Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram was born on 16 December 1863 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, the son of a Unitarian minister. He did not go to university. At eighteen he went to Boston to train in an architect’s office, and he supplemented his income by writing art criticism for the Boston Evening Transcript. Travels in Europe in the 1880s, especially in Italy, turned him toward medieval church architecture and toward High Church Anglicanism.

He went on to become the most influential advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States. His firms, especially Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, designed churches, chapels and campuses across the country. His work includes much of the Gothic architecture at the United States Military Academy at West Point and at Princeton University, where he was the supervising architect. In New York, he took over the design of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and redesigned it in the Gothic style. He was also a prolific writer on architecture, religion and society, and a strong critic of modern industrial life. He died on 22 September 1942.

His fiction belongs to his twenties and early thirties, when he was part of a circle of young Boston aesthetes. He wrote six supernatural stories, published together as Black Spirits and White (1895). He never returned seriously to fiction. Both stories on this site come from that book.

No. 252 Rue M. le Prince is a traditional haunted-house vigil set in Paris. An American visitor agrees to spend a night alone in a notorious house whose former owner was said to be a sorceress, and the story builds to a genuinely nasty climax. The Dead Valley is completely different, and it is the real find. It’s a short, eerie piece about two Swedish boys who take a shortcut over the hills and find a valley where nothing grows, nothing sounds, and the floor is a sea of dead white mist. It is barely a ghost story at all. Lovecraft singled it out in Supernatural Horror in Literature for its regional horror, and it is one of the purest pieces of landscape horror of the period.

Start with “The Dead Valley.” It takes about sixteen minutes.