Project Gutenberg 2025-08-07 Public domain in the USA. 295 Ernst, Paul 1899 1985 Ernst, Paul Frederick Brundage, Margaret 1900 1976 Brundage, M. Finlay, Virgil 1914 1971 Finlay Clicking red heels $aIndianapolis, IN :$bPopular Fiction Publishing Company, $c1937. Produced from Weird Tales June 1937. Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net "Clicking red heels by Paul Ernst" is a pulp horror short story written in the late 1930s. It follows a wealthy young man whose affair with a cobbler’s daughter turns deadly and whose guilt—or a curse—begins to stalk him in the form of phantom footsteps. The likely topic is the collision of calculated murder with supernatural retribution, blurring the line between psychological torment and an actual haunting. Eldon Gruin, fearing scandal from his obsessive lover Maria José, engineers her death by sending their car over a Palisades cliff while he clings to a tree branch. Publicly, it looks like an accident, but Maria’s father curses him to be forever accompanied by her presence. Eldon soon hears unseen steps—echoes of Maria’s red heels—matching his every move; traces of her appear in his room, and even others catch the faint clicking. Spiraling into terror and isolation, he returns to the cliff and finally rams his car through a new concrete barrier to his death. Afterward, investigators discover tiny sliding weights hidden in his shoe heels, suggesting a possible trick behind the sounds, yet the lingering signs of Maria and the uncanny precision of the footsteps keep the story’s haunting power disturbingly unresolved. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV29N06193706 20250629113742ernst 1937 US Reading ease score: 82.8 (6th grade). Easy to read. en Short stories Murderers -- Fiction Man-woman relationships -- Fiction PS Text Category: Short Stories Category: Science-Fiction & Fantasy Category: American Literature 58613 2025-09-30T08:35:51.856367 text/html 33850 2025-08-07T10:12:15 text/html 349259 2025-09-30T08:35:54.998385 application/epub+zip 348008 2025-09-30T08:35:53.114414 application/epub+zip 214887 2025-09-30T08:35:52.327344 application/epub+zip 1033371 2025-09-30T08:35:56.324395 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1026540 2025-09-30T08:35:54.421343 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 50826 2025-09-30T08:35:51.710407 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 30966 2025-08-07T10:12:15 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 18001 2025-09-30T08:35:56.468315 application/rdf+xml 31833 2025-09-30T08:35:52.676393 image/jpeg 4888 2025-09-30T08:35:52.508334 image/jpeg 1111917 2025-09-30T08:35:51.875352 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia en.wikipedia en.wikipedia