Three Ghost Stories
1846
Dickens wrote these three tales in 1846, during the same fertile period that produced A Christmas Carol, and they share that book's uncanny ability to make the supernatural feel startlingly real. The collection opens with a narrator who, needing temporary lodging, disregards village warnings and moves into a house with a ghostly reputation. What follows blends dark comedy with genuine dread as he confronts not just specters, but the weight of secrets the living keep. The other two stories follow similarly: ordinary people encountering the extraordinary, their skepticism giving way to something far more unsettling. Dickens understood that ghost stories are really about guilt, memory, and the past's refusal to stay buried. These aren't tales of monsters, but of the haunted spaces we carry within ourselves. They move with the quick, assured pace of a master storyteller who knew exactly when to chill the blood and when to let humor provide relief. For readers who want their ghost stories with literary pedigree and psychological depth, this collection delivers both chills and satisfactions.
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“The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of intellect) burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested that her silver watch might be delivered over to her sister (2 Tuppintock’s Gardens, Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of anything happening to her from the damp. Streaker, the housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was the greater martyr. The Odd Girl, who had never been in the country, alone was pleased, and made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the garden outside the scullery window, and rearing an oak.””
— Charles Dickens
“considering””
— Charles Dickens
“grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here,”
— Charles Dickens
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Dickens, Charles. Three Ghost Stories. Lex, lex-books.com/book/three-ghost-stories-1e4b2682-5ea4-476b-bc42-9dca15096cc5.Dickens, C. (1846). Three Ghost Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/three-ghost-stories-1e4b2682-5ea4-476b-bc42-9dca15096cc5Dickens, Charles. Three Ghost Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/three-ghost-stories-1e4b2682-5ea4-476b-bc42-9dca15096cc5.
