Read "The Curse of the Catafalques" by Thomas Anstey Guthrie online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Unless I am very much mistaken, until the time when I was subjected to the strange and exceptional experience which I now propose to relate, I had never been brought into close contact with anything of a supernatural description. At least if I ever was, the circumstance can have made no lasting impression upon me, as I am quite unable to recall it. But in the 'Curse of the Catafalques' I was confronted with a horror so weird and so altogether unusual, that I doubt whether I shall ever succeed in wholly forgetting it -- and I know that I have never felt really well since.
It is difficult for me to tell my story intelligibly without some account of my previous history by way of introduction, although I will to make it as little diffuse as I may.