Newly Discovered H. G. Wells Story Published in "Strand Magazine"

Andrew Gulli, editor of Strand Magazine, has made it a personal mission of late to track down unpublished stories from famous writers and publish them for the first time in his magazine. Last year saw the first-ever publication of a Faulkner play and a Fitzgerald short story. This month's issue of the Strand continues the tradition, featuring the first publication of "The Haunted Ceiling," a short ghost story by H. G. Wells.

Gulli discovered the story in a significant archive of Wells' work held at the University of Illinois. An assistant photocopied hundreds of Wells manuscripts, which Gulli combed through in an effort to find something new.

"Initially, from the titles of the manuscripts, I thought I happened upon lots of unpublished works, but those thousands of pages were narrowed down to this delightful story," said Gulli in an interview with The Guardian.

Scholars have dated the story to sometime around the mid 1890s, when Wells, about 30 at the time, also wrote "The Red Room," the most famous of his ghost stories.

Gulli continued, "The reason we released it now is to keep up the tradition of having ghost stories read during the cold months and during the holiday. There is something very cosy about it: the old house, the main characters playing chess and discussing this odd ceiling, but at the same time you have something very macabre and unsettling."