The

The The Stories that inspired the Twilight Zone episode 22.

The Bus Conductor by E. F. Benson

My friend Hugh Granger and I had just returned from a two days' visit in the country,

where we had been staying in a house of sinister repute,

which was supposed to be haunted by ghosts, of a peculiarly fearsome and truculent sort the house

itself was all that such a house should be jacobian and oak paneled with long dark passages and high vaulted rooms it stood also very remote and was encompassed by a

wood of sombre pines that muttered and whispered in the dark and all the time that we

were there a southwesterly gale with torrents of scalding rain had prevailed, so that by day

and night weird voices moaned and fluted in the chimneys. A company of uneasy spirits held

colloquy among the trees, and sudden tattoos and tapping beckoned from the window panes.

But in spite of these surroundings which were sufficient in themselves, one would almost say,

to spontaneously generate occult phenomena, nothing of any description had occurred. I am bound to add also that my own

state of mind was peculiarly well adapted to receive or even invent the sights and sounds

we had gone to seek, for I was, I confess, during the whole time that we were there in a

state of abject apprehension and lay awake both nights through hours of terrified

unrest afraid of the dark yet more afraid of what a lighted candle might show me.

Hugh Granger on the evening of our return to town had dined with me, and after dinner our

conversation, as was natural, soon came back to these entrancing topics.

But why you go ghost-seeking, I cannot imagine, he said,

because your teeth were chattering and your eyes staring out of your head all the time you were there, from sheer fright, or do you like being frightened?

Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways. This is one of them.

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