author
Charles Willing Beale
1845–1932
A builder, hotelkeeper, and dreamer as much as a novelist, this American writer brought a practical engineer’s mind to eerie mysteries and early science fiction. He is best remembered for The Ghost of Guir House, a Gothic tale that helped keep his name alive for later genre readers.
2 Audiobooks
The Ghost of Guir House
by Charles Willing Beale
The Secret of the Earth
by Charles Willing Beale
About the author
Born in Washington, D.C., on December 9, 1845, Charles Willing Beale trained as a civil engineer at a young age and later worked as a surveyor for the Pacific Railroad. In 1869 he moved to western North Carolina, where he pursued several business ventures before building and running a hotel in what became Arden.
Beale led a notably varied life: engineer, hotel owner, town founder, and writer. Sources describe him as deeply interested in Eastern cultures, occult ideas, and hypnotism, interests that echo in the strange atmospheres and speculative ideas found in his fiction.
He wrote horror and science fiction as well as shorter pieces for periodicals in the late nineteenth century. His best-known novel is The Ghost of Guir House (1897), and he is also remembered for The Secret of the Earth (1899), an early hollow-earth adventure. He died in Arden, North Carolina, on August 16, 1932.