The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) by Charles Dickens
Excerpt from Chapter One: The Gift Bestowed
Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.
This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man!
It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music. It seemed to listen too.
At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face.
“Here again!” he said.
“Here again,” replied the Phantom.
“I see you in the fire,” said the haunted man; “I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night.”
The Phantom moved its head, assenting.
“Why do you come, to haunt me thus?”
“I come as I am called,” replied the Ghost.
“No. Unbidden,” exclaimed the Chemist.
“Unbidden be it,” said the Spectre. “It is enough. I am here.”
Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two faces—if the dread lineaments behind the chair might be called a face—both addressed towards it, as at first, and neither looking at the other. But, now, the haunted man turned, suddenly, and stared upon the Ghost. The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on him.
Christmas Eve, in Victorian times, was the night for ghostly tales. Charles Dickens already mastered the theme with “A Christmas Carol.” Mastered being the word, considering how long the popularity of the tale has persisted and its many incarnations. The carol was not his only story featuring a Christmas Eve spirit.
In “The Haunted Man,” a spirit visits a professor of chemistry, by the name of Redlowe. The professor was dwelling on his past. The phantom offers him a choice, to keep his memories, or to forget them. Redlowe was also given the option to bestow this supposed gift on others. What follows is a series of events set to prove that people need their pasts in order to be who they are in that moment.
This novella marks the fifth and final Dicken’s Christmas story.
To read “The Haunted Man,” in full, it can be found at Project Gutenberg.
Excerpt Source: The Project Gutenberg Book of The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, by Charles Dickens
The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James
“I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”
This story first appeared in a serial format in Collier’s Weekly (January 27 – April 16, 1898). James tells the tale of a governess who takes a position in the household of a handsome bachelor, who has the care of his niece and nephew. She has to protect the children from the strange and evil happenings in their isolated country house.
Collier’s Weekly, illustration by Eric Pape – Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 5 March 1898, Public Domain
“I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Wasn’t it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?”
“He did stand there!—But high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower”
Collier’s Weekly, illustration by Eric Pape – Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, (12 February 1898) Public Domain
“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”
“Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is.”― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
A Victorian Ghost Story 