Stephen’s Top Ten Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories

To get us in the mood for Halloween, the editor of our Mystery & Supernatural series, Dr Stephen Carver, picks some of his favourite classic ghost stories. 

I think ghost stories are ingrained in all of us. It’s one of our ways of coming to terms with death. In my case, my late mother was a Spiritualist and I grew up around readings and séances. To this day I remain fascinated by and still a little afraid of ghosts. As I came to supernatural fiction before films like Poltergeist turned the uncanny into Star Wars, my favourites all come from the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Ghost Story’, from Dickens and Le Fanu to M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, with brooding gothic atmosphere, a real sting in the tale, and a very dark sense of humour. I sought these out as a kid in the seventies through the New English Library anthologies edited by the wonderful Peter Haining, and later, as a student in the nineties, I was around for the first Wordsworth ‘Tales of Mystery and The Supernatural’ collections. You can imagine, then, what an honour and a pleasure it is to now be editing the series myself.

Here then, is a list of my favourite British ghost stories from the long nineteenth century in chronological order. If, like me, you’re already well versed in all this ancient and curious lore then we should compare notes. If you’re coming to the genre as a new reader, then this will hopefully serve as a nice introduction to the classic ghost story. Stephen’s Top Ten

The Old Nurse’s Story – Elizabeth Gaskell (1852)

Best known for Mary Barton (1848), it’s easy to think of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) as primarily a social critic, but she was also deeply superstitious and loved folklore and scary stories, once frightening the life out of Charlotte Brontë with a late-night anecdote. She wrote several gothic tales and a handful of ghost stories of which ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ is one of the best. The story was first published by Dickens in an extra Christmas number of Household Words, which he always loaded with seasonal ghost stories. The ‘Old Nurse’, ‘Hestor’, relates the story of the time she was a young servant in a remote country house desperately trying to protect a child in her charge from a supernatural threat born of a dark family secret. Gaskell blends suspense with a moral lesson, and the story is also notable for its feminism. Following writers like Mary Shelley, Gaskell is in the tradition of the ‘Female Gothic’, which uses horror as a veiled way to explore anxieties over motherhood, domestic abuse, and female sexuality. There’s no male hero waiting in the wings to solve the problem. The men in the story are the problem. I love this story for the ghostly child outside the window. She reminds me of ‘Ralphie Glick’ in Salem’s Lot (1979), one of the creepiest scenes in television history. Stephen’s Top Ten

The Signal-man – Charles Dickens (1866)

Charles Dickens’ (1812–1870) love of ghost stories is well known, and he wrote many himself, most notably A Christmas Carol in 1843, establishing the tradition of the Christmas ghost story in British popular culture. First published in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round, ‘The Signal-man’ is regarded by scholars of the genre as one of the best, if not the best, ghost stories ever written for its combination of suspense and growing menace, oppressive gothic atmosphere, character development, and denouement. Based alone in a signal-box in a deep cutting by a tunnel entrance – ‘as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw … as if I had left the natural world’ – a signal-man gradually opens up to a visiting stranger about an apparition he has seen twice at the mouth of the tunnel, both times foreshadowing a terrible accident on the line. And now, he’s seen it again… Readers of a certain age will remember being scarred for life by the 1976 television adaptation by Andrew Davies and Lawrence Gordon Clark starring Denholm Elliott in the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas series. I was one of those children. Stephen’s Top Ten

Green Tea – J.S. Le Fanu (1872)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish Gothic and Sensation writer, and a key figure in the evolution of the Victorian Ghost Story. He was greatly admired by Dickens, who sought his advice when writing ‘The Signal-man’, and ‘Green Tea’ was first published in All the Year Round. M.R. James, meanwhile, led a revival of interest in Le Fanu in the 20th century, and was greatly influenced by him, sharing a similar delight in gallows humour. Like James, any of Le Fanu’s stories are worth seeking out but ‘Green Tea’ is one of the classics, exploring his common theme of an unfortunate protagonist accidently accessing a higher plane of perception – ‘interior sight’ – that means they can see supernatural entities who, in turn, can see them. In this case, a bookish clergyman is haunted by a malevolent monkey who he attributes to drinking too much green tea. The story indicates the growing Victorian interest in psychological maladies and treatments, and is presented as a ‘case study’ by ‘Dr. Martin Hesselius’, a practitioner of ‘Metaphysical Medicine’ and an ancestor of Bram Stoker’s ‘Professor Van Helsing’, and occult detectives like Algernon Blackwood’s ‘John Silence’ and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘Thomas Carnacki’. For a Le Fanu favourite, I am torn between this story and ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (1839), but ‘Green Tea’ just has the edge because of Hesselius, who recounts the story with ghoulish relish. Stephen’s Top Ten

The Phantom Rickshaw – Rudyard Kipling (1888)

Like Gaskell, Kipling (1865–1936) is another author associated with a specific style of writing (patriotic and imperialist) who actually wrote a lot of horror and supernatural fiction, mostly set in India or during the First World War. ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ is one of Kipling’s early Indian stories and an example of ‘Imperial Gothic’ writing, an anxiety-ridden Victorian sub-genre of magazine fiction in which English Christian values collide with and are corrupted by the exotic and the Eastern. Like Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’, there’s also a certain level of psychological ambiguity, inasmuch as we never know whether the protagonist is dealing with a genuine haunting or a hallucination brought on by fever and overwork. Either way, ‘a little bit of the Dark World came through,’ and the story is incredibly disturbing, as a young man in the British Raj engaged to be married is driven slowly out of his mind by the ghost of a rejected lover following him around the streets in the ‘phantom rickshaw’. Like the ‘Bradley Headstone/Eugene Wrayburn’ story arc in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865), this is an early example of stalking in literature. Many moons ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on Kipling’s complex gothic fiction, inaugurating my academic career and prefacing a doctorate on the Victorian popular gothic.

A Terrible Vengeance – Charlotte Riddell (1889)

Charlotte Riddell née Cowan (1832–1906) was a prolific Northern Irish novelist and short story writer whose work is nowadays unjustly neglected. She wrote in several popular genres, including the ghost story, and contemporary reviewers frequently compared her favourably with Le Fanu. In the 1860s, she was part-owner and editor of St. James’s Magazine, a prominent London literary journal. Charlotte’s husband, Joseph, was decent but useless, a failed inventor and entrepreneur with no head for business. Her writing was thus their major source of income, and she was tormented by money worries throughout her life, an anxiety often transmitted to her protagonists. In this story, for example, the motivations of all the main characters are financial, from marrying for money to blackmail. She often wrote about haunted houses – a common feature being the difficulty in letting such places for the owners – but in ‘A Terrible Vengeance’ it is a person rather than a place that is haunted, by dainty wet footprints that follow him everywhere. Like M.R. James’ ‘Martin’s Close’ (1911) and Stephen King’s ‘Something to Tide You Over’ (1982), there’s just something particularly sinister about the drowned dead. I was torn between this story and Riddell’s haunted house mystery ‘Old Mrs. Jones’ (1882), but this ghost got to me more. We’re presently preparing a new edition of Irish Ghost Stories in which Mrs. Riddell will feature quite prominently alongside writers like Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. Stephen’s Top Ten

The Shadow – E. Nesbit (1905)

Like Riddell, beloved British children’s writer Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) supported her family by writing, although her husband was not decent, fathering three children by other women. Best known as the author of The Railway Children (1906), Nesbit wrote for adults as well, including many tales of horror and the supernatural. As a result of childhood trauma, Nesbit had a morbid fear of the dark, which was often at the heart of her horror writing. Her most famous ghost story is ‘Man-size in Marble’ (1887), adapted by Mark Gatiss as Women of Stone for the BBC’s 2024 Ghost Story for Christmas, but ‘The Shadow’ is the most eerie and unsettling, literary gothic rather than a short, sharp shocker. The ghost itself is a sigh and a shadow, flowing from the darkness like black ink; its presence always a terrible omen in a claustrophobic domestic environment full of secrets and regrets. I’ve always loved Nesbit’s horror stories, and earlier this year I got to select and edit a new Wordsworth Editions’ collection.

Keeping His Promise – Algernon Blackwood (1906)

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) – known in his own day as ‘The Ghost Man’ – was a British broadcaster, journalist, traveller, mystic, and paranormal investigator, and, above all, a prolific and bestselling author of weird, occult, and supernatural fiction. H.P. Lovecraft was a devotee, calling Blackwood a ‘Modern Master of Horror.’ Not as well-known these days as he should be, if Blackwood is remembered at all it is probably for his spooky wilderness tale ‘The Wendigo’ (1910) and for the adventures of his occult detective ‘John Silence’, a kind of cross between Sherlock Holmes and John Constantine. ‘Keeping His Promise’ is one of Blackwood’s early ghost stories, and a very creepy one it is too. Blackwood often used sound as the foundation of a ghost story, rather like Robert Wise in his seminal 1963 movie The Haunting. After an old friend in some obvious distress visits a young medical student, he disappears from the room in which he’s staying, leaving behind the sound of deep regular breathing, as if of someone asleep. So where the hell did he go? It amazes me that Blackwood’s name has dropped off the horror radar, especially in his native country. We’ve just published a new collection of his weird fiction that I hope may go some way to reminding people of his macabre genius. Stephen’s Top Ten

The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions (1911)

Yorkshireman Oliver Onions (1873–1961) is another one of those writers whose fame did not survive their own era. The destructive nature of creativity was a recurring theme in his fiction, frequently linked to sexuality and repression. This can be seen in his most famous ghost story, ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, in which a blocked writer in a rundown rented property trying to meet a vital deadline either goes slowly out of his mind, or is increasingly possessed by an unseen but jealous female spirit. He is supported by a young Bohemian woman who would like to be more than a friend, but has no chance against the presence in the house. The ghost, if it be so, is manifest no more than in the crackling sound of a woman’s hair being brushed, and the accidental refrain of an old folk song in a dripping faucet. Onions was inspired when listening to his wife, the popular novelist Berta Ruck, brushing her hair before bed in their cold, dark house in Hampstead shortly after their marriage. Berta was so disturbed by the finished story that she insisted on moving. You can feel Modernism entering the ghost story with Onions, with a similarly complex subtlety to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), which isn’t in this list as it’s a novella. I also have a soft spot for Onions as he was the first author I wrote about on the Wordsworth blog.

The Thing in The Hall – E.F. Benson (1912)

As a student, Edward Frederic Benson OBE (1867–1940) attended the first of M.R. James’ Christmas Eve ghost story readings at Cambridge. His name is nowadays most closely linked to his enduringly popular ‘Mapp and Lucia’ series of comic novels, which are periodically re-adapted on television and radio, but he was also an accomplished writer of ghost stories, his story ‘The Bus Conductor’ featuring in the legendary British horror film Dead of Night (1944). Benson wrote conventional ghost stories in the Victorian tradition, as well as giving M.R. James a run for his money, but you can also see a pre-Lovecraftian development of the ‘weird’ as he work progressed, eschewing the more familiar gothic tropes in favour of something stranger, putting him in the same conceptual camp as writers like Blackwood and Onions. ‘The Thing in The Hall’ is one such story, presented as the transcript of a psychic experiment by two scientists which goes increasingly wrong: ‘It was like the shadow of some enormous slug, legless and fat, some two feet high by about four feet long. Only at one end of it was a head shaped like the head of seal, with open mouth and panting tongue…’ Next to M.R. James’, I enjoy reading Benson’s ghost stories the most. They’re imaginative, chilling, and very tightly written. Because Benson was also a humourist, he never takes himself too seriously either. I’m frequently reminded of that Alan Moore P.G. Wodehouse/H.P. Lovecraft pastiche ‘What Ho! Gods of the Abyss’ (2007). I came to Benson through the excellent Wordsworth collection Night Terrors edited by the late David Stuart Davies. Stephen’s Top Ten

A Warning to the Curious – M.R. James (1925)

Montague Rhodes James Litt. D. (1862–1936) was a medieval and biblical scholar, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Provost of King’s College and Eton College. He also wrote ghost stories for a bit of fun in his spare time, reading them to students on Christmas Eve. These stories are widely regarded as the greatest supernatural fiction in the English language, and have had a tremendous influence on the development of modern horror. James’ stories form the backbone of the BBC’s long-running Ghost Stories for Christmas series. ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is undoubtedly one of James’ best and most chilling stories, while characterising his style and motifs: a story within a story; a setting in the recent past; a haunted object; and a very nasty climax. The story is related to the writer by an academic who encountered an amateur archaeologist while holidaying on the South Coast. The man has found an Anglo-Saxon crown that legend says guards England from invasion. Unfortunately, the crown had a guardian too, who did not let his death keep him from the job. Though ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904) is a strong second place, ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is the one that gave me the willies the most when I read it as a kid. The 1972 Lawrence Gordon Clark television version is terrifying as well! This stuff stays with you.

So, these are my ‘Desert Island Ghost’ reads. Let me know what you think, and send us your list as well. And remember, whatever you do, don’t look behind you…

 

Main image Credit: Sara Winter /Alamy

For some ‘real’ ghost stories, see 12 Ghost Stories for Halloween 2025

Stephen’s Top Ten

Stephen’s Top Ten

Stephen’s Top Ten

Stephen’s Top Ten