A Terribly Strange Bed

Faulkner visits a low gambling house where he wins a large amount. One of the hosts serves him coffee and urges him not to try going home with his money through the dark streets while he is drunk, instead offering him a bed for the night. Faulkner lies on the large four-poster bed, feels sick, and is wide awake. He sees the canopy slowly and quietly descending. Scrambling out from under, he sees the canopy being lowered by a screw. He realizes that the coffee was drugged but a too-strong dose of the drug had the opposite effect, and that he was supposed to be smothered and disappear without reporting that he had been robbed.

Although this story is not actually supernatural (events in it have natural explanations), it has been printed in enough collections of supernatural and ghostly stories to qualify as a "genre" story. First published in the magazine Household Words, April 24, 1852.