"There's Room for One More."

“There’s Room for One More.”

One-minute review: A comely New York girl was invited to visit her cousins at a Carolina plantation. She was assigned to sleep in a wing away from the main house. The moon was bright as she readied for bed. Suddenly, she heard horses’ hooves on the path outside her window. Below, on a winding path, a horse-drawn carriage pulled up with a driver, ugly beyond imagining, who pointed a bony finger at her and said in a menacing tone, “There’s room for one more.” At that moment, as the girl recoiled in horror, the coach and its ugly driver vanished from the driveway.

She talked herself into believing it was a nightmare and in the light of day, she felt reassured and said nothing to her cousins. However, the next night, the coach and its ugly driver reappeared and, as happened the night before, the driver pointed a bony finger at her standing at the window and said in his menacing tone, “There’s room for one more.” And like the night before, coach and driver vanished from the path.

Genuinely scared, she made up some excuse and headed back to New York. She went right from the train in a taxi to her doctor’s office on the eighteenth floor, to whom she told her story. The doctor was matter of fact, and reassured her that she must have been dreaming. Relieved, she left the doctor’s office to go to the elevator, which opened with a car full of passengers.

She was about to squeeze in among the packed passengers when she heard the menacing voice of the ugly coachman say, now the elevator attendant, “There’s room for one more.” She screamed and jumped back outside the elevator. The door slammed shut and the building was rocked as the elevator broke loose form its moorings and plunged to the bottom of the building. Everyone on the elevator was crushed.

Famous Ghost Stories. Compiled by Bennett A. Cerf. New York: The Modern Library. 1944.