The Phantom Coach by Amelia B. Edwards

Last week we studied The Phantom Coach by Amelia B.

Edwards. This story has won the prize of being the best story we have read so far. The Phantom Coach is a first person story about James Murray and what he experiences when he visits a small cabin far in the woods, gets on the wooden carriage with three dead men, and ends up with his wife in the end of the story. The story is unique because it can be seen as a story within a story. Story one begins with James meeting Jacob in the forest, and it ends when he wakes up to his wife with him in the hospital 20 years later. Story two consists of after James meeting Jacob in the forest, is introduced and listens to The Master's unlimited amount of knowledge, and rides in the carriage with three corpses before he falls out. The carriage he is in is one that crashed seven years before his time, and this is one of the key points that add to the mystery of what actually took place with James. And this is why the carriage he went into is called in the last two words of the story, Phantom Coach. There many quotes that can be used to describe what James is experiencing, but this one is awesome. "I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw-- oh Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man--that none of them were living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light--the light of putrefaction--played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me!" 

After finishing this story, we went over two short stories we brought in. First we read Halloween Horror by Joshua Hall and then a descriptive story/poem named Eating Pumpkins by Dorthy Brock. Next Wednesday's short story is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.