The Haunted and the Haunters (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

By Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The Haunted and the Haunters (also known as The House and the Brain) features a wealthy, rational-minded narrator who, armed with scientific instruments and skeptical determination, volunteers to spend a night alone in a notoriously and violently haunted London house. He is convinced that the disturbances are simply human fraud or psychological phenomena. However, as the night progresses, the narrator is confronted by a series of increasingly intense and inexplicable terrors that defy all rational explanation. He soon discovers that the house is cursed not by a simple ghost, but by a complex, ancient force tied to a hidden, sinister history.

From the influential pen of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the prolific Victorian novelist and playwright, comes a foundational work of supernatural fiction that blends skeptical inquiry with terrifying reality.

This masterful story is a landmark in Victorian ghost fiction, demonstrating Bulwer-Lytton's genius for blending intellectual curiosity with deep, creeping dread. It is essential reading for fans of classic supernatural fiction and the origins of psychological horror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447489542

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was an English writer and politician.

Book preview

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC, was born in London in 1803. His wealthy parents were neglectful, and Bulwer-Lytton was a neurotic, nervous child. At the age of just fifteen, he published his first collection, Ishmael and Other Poems. He attended Cambridge University, where won the prestigious Chancellor’s Gold Medal, and in the year of his graduation published another collection, Weeds and Wild Flowers.

Alongside a career in politics – most notably as Secretary of State for the Colonies – Bulwer-Lytton’s literary career blossomed out of the successes of his youth. He wrote in a variety of genres, often under pseudonyms, in order to fund an extravagant lifestyle. The 1828 novel Pelham brought him public attention and success, and Bulwer-Lytton wrote prolifically for the rest of his life, producing short fiction, novels, plays and verse. The Last Days of Pompeii – probably his magnum opus – was published in 1834, and Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, published just two years before his death in 1873, is credited with contributing to the birth of the science fiction genre and popularising the fringe 'Hollow Earth' theory.

Bulwer-Lytton died in 1873, just shy of his 70th birthday, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Arguably, his legacy lives on most firmly in his most famous quotation, taken from his play, Richelieu: "beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword."

The Haunted and the Haunters

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A friend of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest, Fancy! since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London.

Really haunted? – and by what? ghosts?

Well, I can’t answer that question: all I know is this – six weeks ago my wife and I were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, ‘Apartments Furnished’. The situation suited us; we entered the house – liked the rooms – engaged them by the week – and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don’t wonder at it.

What did you see?

"Excuse me – I have no desire to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer – nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what you would hold to be incredible without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this, it was not so much what we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes of our own excited fancy, or the victims of imposture in others) that drove us away, as it was an undefinable terror which seized both of us whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither saw nor heard anything. And the strangest marvel of all was, that for once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman though she be – and allowed, after the third night, that it was impossible to stay a fourth in that house. Accordingly, on the fourth morning I summoned the woman who kept the house and attended on us, and told her that the rooms did not quite suit

Reviews for The Haunted and the Haunters (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

[jefware · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I believe this ghost story may be the first to convey the idea that belief is necessary to be harmed by apparitions.