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Three Ghost Stories

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Title: Three Ghost Stories

Author: Charles Dickens

 
Release date: April 1, 1998 [eBook #1289]
 Most recently updated: March 9, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1289

Credits: Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of "Christmas Stories" by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE GHOST STORIES ***

Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of "Christmas Stories"
by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

 THREE GHOST STORIES

 by Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

The Haunted House 121
The Trial For Murder 303
The Signal-Man 312

THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
IN TWO CHAPTERS. {121}

 [1859.]

THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE.

UNDER none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none
of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance
with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in
the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no
lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to
heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it direct from a
railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway
station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I
had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the
embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly
commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
commonplace people-and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on
myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine
autumn morning.

The manner of my lighting on it was this.

I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop by
the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary residence
in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened
to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely
place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and
had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern
Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to
find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I
hadn't been to sleep at all;-upon which question, in the first imbecility
of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager
by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had,
through the night-as that opposite man always has-several legs too many,
and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct
(which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a
pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had
appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and
bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking
them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he
listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his
demeanour became unbearable.

It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had
out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the
curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and
between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller and said:

"I _beg_ your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in me?"
For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or
my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.

The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if the
back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a lofty
look of compassion for my insignificance:

"In you, sir?-B."

"B, sir?" said I, growing warm.

"I have nothing to do with you, sir," returned the gentleman; "pray let
me listen-O."

He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.

At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication with
the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my relief that the
gentleman might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for
(some of) whom I have the highest respect, but whom I don't believe in.
I was going to ask him the question, when he took the bread out of my
mouth.

"You will excuse me," said the gentleman contemptuously, "if I am too
much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all about it. I
have passed the night-as indeed I pass the whole of my time now-in
spiritual intercourse."

"O!" said I, somewhat snappishly.

"The conferences of the night began," continued the gentleman, turning
several leaves of his note-book, "with this message: 'Evil communications
corrupt good manners.'"

"Sound," said I; "but, absolutely new?"

"New from spirits," returned the gentleman.

I could only repeat my rather snappish "O!" and ask if I might be
favoured with the last communication.

"'A bird in the hand,'" said the gentleman, reading his last entry with
great solemnity, "'is worth two in the Bosh.'"

"Truly I am of the same opinion," said I; "but shouldn't it be Bush?"

"It came to me, Bosh," returned the gentleman.

The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had delivered
this special revelation in the course of the night. "My friend, I hope
you are pretty well. There are two in this railway carriage. How do you
do? There are seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine spirits
here, but you cannot see them. Pythagoras is here. He is not at liberty
to mention it, but hopes you like travelling." Galileo likewise had
dropped in, with this scientific intelligence. "I am glad to see you,
_amico_. _Come sta_? Water will freeze when it is cold enough.
_Addio_!" In the course of the night, also, the following phenomena had
occurred. Bishop Butler had insisted on spelling his name, "Bubler," for
which offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed
as out of temper. John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had
repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint
authors of that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers
and Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England, had
described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh circle, where
he was learning to paint on velvet, under the direction of Mrs. Trimmer
and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman

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