Three Ghost Stories - Free Audiobook

This selection brings together three ghost stories that Charles Dickens wrote in the 1850s and 1860s for the special Christmas issues of All the Year Round, the weekly magazine he edited. Each Christmas number was a collaborative project, with Dickens providing a framework and inviting other writers to contribute, and these pieces are among his own contributions.

The Signal-Man, from the 1866 number Mugby Junction, is the best known. A traveller climbs down into a steep railway cutting to talk with a lonely signalman who works beside a tunnel mouth. The man is troubled by a figure that appears near the danger light and seems to warn him of something he cannot identify. The Trial for Murder, from 1865, is narrated by a London man who glimpses two figures in the street shortly after a notorious killing and is then summoned to serve on the jury at the trial. The Haunted House, from 1859, follows a narrator who rents a country house with an evil reputation and assembles a party of friends to spend the winter there, each taking a room and agreeing to report what they find.

These tales show a side of Dickens quite different from his long social novels: compact, atmospheric and interested in guilt, premonition and the nervous strain of modern life. They suit readers of Victorian ghost stories and seasonal fireside reading.