he will become in the future. I think the house is more a metaphor for his life, his body, his being. It could also be his family – people whose stories he knows intimately although they’re all dead, and they’re still with him, part of him, crafting him, haunting him.
I like this one a lot.
A Scare A Day: Film Pairing
We’re going to Czechoslovakia, and Prokletí domu Hajnů/The Damned House of Hajn (1988) dir. Jiří Svoboda, written by Václav Šašek and Jiří Svoboda and based on Jaroslav Havlíček’s psychological novel (1937).
This is a Gothic extravaganza of familial insanity, repression, vice, incest, rape, delusions, gaslighting, and human fragility. The aristocracy is crumbling, and its ‘ghosts’ are the imprints of the past stamped indelibly upon the present occupants of the house. Spectres of mental illness and identity disintegration loom over the protagonists, and it’s all pretty bleak.
I think it’s a good companion to the poem, or at least, to my interpretation of the poem, that the student we meet is haunted by versions of himself, or haunted by the past inhabitants of the house to whom he could be related or with whom he was intimately acquainted.
Here is a good review of the film (with spoilers) by Stephen J. Schnieder for Kinoeye: Invisibility and Repression in Jiří Svoboda’s Prokletí domu Hajnů/The Damned House of Hajn (1988)
The JustWatch link isn’t very helpful, but I watched this as a dodgy Russian bootleg with English subs. Have a go on those sorts of sites, or see if some enterprising citizen has uploaded to YouTube, where I found it a few years ago. That version isn’t up now, but there will likely be others floating around.
Leave a Reply