This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, charlie@idirect.com.
Please note: This edition does not contain the second chapter ofthe first story, "The Haunted House", by Dickens. It can be foundin 3ghst10.txt or 3ghst10.zip, 1998, "Three Ghost Stories byCharles Dickens."
The Lock and Key Library
Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English
Edited by Julian Hawthorne
The Haunted House
No. I Branch Line: The Signal Man
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain
The Incantation
The Avenger
Melmoth the Wanderer
A Mystery with a Moral
On Being Found Out
The Notch on the Ax
Bourgonef
The Closed Cabinet
Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environedby none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first makeacquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmaspiece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There wasno wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwontedcircumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that:I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not morethan a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stoodoutside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I couldsee the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in thevalley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace,because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterlycommonplace people—and there my vanity steps in; but, I will takeit 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 stopby the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporaryresidence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, andwho had happened to drive past the house, had written to me tosuggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train atmidnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had satlooking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky,and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find thenight gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that Ihadn't been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the firstimbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I wouldhave done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me. Thatopposite man had had, through the night—as that opposite manalways has—several legs too many, and all of them too long. Inaddition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to beexpected of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and hadbeen perpetually listening and taking notes. It had appeared to methat these aggrav