Timeless Tales: Regenerating the Public Domain
Generated By ChatGPT, Images Generated By Multiples
Welcome to Timeless Tales, an experiment in telling AI generated stories as ethically as possible. Here, we will be using public domain stories and the characters who drive them as a base but in a way that tries to appeal to what folks loved about them. Please note that for obvious reasons, you can copy and paste this anywhere and do what you want with it because these are AI generated. So if you get bored, we encourage you to make you’re own versions.
Jigong and the Phantom Bride
One evening, in the town of Songling, an old man named Master Zhao rushed into the temple, breathless and pale.
“Master Jigong!” he cried. “You must help me! My son is bewitched!”
Jigong, dressed in his usual ragged kasaya, sat cross-legged on the temple steps, fanning himself with his broken fan. His bare foot tapped a lazy rhythm against the stone, his other sandal missing, as usual. He looked up from his bowl of wine.
“Bewitched?” Jigong took another sip. “Is he chasing after a fox spirit? Happens all the time, you know.”
“No!” Master Zhao shook his head. “He is marrying a ghost!”
Jigong spit out his wine. “A ghost? Now that’s interesting. Weddings are expensive, though. Will you at least get a dowry out of it?”
Master Zhao wrung his hands. “Please, Master! My son, Zhao Liang, has been acting strangely. He barely eats, speaks in riddles, and only leaves the house at night. Last night, I followed him and saw him whispering to a woman in white.”
Jigong raised an eyebrow. “A woman in white?”
Master Zhao shivered. “Yes! She floated above the ground and had no shadow! Then, she turned and looked right at me with empty, glowing eyes!”
Jigong scratched his chin. “Well, I do love a good wedding. Let’s go.”
The Midnight Bride
That night, under the full moon, Jigong and Master Zhao followed Zhao Liang as he wandered into the old graveyard outside town. Sure enough, a pale woman in white awaited him, her long sleeves drifting in an invisible wind. Her face was beautiful but deathly pale, and her eyes glowed faintly.
“My love,” she whispered, holding out a delicate, ice-cold hand. “Come away with me. Our wedding night is near.”
Zhao Liang, entranced, took her hand and stepped forward.
Jigong yawned loudly. “Ahh, young love! So tragic, so poetic. So stupid.”
The ghost bride’s head snapped toward him, her mouth curling into a sneer. “Who dares interrupt our love?”
Jigong waved his broken fan. “Oh, just a passing monk, wondering if you plan to take your groom to the underworld before or after the wedding banquet.”
Master Zhao gasped. “The underworld?! No!”
The ghost bride’s face darkened. “He is mine now.”
Jigong chuckled. “I get it. Marriage is for life… and in your case, afterlife. But tell me, dear bride—where is your bridal procession? Your lanterns? Your musicians?” He shook his head. “You’re a very improper ghost.”
The ghost hesitated. Jigong leaned in and whispered, “I bet you’re just a wandering spirit who got caught up in romance. Isn’t that right?”
The bride let out a wailing shriek, her voice carrying on the wind. “I was betrayed! My wedding was never finished! My groom abandoned me, and I was buried in sorrow!”
Jigong nodded sagely. “Ah, so this is about unfinished business. Typical.” He turned to Zhao Liang. “You weren’t actually in love, were you? Just under a spell.”
Zhao Liang blinked, his mind clearing. “I… I don’t know what came over me…”
Jigong grinned. “That’s the power of obsession. Happens to gamblers, drunkards, and apparently, ghost brides. But don’t worry—I am an expert at completing unfinished business.”
He snapped open his broken fan, and with a flick of his wrist, the wind around them shifted. The lanterns in the distance flickered to life, casting an eerie glow.
Jigong slammed his foot down. “I now pronounce you… released!”
A gust of wind swept through the graveyard. The ghost let out a final sigh, and her form began to fade.
“My wedding…” she whispered. “It is truly over.”
With a final soft smile, she disappeared into the night, leaving only the scent of orchids.
Jigong dusted himself off. “There. No need for a divorce.”
Master Zhao fell to his knees, bowing. “Master Jigong, you have saved my son!”
Jigong picked up a discarded dumpling from Zhao Liang’s pocket and took a bite. “Saved him? Bah. I just hate messy weddings.”
He yawned, stretched, and wandered off, humming a drunken song as the first light of dawn touched the graveyard.
The End.
Spring-Heeled Jack: The Hollow Knock
In the fog-veiled town of Coldhearth, built where Roman roads once split the moors, people no longer spoke his name aloud. Spring-Heeled Jack had once been a laugh, a drunken tale told at hearthsides. But now, children drew him in soot behind cupboards, and adults walked with iron nails sewn in their cuffs, just in case the rumors were real.
They said he came with a knock that wasn’t heard with the ears, but felt in the gut—like a bad hunch given form. They said he could leap over roofs, spit fire, and vanish through the keyhole. But what they didn’t say, what the penny dreadfuls never printed, was that he only appeared to those hiding guilt.
And Coldhearth? Coldhearth was full of the guilty.
The Story Begins
The town’s new curate, Sister Magdalen, had never believed in devils. She’d come from the city to tend to Coldhearth’s forgotten parish—a once-proud church now overgrown with vine and nettle. Her hands, rough from pruning ivy, found more rot than root.
One night, a child was found trembling in the rectory steps. Not injured—but changed. Silent. Blank-eyed. Her name was Elsie. Her mouth was caked with soot, and her hands smelled of lamp oil. The only thing she would do was draw—over and over—a long-legged man with bright buttons and a grin like a cracked teapot.
Villagers begged Magdalen to send the child away. “She’s marked,” they whispered. “She saw him.”
But Magdalen refused. She’d seen too much cruelty to believe in monsters with claws. Monsters wore human skin, and they voted, or gossiped, or punished women for learning to read.
Unearthing the Truth
In the village hall, Magdalen found an old pamphlet—“The True and Most Horrid History of Spring-Heeled Jack”—filed behind broken hymnals. The tale matched the child’s drawing too closely to ignore. But in the margins, a name had been crossed out repeatedly: Hargrave.
So she asked the blacksmith.
Hargrave had been the old magistrate—the kind who had the poor whipped and the orphans pressed into chimney-work. Twenty years dead now, and no one mourned. But rumor had it he’d made a pact to hide the crimes of his peers… and that when his body was buried, the iron spikes they placed around his grave had bent outward.
The Climb to the Chapel Roof
That night, Magdalen kept a lantern by the child’s bedside. Fog rolled in thick, unnatural. The air curdled with the scent of burning pitch.
Then came the knock—not on the door, but in her chest.
She turned to the window—and there he stood.
Spring-Heeled Jack.
His coat too fine, his face too long, his eyes reflecting lanternlight like oil. A deep bend in his knees, like a man forever crouched to leap. He didn’t breathe, but his shoulders heaved as if laughing silently.
He pointed to the child.
Magdalen barred the door, but he didn’t need doors. He stepped sideways—into the wall, like ink spilling through paper—and emerged from the rafters.
The Reckoning
But Spring-Heeled Jack did not touch the girl. Instead, he turned to Magdalen—and spoke without lips moving.
“I hunt only those who shield what must not be forgotten.”
In that moment, Magdalen understood. The village had buried its sins—children stolen for labor, girls accused of witchcraft, elders left to starve. They blamed devils, not themselves.
Spring-Heeled Jack was no devil. He was a memory with claws.
The End (For Now)
Magdalen did not flee. She opened the old church and rang the rusted bell until dawn. She painted the names of the lost on every pew, even the ones scratched out of record.
The child, Elsie, finally spoke.
“He stopped smiling,” she said. “He left.”
From that day on, the knock was never heard again.
But Magdalen knew better. Spring-Heeled Jack doesn’t vanish. He waits. In soot, in shadow, in the lies towns forget to bury deep enough.
The Steam Man and the Devil’s Tracks
The wind howled over the prairie, kicking up dust and tumbleweeds as Johnny Brainerd adjusted the brass gauges on his invention. The Steam Man, a 10-foot-tall mechanical colossus, stood motionless before him, its iron body gleaming in the setting sun. With a hiss of steam and a chuff of gears, the automaton flexed its piston-driven legs, ready to thunder across the open land.
Johnny wasn’t a gunslinger or a cavalry scout—he was an inventor, small and frail, but with a mind sharper than a Bowie knife. His machine had already made him a legend. Where horses faltered and trains required tracks, the Steam Man conquered all. It had carried Johnny through Indian Territory, across bandit-infested badlands, and even outpaced a buffalo stampede. But tonight, it would face something far worse.
The town of Larkspur sat silent ahead. Too silent. No lights in the saloons, no children playing near the well. A ghost town? No—Johnny had been here just weeks ago, selling supplies. Something had happened.
As he pulled the lever, the Steam Man stomped forward, its furnace-heart glowing red in the dusk. Then he saw them—the tracks. Not wagon ruts or horse prints, but deep gouges in the hard-packed earth, like something enormous had been dragged away.
“Not the first time,” muttered Hank Rollins, a grizzled trapper who had hired Johnny for safe passage. “Heard stories ‘bout somethin’ out here. The Devil’s Train, they call it.”
Johnny scoffed. “No such thing. But whatever took these people left a trail.”
They followed the gouges through the tall grass until they reached an old rail line, long abandoned. Then they saw it—looming on the horizon.
A train.
Not a regular locomotive, but a monstrous iron beast with wheels too large and a cowcatcher that looked like gnashing jaws. It belched black smoke, its furnace glowing blue, not red. And it moved without tracks, gliding over the prairie like a specter.
Then Johnny saw the cages.
People, whole families, locked in iron-barred cars, their faces hollow with fear. The train wasn’t just taking them—it was feeding on them, the blue glow pulsing stronger as it drained their energy.
“Sweet mercy,” Hank whispered. “It ain’t a train. It’s a hunter.”
Johnny clenched his fists. No machine, no matter how unnatural, was beyond reason. He swung onto the Steam Man’s platform, gripping the controls.
“Then let’s hunt it back,” he said, pulling the throttle.
With a deafening hiss, the Steam Man charged. The prairie trembled as steam-driven legs pounded forward, closing the gap between man and monster. The Devil’s Train screeched, its iron whistle blaring like the cry of a dying thing.
The chase was on.
And Johnny Brainerd had never lost a race.
“Ally Sloper and the Great Gaslight Investment Scheme”
ACT I: THE BRILLIANT IDEA
It was a typical Tuesday morning in Somnolent Street: the sky was overcast, the chimneys coughed politely, and Alexander “Ally” Sloper had once again been evicted from his lodgings. He stood outside Number 13½, his worldly possessions stuffed into a mothbitten carpetbag and his debt ledger longer than the queue at the pawnshop.
“Progress,” he muttered to no one in particular, “is like breakfast: overrated and rarely affordable.”
Ally’s eyes fell on a flickering gaslight outside the local public house, The Wheezing Parson. His monocle gleamed with sudden inspiration.
“GASLIGHT! That’s it! A gentleman’s fortune lies in illumination!”
With the logic of a man who once tried to patent square billiard balls to stop them rolling away, Ally decided he would found the British Illuminated Finance & Utility Cooperative—or BIFUC, for short.
ACT II: THE PITCH
Ally’s first victim—I mean, investor—was the ever-gullible Uncle Ebenezer, a clockmaker who believed time was a conspiracy invented by the Swiss.
“Uncle,” Ally beamed, arms open like a returning war hero who had spent the battle behind a curtain, “imagine a world where the gaslight never dims, and neither do your finances!”
Uncle Ebenezer blinked. “Is this another one of your schemes, boy?”
Ally shook his head solemnly. “Certainly not! This is a cooperative. We are not scoundrels. We are shareholders with ambition.”
Ebenezer handed over his coin purse with the weariness of a man who had done this before and knew exactly how it would end.
ACT III: THE COMPANY EXPANDS
Before long, BIFUC had exactly six investors, two gaslights (one of which was stolen from a rival firm), and a suspiciously forged deed to a sewer hatch.
Ally’s fellow conspirators included:
Mrs. Sloper, his long-suffering landlady and unofficial bailiff.
The Lodger, a silent man who had not paid rent since 1873 and communicated solely via newspaper clippings.
Professor Foggs, who claimed to have invented the phrase “hot air” and made a living bottling it.
Bessie Bint, a barmaid with a knack for persuasion and a sideline in dramatic reenactments of unpaid tabs.
And Young Blenkinsop, a boy who delivered messages, coal, and unsolicited poetry.
They met in the back of the Wheezing Parson, under a flickering gaslight and the watchful eye of a bar tab that had developed its own ecosystem.
“Gentlefolk,” Ally declared, “we shall become London’s premiere illuminators! We shall be so rich that Parliament will name a puddle after us!”
ACT IV: A BURNING SUCCESS
On the eve of their grand unveiling, Ally unveiled his crowning achievement: a gaslamp powered entirely by the hot air of public opinion, stored in jars labeled “Election Speeches, 1884.”
When lit, the lamp emitted a sound not unlike a minister dodging a question.
The press arrived, eager to ridicule.
But as the lamp flickered into life, something astonishing happened: it exploded, shattering the pub’s stained-glass windows and launching a flaming portrait of Queen Victoria three blocks north, where it was mistaken for a sign of divine intervention.
The Times called it “A spectacular failure of ordinary magnitude.”
The Sloperian Gazette (written, printed, and circulated entirely by Ally himself) called it “A Glorious Success That Lit Up the Nation.”
ACT V: THE AFTERMATH
Ally escaped charges on a technicality involving a missing comma and a bribe disguised as a fruit basket. BIFUC dissolved shortly after into a cloud of soot and outstanding warrants.
Uncle Ebenezer got his money back—sort of. He now owned a lamppost in Wales and a controlling interest in a bankrupt bathhouse.
Back in Somnolent Street, Ally returned to Number 13½ (having sweet-talked Mrs. Sloper with a “limited-edition gas lamp candleholder”) and resumed his usual activities: napping, scheming, and avoiding eye contact with creditors.
As for the public, they never forgot the BIFUC fiasco.
They just couldn’t agree whether it was a crime, a play, or the greatest comedy of the decade.