About the library

A free library of ghost stories, folk tales, legends and demon lore from China, Japan, the Slavic lands, Persia and India, many in English for the first time.

What we publish

We publish complete texts of old books whose originals are in the public domain: folk tales, ghost stories, legends, myths and sacred or esoteric writings. Many of them have never been published in English before. New chapters appear every few days, and every chapter is free to read.

How we translate

Translations are made by AI language models working from the original-language text. A second model then checks each translation sentence by sentence against the original for omissions, additions and errors. We aim to stay faithful to the original: no abridging, no summarising. Introductions, notes and the bestiary are added to every book. If you spot a mistake, please tell us.

Sources and copyright

For every book we list the source edition we translated from and why it is in the public domain. We translate from original texts, never from modern copyrighted editions or existing English translations.

Listen

Many chapters are also available as long-form narrated audio on our YouTube channel.