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Updated: May 31, 2025
If I had been warned I might have taken precautions, or left the place, or sent Roland away, a hundred things which now I could not do; and here I was with my boy in a brain-fever, and his life, the most precious life on earth, hanging in the balance, dependent on whether or not I could get to the reason of a commonplace ghost-story!
The veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged by A Strange Story, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for more than a generation; while The Haunted and the Haunters, a brief ghost-story contributed to Blackwood's Magazine, has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done.
All this P. Sybarite comprehended in a glance and, comprehending, bristled like a truculent game-cock or the faithful hound in the ghost-story. The aspect of Respectability seemed to have upon him the effect of a violent irritant; his eyes took on a hot, hard look, his lips narrowed to a thin, inflexible crease, and his hands unconsciously closed.
An ancestor of his was mixed up in it. You know every Breton house has its ghost-story; and some of them are rather unpleasant." "Yes but those dogs?" "Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the peasants say there's one day in the year when a lot of dogs appear there; and that day the keeper and his daughter go off to Morlaix and get drunk. The women in Brittany drink dreadfully."
Scarce otherwise, surely, than the unforgotten dead are alive alive in unforgetting love. It is rather strange, if you will give it a thought, how much of our real life is thus literally a ghost-story.
This tale it was which had come into Tom's head as he listened to honest Dick Wharton's ghost-story, while the means which he had adopted to verify his supposition sprang from his own fertile Irish brain. "We'll take it down to Cape Town," continued Tom, "and if we can't dispose of it with advantage there, it will be worth our while to ship for London with it.
And so on through those familiar introductory sentences, in which Jacob Marley's demise is insisted upon with such ludicrous particularity. The momentary sense of incongruity here referred to was lost, however, directly afterwards, as everyone's attention became absorbed in the author's own relation to us of his world-famous ghost-story of Christmas.
'You'll run about telling that fine ghost-story, said Ida roughly. 'But Louisa could not have been a ghost, said Rose, bewildered. 'I thought she was his nursery-maid taking him somewhere! Didn't she then with a sudden flash 'Oh! 'Turned off long ago for flirting with that scamp Rattler, said Herbert. 'Now she has run off with him. 'There was a sailor-looking man with her, said Rose.
Miss Phillips hesitated, glancing keenly at the eager faces of the girls around her, who now seemed perfectly calm and self-possessed. Then she looked at her watch; it was not quite six o'clock. There would still be time; but she hesitated to tell a ghost-story in the same house in the very room! where the ghost was supposed to appear. It was the girls' own tranquil manner that decided her.
He sat up in bed, and the ghost-story came in a rush to his mind. His fire was dead, and the room was consequently dark; yet by and by he knew, though he heard no sound, that his door had opened. He cried out, "Who is that?" but got no answer. By an effort he jumped up and went to the door, which was ajar. His bedroom was on the first floor, and looking up the stairs he could see nothing.
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