What did they fear most in the 19th century?

Anyone who's judge short-story contest, taught a fiction class, edited a magazine has seen these stories: I fell asleep and dreamed I was fighting with a bear and then I woke up and was scratched with claw marks! or I sat down at a bar and had a long conversation with a stranger who turned out to be the devil but when he left the bartender said too bad you spent the whole evening alone! or I know that an evil spirit walks through the old house moving things around and making noises but nobody believes me! or There's a story that I heard/that happened to me and you may not believe it but it's true. These are some of the tropes of horror and fantasy fiction, and they're well on display, in the earliest incarnations, in the Library of America "American Fantastic Tales" vol 1. Most of these early stories, except for the few by the masters (Poe, Hawthorne) are really pretty pedestrian: overheated, overwritten, drenched in atmosphere (gloomy woods, creaky mansions), not particularly rich by today's standard, even for pulps. The editor (Peter Straub) apparently has pretty lean pickings in the 19th century, and he's trying for variety not of subject (there just isn't so much variety, at least before the age of psychological realism), but of setting and authorship: the early stories include two by women, one by a black man; they're set various in New England, New York, California, indeterminate Europe. Nothing from the South, though, surprisingly. These earlier stories are a window on the deepest fears of their time, and it seems, from this small sample, that religious crisis played a much bigger role than it does today and that madness was frightful because so poorly understand: It was seen more as a possession than an illness.