The Haunted House: Paranormal Parlor, A Weiser Books Collection
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About this ebook
Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten crypto-classics. Magical Creatures is a hair-raising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic.
At Christmas time we so often associate Charles Dickens with his classic A Christmas Carol. In this unlikely Christmas tale, first published in 1894, in Christmas Stories you won’t find many mentions of Yuletide feasts or golden stores. Instead you will be treated to a story of a different ilk. In a very Clue-like scenario, the host invites several guests to take residence in the house for one night, the Twelfth Night of Christmas, each taking a room of their own--The Clock Room, The Cupboard Room, The Garden Room, and so on.
Dickens also used this story as the setting for a collection of stories in which he commissioned various writers to take on a character and a room from the story he had written, and detail the character's encounter with the ghost of the room. Watch for each of these stories to come in the Paranormal Parlor collection!
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.
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Reviews for The Haunted House
55 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a collection of short stories, brought together weakly by a surrounding plot. The haunted house of the title is spotted by the author from the train, who decides it would be a good idea to rent it for a few months and stay there with a group of friends over the Christmas season. They have until the 12th Night to sleep in their allotted and supposedly haunted room, at which point they will regale the whole group with their own experiences. Here an added twist comes in - each of the stories was written by a contemporary of Dickens, who invited his literary friends to contribute alongside himself. The quality and style of the tales thus vary, and generally they have not aged well at all. What they all have in common is that there is very little in the way of ghosts or hauntings, which is somewhat disappointing. While the concept behind this is in my opinion a very good one, it is let down by its execution.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having read Dickens's short ghost story The Signalman and being somewhat familiar with the works of Wilkie Collins, I was hoping for a literary experience of the same or at least similar calibre. Sadly, I was distinctly underwhelmed by the collection of short stories on offer here. The Haunted House appeared in Dickens's magazine All the Year Round in 1862 and features contributions by his friends Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, as well as the now rather unknown authors Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala and Adelaide Anne Procter. It consists of several unrelated short stories linked together by a frame narrative, in this case nine friends spending the Christmas holidays in a supposedly haunted house and describing their experiences on Twelfth Night. Apart from the rather melodramatic and moralistic overtones typical of the time, the stories had virtually nothing to do with what I understand by a haunted house or ghost story but dealt with rather more personal issues of hauntings. I'm sorry to say that I found the majority of them slightly baffling and not in the slightest bit affecting, the exception being Wilkie Collins's story Blow up with the Brig that at least raised the tension during reading. Unfortunately, this volume isn't exactly what I'd describe as a classic.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Edition doesnt have all the stories that make up this group but what I read was good
Book preview
The Haunted House - Charles Dickens
CHAPTER I—THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE
U NDER none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people—and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it 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 stop by the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn't been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had, through the night—as that opposite man always has—several legs too many, and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket–book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil–engineering way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he listened. He was a goggle–eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his demeanour became unbearable.
It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had out–watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and between me and the day, I turned to my fellow–traveller and said:
"I beg your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in me?" For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling–cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.
The goggle–eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a lofty look of compassion for my insignificance:
"In you,