Ghost Stories

Unknown Narrator

This narrator moves through several tales as the observing 'I' — the guest who asks for the falling-stone story, the listener who notices how the circle around the hearth goes suddenly still. He is candid about his own nerves, admitting he can hide under the bedclothes when skeletons grow hackneyed, yet he is the one who presses for the firsthand account. His susceptibility makes him the reader's proxy: through his eyes, ordinary evenings acquire the hush and dark corners that the early stories depend on.

Frank Halton

Frank Halton surfaces across several stories as the man who can jest about ghosts and then, without a pause, hold a circle silent with a firsthand account. He is at ease in company — laughing, deflecting, matching wits — yet his authority comes from the sense that he has actually seen something he cannot fully swear to. That gap between social ease and private dread is what makes him the natural teller of tales that begin as entertainment and end as something else.

Dick Peveril

Handsome Dick Peveril wins Church-Peveril by a crime he never answers for in life, and dies within a year of enjoying it, his confession unfinished and his spirit unabsolved. From the night of his death, the long gallery harbours two little white-robed figures whose appearance has killed servants, sceptics, and the brilliantly clever Mrs. Canning alike. He is the origin-point of the book's most chilling legend — the ancestral sin that makes the house itself a character, and the reason no visitor is warned in vain.

Madge Dalrymple

Madge Dalrymple belongs to the social world of country-house gatherings where croquet is played for the sake of saying it was played, and ghost stories are traded as after-dinner currency. She is sensitive to atmosphere — the moment the childish gaiety of an evening is withdrawn, she registers it — and her romantic attachments place her at the centre of stories where affection and the supernatural press against each other. Her presence keeps the eerie events tethered to ordinary feeling, so that the horror lands on someone the reader cares about.

Young Frank Pencarris

Young Frank Pencarris stands at the threshold between boyish curiosity and adult dread, the age at which nightmares are still vague enough to be truly frightening. He moves through the stories as a focal consciousness — the one who sees, who feels the room's mood turn, who cannot yet dismiss what he has witnessed. His youth matters to the early arc because it keeps the supernatural personal: what happens to him happens to someone still forming, and the reader feels the cost.

Mr. Tilly

Mr. Tilly is the invalid at the heart of a household's anxious attention — 'dear Mr. Tilly,' 'wounded Mr. Tilly' — a man whose injury makes him both pitied and strangely powerful. Around him, the living arrange themselves into a séance, and what comes through is not comfort but something that will not stay in its proper place. His vulnerability and his centrality together make him the story's pressure point: the person everyone wants to protect, and the person through whom the uncanny finds its way in.