Originally published 1 January 1810 | ||
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Similar Fantasmagoriana, Tales of the Dead, The Vampyre, The Family of the Vourdalak, The Haunting of Hill House | ||
The Gespensterbuch was a collection of German ghost and folk stories collected and rewritten by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun and published in five volumes between 1811–1815.
Contents
Freischütz
The first tale in the first volume was the story of a magic marksman, "The Freischütz", which became the basis of Weber's opera Der Freischütz.
Translation
In 1812, Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès translated eight German ghost stories into French as Fantasmagoriana, including five of the tales from the first and second volumes of the Gespensterbuch. The following year, Sarah Elizabeth Utterson translated five of the stories from Fantasmagoriana into English as Tales of the Dead (along with a story of her own), including three of the Gespensterbuch tales. The stories she omitted were translated into English by A. J. Day together with Utterson's translation in Fantasmagoriana: Tales of the Dead (2005).