It’s almost October, which means it’s almost time for the #AScareADay challenge! One poem or scary short-story a day for a whole month. You can read along with us using the links below. Feel free to add your comments or follow along on social media using the hashtag #AScareADay (remember the capitals to make it more accessible!) to share your thoughts with fellow readers. As requested from previous years, I’ve put slightly less early material on and moved into the 20th century a little quicker! I’ve also added a little more poetry to help making the amount of reading more manageable.
If you missed the previous ones and would like to catch up on our spooky reads (or try to do fout challenges at once!), here are the 2022, 2023 and 2024 challenges.
Enjoy!
October 1st – Robert Herrick – ‘The Hag’ (1648) – Read it here or listen to it here
October 2nd – Johan Karl August Musaus – ‘The Elopement’ (1801) – Read it here or listen here
October 3rd – ETA Hoffman – ‘The Sandman’ (1817) – Read it here
October 4th – John Galt – ‘The Buried Alive’ (1821) – Read it here or, for a more accessible version, here. Listen to it here
October 5th – Alfred Lord Tennyson – ‘The Kraken’ (1830) – Read it here and listen here
October 6th – Emily Brontë – ‘And now the house dog stretched once more’ (1839)- Read it here or listen here
October 7th – Dinah Mulock – ‘The Last House in C____ Street’ (1856) – Read it here
October 8th – Rhoda Broughton – ‘The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing but the Truth’ (1868) – Read it here
October 9th – Margaret Oliphant – ‘The Secret Chamber’ (1876) – Read it here or, for a more accessible version, here
October 10th – Lionel Johnson – ‘The Dark Angel’ (1893) – Read it here
October 11th – Emma Frances Dawson – ‘An Itinerant House’ (1897) – Read it here
October 12th – Madeline Wynne – ‘The Little Room’ (1907) – Read it here
October 13th – Vachel Lindsay – ‘The Spider and the Ghost of a Fly’ (1914) – Read it here or listen here
October 14th – Lord Dunsany – ‘Charon’ (1915) – Read it here
October 15th – Conrad Aiken – ‘The Vampire’ (1916) – Read it here or listen here
October 16th – Meredith Davis – ‘The Accusing Voice’ (1923) – Read it here
October 17th – Agatha Christie – ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’ (1924) – Read and listen to it here
October 18th – Everill Worrell – ‘The Canal’ (1927) – Read and listen to it here
October 19th – Hugh Walpole – ‘The Tarn’ (1936) – Read it here
October 20th – Elizabeth Jane Howard – ‘Three Miles Up’ (1951) – Read it here
October 21st – Flann O’Brien – ‘Two in One’ (1954) – Read it here
October 22nd – Clive Barker – ‘The Midnight Meat Train’ (1984) – Read it here
October 23rd – John Lindqvist – ‘Itsy Bitsy’ (2011) – Read it here
October 24th – Lisa L Hannett – ‘Sweet Subtleties’ (2012) – Read it here
October 25th – Kaaron Warren – ‘Eleanor Atkins is Dead and Her House is Boarded Up’ (2014) – Read it here
October 26th – Martín Espada – ‘The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate’ (2015) – Read it here
October 27th – Helen Stubbs – ‘Uncontainable’ (2016) – Read it here
October 28th – Nibedita Sen – ‘Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnibar Island’ (2019) – Read it here
October 29th – Lonnie Nadler and Abby Howard – ‘The Portrait of Sal Pullman’ – Read it here
October 30th – Suzan Palumbo – ‘Bleeding Hearts’ (2024) – Read it here
October 31st – Vanessa Fogg – ‘The Path She Sings’ (2025)- Read it here
Romancing the Gothic 
23 thoughts on “The ‘Scare a Day’ Challenge – October 2025”