"The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins

British author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is best known for his two mystery novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White. He’s also known as a friend of Charles Dickens; the two met in 1850, and Dickens not only published several of Collins’s stories in his magazines, he also collaborated with Collins on both fiction and drama projects. 

In 1878, Collins published a strange story (which may be redundant; most of his stories were strange) entitled The Haunted Hotel: A Tale of Modern Venice. The novel is set in England, Ireland, and Italy, and it certainly has the stamp of Collins, being a mystery with supernatural or ghostly overtones.

 

An English aristocrat, Lord Montbarry, has surprised his family and friends by breaking off his engagement with a cousin, Agnes Lockwood, to marry a foreign countess. The new Lady Montbarry is completely unacceptable to the family; she and her brother, a supposed baron, seem more like goldiggers. When they learn that the lord’s wealth is all tied to entailed holdings (which means they can’t own and sell anything; the property remains with whomever holds the title), they induce the lord to take out a life insurance policy.

 

While on their extended honeymoon, the newlyweds rent a palace in Venice. The bride’s brother joins them. And it is not long before the lord succumbs to what is diagnosed as bronchitis. An investigation is launched by the insurance company, but all seems aboveboard.

 

Wilkie Collins

Except, of course, it’s not. The widow is becoming haunted by what has happened; the story beings with her consulting a renowned physician in London, trying to determine f she’s going mad. She has become convinced that the jilted fiancée, who by all accounts is a young woman of sterling reputation, will be the instrument of the widow’s own death. 

 

Collins mixes mystery and a ghost story together. He adds the deceased lord’s missing manservant, and a mysterious payment made to the manservant’s wife, swirling the plot into an even more mysterious direction. We know what likely happened – Lord Montbarry was likely murdered. But we don’t know what happened, and how the perpetrators managed to pull it off.

 

The Haunted Hotel is a classic Wilkie Collins novel, with a mix of mystery, murder, and the supernatural. Originally published in 1878, it has the charmingly formal language of the Victorian age coupled with a tale of the supernatural. The ghosts of those who die before their time don’t rest easy.