The Story of the Rippling Train

At a country house party, a guest complains that ghost stories always come secondhand — you never meet the person it happened to. The hostess's brother offers his own.

Fifteen years earlier, on a bright April afternoon, he watched the library door swing open on no one. Something came rippling across the carpet — smoke, he thought, then spilled water, then pale gray silk unrolling into the train of a court dress, and a woman moving backwards into the room, her profile toward him, wearing a sadness he had never seen in a living face. He had known her a decade earlier and never told her so. He wrote down the date. What it meant reached him long afterward.