A nobleman lures his drunken rival into catacombs where he walls him up for all eternity. A recluse in a “mansion of gloom” entombs his living, breathing sister in a vault. A lunatic who insists he is sane kills and dismembers an old man, and only confesses to his crime when he purports to hear his victim’s still-beating heart beneath his floorboards. A man consumed by rage and “gin-nurtured” malevolence punishes his cat by gouging its eye out. And a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition is tortured by the “most demoniac of men” and forced to choose between plunging into a pit or being sliced up by a razor-sharp pendulum.