Release date is 2025-08-07

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.)

Originally published: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1937