Charles DickensClassics · Fiction·1812–1870
Three Ghost Stories
Synopsis
This collection gathers three of the author's supernatural tales, the most celebrated being a haunting set on a lonely stretch of railway. In it, a railway signalman, isolated in a deep cutting beside the tracks, confides that he is repeatedly visited by a spectral figure whose appearances seem to foretell disaster on the line.
The narrator listens with growing unease as the signalman recounts the apparition's warnings and the calamities that have followed, building toward a chilling and ironic conclusion.
The collection also includes a tale in which a murdered man's ghost shadows the foreman of the jury trying his killer, ensuring that justice is not escaped, and a story drawn from a haunted-house framework in which the narrator confronts the lingering presence within an old, unsettled home.
Across all three, the stories trade in atmosphere, dread, and the thin membrane between the living and the dead rather than overt gore. Compact and tightly told, they showcase the author's gift for unease and his interest in conscience, fate, and the supernatural intruding upon ordinary Victorian life.
Together they form a brief but enduring entry in the English ghost-story tradition.
How it reads
Prose complexity 4/10
Genres
Frequently asked questions
Which stories are in Three Ghost Stories?
The collection contains 'The Signal-Man,' 'The Haunted House,' and 'The Trial for Murder.' 'The Signal-Man,' about a railway worker warned of disaster by a spectre, is the best known.