"To Be Read at Dusk" by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens loved a good ghost story. A Christmas Carol. for example, is many things – a tale of Christmas that changed the holiday forever, a moral injunction to care for those less well off, and a reminder not to let the past strangle the present and the future. But it is, at its most basic, a ghost story. 

For some years, three ghost stories by Dickens have been bundled together and published in a short volume under the title of the first story, To Be Read at Dusk. They were originally published as short stories in various magazines between 1852 and 1866. 

 

The telling of the title story, “To Be Read at Dusk,” is set in Switzerland, while the story itself is set in Italy. A traveler is staying at a Swiss inn, along with five couriers of various nationalities. He’s quietly listening to their conversation, and soon enough it turns to a ghost story. A newlywed couple from England rent a villa in Italy, and all seems to be going well. But the young bride is terrified of a particular face, and it’s a face of someone she doesn’t know. Almost inevitably, she will meet the bearer of that face. 

 

Charles Dickens

“In “The Signalman,” a traveler at a train station calls out to the signalman and terrifies the man. The traveler is taken aback; he doesn’t know why the signalman should react the way he does. The signalman tells him a story, and the traveler is left wondering if he himself might be a ghost or something supernatural. 

 

The third story is “The Trial for Murder.” A youngish man living in the Piccadilly section of London is startled at home one night to see what looks like a dead man beckoning him at the door. No one’s there, and the man might have thought nothing of it. Except he’s called to be on a jury, and is, in fact, elected jury foreman. And the trial involves the man whose apparition was seen at the door.

 

More than 150 years have passed t=since the stories were first published, but the three tales in “To Be Read at Dusk” remain entertaining, and slightly chilling, ghost stories.

English Heritage: "Eight Ghosts"

Give eight writers an assignment, and you never know what they’ll come up with. 

The English Heritage organization cares for more than 400 properties, buildings, and monuments, ranging from Roman forts and medieval castles to Cold War bunkers. To help raise funds for conservation work, it asked eight English authors to choose their own English Heritage site, spend time there, including after hours, and write a ghost story involving the site.

 

The result is Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories. It’s a small gem of book, with some cracking good stories that each pack at punch.

 

For “They Flee From Me That Sometimes Did Me Seek.” Sarah Perry (After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent) selected Audley End, a house built on the site of an abbey in Essex. She tells a tale of a young woman who joins a team restoring an old tapestry, who soon finds out that the work will figuratively and literally absorb her. In “Mr. Lanyard’s Last Case,” Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney, Devil’s Day) visited Carlisle Castle, and spins a historical story of an attorney prosecuting the rebels who fought and lost the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

 

In “The Bunker,” Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Pier Falls) selected the York Cold War Bunker, telling the story of a woman caught between present and future. Kenilworth Castle is the setting for Kamila Shamsie’s (Burnt Shadows, Home Fire) “Foreboding,” in which a new guard starts his job and finds what he’s not looking for.

 

Stuart Evers (If This is Home, Ten Stories About Smoking) goes to Dover Castle for his story, “Never Departed More,” about an actress who stays there to soak in the atmosphere and soaks in a bit more than expected. Housesteads Roman Fort is the setting for “The Wall” by Kate Clanchy (Meeting the English, Antigona and Me), in which a mother and father takes her truant teenaged daughter for a day trip – and little is what it seems. 

 

Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) selected Pendennis Castle for “As Strong as Death,” about in impending wedding haunted by a ghost of woman who disguised herself as a sailor. And Max Porter (Lanny, Grief is the Thing with Feathers) used Eltham Palace to tell his story “Mrs. Charbury at Eltham,” about an elderly woman who returns to the place where her sister disappeared.

 

The volume also includes a short essay by Andrew Martin (The Somme Stations, Soot), which explains how the castles, abbeys, and houses of England inspired the ghost story. Also included is a gazetteer of English Heritage hauntings, a detailed list of all the places said to have ghosts. 

 

Eight Ghosts is both a collection of some really good (and scary) stories and a clever way to raise funds for a worthy cause.

 

Related:

 

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

 

My review of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

 

My review of Lanny by Max Porter.

 

Top photograph by Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash. Used with permission.