This volume opens with an excised episode from Dracula, recounting a terrified traveler's night of wandering through a deserted, snow-swept Bavarian village on Walpurgis Night. Ignoring his coachman's frantic warnings, the protagonist seeks shelter in the marble tomb of Countess Dolingen of Gratz, only to witness a terrifying manifestation before passing out in the freezing snow, guarded by a monstrous wolf until rescuers arrive. In The Judge's House, a studious young man seeks absolute isolation in an old, foreboding Lincolnshire mansion associated with a harsh, cruel seventeenth-century magistrate. Despite local superstitions and swarms of aggressive rats that seem dominated by a baleful-eyed phantom rat resembling the dead judge in a portrait, he persists in his work until a final, fatal confrontation with the supernatural trap of the hanging bell rope.
The Squaw relates a tragic and gruesome honeymoon incident in Nuremberg, where an American tourist's careless actions kill a tiny kitten. The mother cat's relentless, burning desire for revenge culminates inside the grim Torture Tower, where the American is trapped inside the iron maiden and slain by its spikes. The Secret of the Growing Gold tells of dark passions and vengeance at Brent's Rock, where a jealous brother discovers that his murdered sister's hair continues to grow through the broken stone of a hearth, ultimately trapping her killer in a grip of silent terror. Finally, The Gipsy Prophecy weaves a tale of ominous warnings on a quiet moorland, where a gipsy queen predicts a bloody doom for a devoted husband, leading through a chain of nervous fears to an accidental tragedy that strangely fulfills the prophecy while disarming its mortal threat.
