Helena Blavatsky is one of the most famous occultists of all time. Founder of The Theosophical Society, she has developed a polarising reputation; her supporters see her as a visionary and a spiritual genius, her detractors as a charlatan and a fraud. Here are collected two of her short stories concerning spiritualism and the occult.

"[...]C.] and yourself for many years.... C. W. L.'s word is final and his seership infallible to you." The quality of this supposed "seership" bears a very close resemblance to a stupid and vulgar hoax. This is clearly shown by Mr. Martyn, who says: -"In 1919 I went to America. Young Van Hook was in New York. He talked freely of C. W. L.'s immorality and about faking the 'lives' of people" (Italics mine.) Mr. Martyn then puts together various pieces of evidence against this man, and tells Mrs. Besant that he finds "staring me in the face the conclusions that Leadbeater is a sex pervert, his mania taking a particular form which I have-though only lately-discovered, is a form well known and quite common in the annals of sex criminology." (Italics mine.) This sex criminal, then, is the creature whom Mrs. Besant has accepted "for many years" as "sole intermediary between" herself and-the Masters of Wisdom!! One almost hesitates to draw the obvious inference; for this is the man whom she has for years held up to and imposed upon their followers as a model of all the virtues-"a saint"-a person "on the threshold of divinity." (See also footnote post, p.[...].

The Horla ("Le Horla") is a horror story written in the style of a journal by French writer Guy de Maupassant. The story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's own "The Call of Cthulhu", which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity. In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper class, unmarried, bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish. This anguish occurs for four days after he sees a "superb three-mast" boat and impulsively waves to it, unconsciously inviting the supernatural being aboard the boat to haunt his home.