Agatha Christie was famously a founding member of The Detection Club, a group of mystery writers formed in 1930. They crafted ten commandments about writing detective fiction, composed by member Ronald Knox, of which the second very clearly stated: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Sometimes, though, Christie did dabble in that other world, where there supernatural possibilities weren’t left out but were left lingering at the end – in which everything wasn’t explained, in which the rational didn’t quite prevail.
That said, many of Christie’s short stories – even those that seem expressly to be categorized as “supernatural” – are actually only superficially “supernatural,” often in the end resolving quite starkly into mysteries that are fully explained, the apparently supernatural events merely tricks and deception employed by real-life characters who are driven by the usual motives (mostly financial necessity or greed). Some dwell in horror for a significant part of their length but then resolve into an explained mystery so abruptly that the story strains under it. But, in some of her fiction, Christie didn’t employ the supernatural merely as misdirection, didn’t venture into horror terrain and then turn back at the last minute. Sometimes, she stayed there, lingering in the realm of a more ambiguous horror.
Here are Agatha Christie’s best horror stories – all of them in the collection The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural (HarperCollins, 2019). This list isn’t exhaustive (Christie wrote over 150 short stories) – so I’d love to hear what your favorites are.
-10. The Wife of the Kenite (1922; The Last Séance, pp. 189–96) There’s really nothing supernatural about this story – in fact, I would put it in the category of revenge horror, with a possible analogue in the Saw franchise (2004–23). The story offers no overarching explanatory ratiocinative framework – just an encounter between a man and a woman he perhaps recognizes (and certainly should have recognized, as it turns out). The ending is open, but sets up a grotesque scenario that connects with a revenge/body horror legacy.
-9. Wireless (1926; The Last Séance, pp. 173–88) In this story, a nephew buys his frail elderly (and wealthy) aunt a wireless radio to keep her “distracted” and her anxiety at bay. When her nephew is out in the evenings, the aunt learns to enjoy listening to the radio, despite her general opposition to new technology. Soon, though, she starts getting strange messages through the radio from her dead husband. These messages are the expressly “eerie happening[s]” at the center of the story: there’s “dead silence,” then a faint “low buzzing sound,” and then messages from the dead (pp. 176–7). Like many of Christie’s stories, this one resolves rationally – and, really, exactly how you’d expect given the wealth of the ill and elderly aunt. But, for a while, the story stays in the uncanny realm of haunted media – offering, actually, perhaps one of the first instances of haunted technology. You can draw a line from the eerie middle of this story to Ian Tuason’s Undertone (2025).
-8. The Flock of Geryon (1940; The Last Séance, pp. 275–94) This is an intriguing story that lingers in folk horror terrain for a good while. It features Hercule Poirot, but very peripherally, and the majority of the story is about a cult, led by a charismatic man, that is associated with the deaths of women from entirely natural causes. The protagonist, Miss Carnaby, approaches Poirot about her friend who appears to have been recruited by an “odd sect” that operates in Devonshire, a sect organized around rituals connected to the harvest and led by the “Great Shepherd.” Worried, and intent on saving her friend, Miss Carnaby decides to join the sect and figure out what’s going on. She appears to succumb to the cult’s immersion in nature and ecstatic rituals, including the “Sacrament of Blood.” Whether she actually does or not – well, you’ll have to read to find out, but since this story features Poirot, it’s no surprise that it does nominally end with his intervention/explanation. This story is also memorable for the means of murder, which involves a kind of biological weapon that I’ve not run across in any other Christie fiction – something that also definitely pushes this story into horror.
-7. The Gipsy (1933; The Last Séance, pp. 97–107) This is a story about a man who tells his friend of a recurring dream, which becomes a recurring experience (dream bleeding into reality), of a “gipsy” who says some version of – “I shouldn’t go that way, if I were you” (p. 98), warning him away from something he was about to do. This man’s fate leads the narrator to a woman who is in touch with a pagan past (more folk horror), “where the old sun-worshippers sacrificed victims” (p. 103). The narrator finds himself trapped in a kind of fate that isn’t easily escaped or understood, evoking the Final Destination franchise through words that come near the end of the story: “Ah! But one couldn’t cheat Fate” (pp. 105–6).
-6. The Mystery of the Blue Jar (1924; The Last Séance, pp. 197–217) The protagonist of this story, Jack Hartington, is trying to perfect his golf game early in the morning, before heading off to his mundane job in the city, when hears a strange cry – “Murder – help! Murder!” three times at exactly the same time. No one else hears it, and he thinks he’s going mad. In desperation, Jack turns to a fellow guest at the hotel at which he’s boarding, Dr Lavington, who is the principal reason I’m including this story in this list. Lavington, who professes to be a “doctor of the soul,” encourages Jack to believe that something not yet explained by science is happening to him. In fact, Lavington utters a line that should strike a chord with any horror fan: “It’s quite possible,” he tells Jack, “that the delusions of today may be the proved scientific facts of tomorrow” (p. 206). This line echoes Van Helsing in Dracula (1931) – “the superstition of yesterday can become the scientific reality of today” – as he proposes his theory that Count Dracula is actually a vampire.
Lavington tells Jack that he may well be hearing the voice of the dead, espousing the view that death especially violent death, can impress itself on a place, and then those “surroundings might conceivably absorb that influence, transmitting it in turn to a suitably tuned receiver – in this case yourself” (p. 209). Here, Lavington espouses a very popular theory – manifest in, for instance, Nigel Kneale’s “The Stone Tape” (1972) – that landscapes can bear the traces of violence and trauma. It also picks up on Christie’s “Wireless” in that both stories have plots that turn on seemingly supernatural ‘transmissions’ – whether they be facilitated by radios or the stones of a house. In the end, as in “Wireless,” everything is explained as the intentional machinations of very human, and living, characters – but this story stays in the eerie until the last page or so and is, in fact, pretty creepy.
Some of these stories (“The Last Seance,” “The Gipsy,” “Wireless,” and “The Mystery of the Blue Jar”) are also collected in The Hound of Death (1933)
-5. In a Glass Darkly (1934; The Last Séance, pp. 17–23) This story is quite reminiscent of the fiction of M. R. James, as a man tells of an uncanny experience while putting up at an old house (evoking specifically, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”). The opening lines certainly evoke James and are dramatically opposed to the trajectory of most of Christie’s fiction: “I’ve no explanation of this story. I’ve no theories about the why and wherefore of it. It’s just a thing – that happened” (p. 17). What happens to the man – the ‘thing’ he can’t explain – is that, while looking in a mirror as he gets ready for dinner, he sees a man strangling a woman. The narrator thinks he knows who both the woman and the man are – but he’s wrong. And the way in which he’s wrong evokes quite directly another classic tale of horror, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926).
-4. The Idol House of Astarte (1928; The Last Séance, pp. 81–95) This is an excellent story that actually features Miss Marple, although only tangentially and only at the very end. Indeed, although this story resolves as a relatively traditional murder mystery (with the usual motives – greed, jealousy), it actually spends the vast majority of its time in folk horror territory. “Idol House” is a story within a story, told by a man who witnessed very uncanny events at a remote location near Dartmoor. He begins his story by saying he’ll tell of the “terrible moment when I saw a man stricken to death by apparently no mortal agency.” He then spends a great deal of time describing the place this death occurred – a sure sign we are in folk horror terrain. There are hut circles, a barrow, and an ancient grove of trees, “a relic of very early days,” and mention of Druids, Romans, and early Phoenicians and their “sacred rites.” Those who enter this ancient grove claim to feel an abiding sense of evil, and, sure enough, one evening when the group visits the grove, someone dies in inexplicable and seemingly supernatural circumstances – circumstances that are “against Nature.” The characters who witnessed the death find it so difficult to explain what happened that they use the impersonal pronoun: “It has got him too.” As I mentioned, Miss Marple shows up and resolves the mystery in perfunctory fashion, but this ending has no power compared to the strangeness of the weight of the story.
-3. The Dressmaker’s Doll (1958; The Last Séance, pp. 317–37) A relatively simple story about how a doll most people deem “uncanny,” “creepy,” even “malicious” begins moving on its own around a dressmaker’s shop. No one sees it move, but it nonetheless appears in disparate places, casually staking them out as its own and staring at the humans around her as if she hates them. “She just moves about as she likes,” the dressmaker says. The owner of the dress shop finally decides to cede a room to the doll and just locks it up – classic avoidance of the existential threat the doll’s autonomous movement poses. The doll won’t stand for being locked up for long, however . . . and the dressmaker has to try something else to get rid of it. The ending offers another attempt at avoidance, perhaps – and the reader is left to wonder what it was, in the end, that the doll wanted. There’s an intriguing connection here to one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, “The After Hours” (1960).
-2. The Last Séance (1926; The Last Séance, pp. 1–16) This story is a purely supernatural story about a medium who can connect with the dead, can in fact materialize the dead. There is some scientific explanation of what happens – references to ectoplasm, for instance – in an otherwise inexplicable tale about the return of those who have died. The story centers on a medium performing one ‘last séance’ – her last because the physical toll on her is tremendous. She’s performing the séance for a woman who is utterly bereft over the death of her child and who refuses to give up any possibility of connecting with that child. The final image of the story – which is of something red, something that is flesh but not human – feels very Lovecraftian, very much about an intertwined body horror and cosmic horror. It’s perhaps the most chilling ending of all of these stories, and it definitely does not return the events of the story to the field of ratiocination. Indeed, this story veers further, perhaps, into sheer horror than any other Christie I’ve read.
-1. Philomel Cottage (1923–4; The Last Séance, pp. 109–33) Christie wrote several versions of this basic story: rich woman marries a man she’s only recently met and about whom she knows little to nothing; she thinks she discovers he may be trying to kill her. This plot can be found not only in “Philomel Cottage” (the original incarnation) but also in the play based on it, which she wrote some time prior to 1932, The Stranger, a play she never published or saw performed. The story did get adapted, however, as Love from a Stranger, written by Frank Vosper in 1936 and then as a film in 1937 and 1947. It also appeared in the (Miss Marple) short story, “The Case of the Caretaker” (1942) and, finally, got its most extended treatment in Christie’s stand-alone novel, Endless Night (1967). As a novel, Endless Night is undoubtedly the most complex articulation of the plot, but I can only wish that Christie had taken the version she gives us in “Philomel Cottage” and developed that into a novel, because whereas Endless Night (and “The Case of the Caretaker” and Love from a Stranger, in all its versions) centers the ambiguity of the principal male protagonist, “Philomel Cottages” ultimately centers the ambiguity of the heroine. The story offers a twist on a twist (I’m tempted to say, a turn of the screw) akin to more contemporary fiction such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), Colleen Hoover’s Verity (2018), and Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid (2022). It never resolves anything and definitely leaves the reader adrift in provocative ambiguity.
