“the tread of dreadful feet”
The Haunting of Charles Dickens
Click the video above to watch the companion video to this blog post.
Charles Dickens and ghost stories are like peas and carrots. You could have one without the other, but each shines most in the pairing. Dickens’ skill as the consummate crafter of characters glitters gloriously, indeed, in the score of ghost stories he wrote during his prolific career. And surely no compendium of haunting tales would be complete without at least one from Dickens’ dark and dreary musings.
Friend and biographer John Forster would later write about Dickens’ “hankering after ghosts,” and that certainly seems an apt description. His thoughts and his interests—like his stories—were filled with “strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.” But for him, “ghost” was a notion as complex as one of his keenly detailed narratives—and equally as personal.
NURSERY TALES FROM HELL
Dickens’ interest in the supernatural began, like it did for so many of us, with childhood ghost stories. I’ve often credited much of my interest in the paranormal with being scared half out of my mind by the books I was reading, the ghost in our house, and a crippling fear of death—not necessarily in that order. For Dickens, it all began with the stories told to him by Mary Weller, his nurse (who he called “Mercy”) who would accompany her thrilling tales with all sorts of terrorizing hand gestures, spooky articulations, and facial contortions, by all accounts totally inappropriate for a child of his age. She likely had little regard for the scandal she caused; she was only thirteen herself and a gifted storyteller who brought to the Dickens household a whole repertoire of folktales she had learned as a country child.
Dickens also devoured the weekly horror publication, The Terrific Register, a penny dreadful full of ghoulish yarns and illustrations to curl one’s hair. The stories in it “frightened my very wits out of my head” and made him “miserable,” but the fear was, for Dickens, delicious. Later, he would absolutely love producing that same kind of fear in his own audiences. Once, after a public reading of one of his ghostly tales, he bragged to his wife with great satisfaction that an attendee had been reduced to sobs of terror and had to recline and compose herself.
Dickens also knew what people wanted. He was keenly aware of the Victorian fascination with all things macabre and occult—especially brushes with the living dead. He knew that scares equaled sales, and it was just a happy chance for him that he liked delivering the former as much as collecting the latter.
THE GHOST HUNTER
On Halloween night, 1859, Dickens dashed off a letter to a friend and fellow writer named William Howitt. Dickens had a question for his colleague: Could Howitt steer him to a house in London (or indeed within the United Kingdom for that matter) “where nobody can live, eat, drink, stand, lie or sleep without molestation” by a ghost? If so, Dickens and his good friend, John Hollingshead, would be most interested in moving in for a night or two.
In response to Dickens’ letter, Howitt suggests an inn in the small village of Holborn, after which Dickens sent Hollingshead off to the remote hamlet to check it out. Sadly, Hollingshead found it to be a “tumbledown pothouse” with nary a ghost in sight. Later, Dickens and Hollingshead—joined by fellow writer Wilkie Collins, made a long track to Hertfordshire to spend the night in another promising property. When they arrived, they couldn’t even find the place and retired to the local pub.
Howitt was a Spiritualist, one of the shocking number of people of the time who had come to believe in—and be obsessed with—communication with spirits. Though Dickens was intrigued by the paranormal and even experimented with the fad of Mesmerism—a sort of mental healing aided, at times, by ghosts--, his interest was more of the skeptic’s, and his letter to Howitt seemed more of a challenge to his friends’ Spiritualist claims than an excited desire to hunt ghosts. More Houdini than Harry Price if you will.
Howitt and Dickens had gotten into a bit of an argument over a series of editorials Dickens had written about Spiritualism and the alleged messages from the dead that drove its popularity. While Howitt was a fervent séance-sitter, with a strong belief in the movement, Dickens had another theory about it all. He believed that the “messages from the dead” were actually coming from the dying, not the already deceased, a theory certainly inspired by his dabbling in Mesmerism, in which he’d seen just how powerful the mind could be. It was also an idea that would be later chronicled through account after account in the book, Phantasms of the Living, a classic of parapsychology. First published in 1886, sixteen years after Dickens’ death, this comprehensive two-volume work was a collaboration between Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, notable members of the Society for Psychical Research. The authors, aiming to revolutionize perceptions of ghosts, present a theory that explains ghost-seeing phenomena through the concept of telepathy. With over 700 case studies meticulously documented, Volume 1 features an introduction by Myers and an explanation of the analytical methods employed in the study. It delves into various topics including hypnotism, the telepathic transmission of ideas, mental imagery, emotional impressions, dreams, hallucinations, and presents a captivating essay on the historical significance of witchcraft.
Probably the first ghost story I ever heard—outside of my own experience in our house—was from my mother, and it was a story Dickens would have welcomed to illustrate his own beliefs regarding communication with the dead. The incident played out in my maternal grandparents’ bedroom on Cuyler Avenue on Chicago’s North Side just before the end of World War II. One of their seven children, William, had been drafted just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Uncle Will was a poet and a pacifist, but he went willingly and was gone for four years. Then, on the night of June 17, 1944, my grandmother awoke suddenly and sat straight up in bed. At its foot stood William, dressed in uniform, smiling at her. She cried out to her husband beside her, “Joseph! William’s home!” His eyes flew open and he, too, saw his son there, but only for an instant. Then, Will was gone.
The next day, as you can probably guess, a telegram arrived from the War Department. William had been killed just hours earlier in an airfield explosion on Saipan Island. At the moment of his death, it seemed, Will had come home to say good-bye.
This is just the sort of phantasm of the living—or dying, in my uncle’s case—that Dickens believed to be behind the communications from the “dead” so rampant in his day—and in ours. He certainly would not believe that the millions of alleged encounters today between hobby ghost hunters and their phantasmagorical prey are anything but tricks of the mind: the powerful, powerful mind he’d witnessed firsthand in Mesmerism--and in what he saw as the totally unsubstantiated psychological fervor over Spiritualism.
I’m not the only one who believes I experienced something like this when I used to be heavily involved in EVP research. Like everyone else, I was utterly fascinated when a new ghost hunting tool hit the market. It was designed by Bill Chappell, the sort of Ben Franklin of the ghost hunting world, who called it the “Ovilus.”
It spoke.
And, unlike the fuzzy, largely open-to-interpretation voices on our recorders, the Ovilus spoke clearly.
Yet, unlike the voice that came out of it, the purported mechanism behind the Ovilus was, indeed, fuzzy. According to its inventor, entities may be able to manipulate the EM field to communicate with us. Putting faith in this possibility, Chappell assigned a different EM level to each of one thousand different words. Ostensibly, the spirits can answer our questions and comment on our activities by manipulating the EM field to match the levels of the words they want to use.
Ostensibly.
Well, it was pretty cool at first, hearing those robotic words in the dark. Although a few words (I remember, specifically, “rabbit”) seemed to pop up very frequently and randomly. Sometimes—ok, rarely—it seemed like the words the thing was saying might actually somehow fit the questions and concerns of our investigation.
“Who are you?”
“Man.”
What do you want?
“Go.”
“Go where? You want us to go? Do you want to go but you can’t?”
And so the wonder didn’t last long. Random seemed to describe most of what was happening with the Ovilus. We struggled to make it mean something, but it really didn’t seem to. At least most of the time.
Because there was something else.
On many occasions, it seemed that my own thoughts were coming out of that little device. On one occasion, I recall, I was using it at Bachelors Grove Cemetery, the tiny, infamous pioneer burying ground southwest of Chicago. The Ovilus was running. I thought, I’m tired. I want to get home.
“Home,” the Ovilus said.
It would, however, be quite some time before I could go, I thought, as we were doing an experiment that required us to take certain readings for several hours.
“Hours,” said the Ovilus.
It was worse because it had been muddy walking in after a heavy rain, and my feet were soaking wet and covered in muck.
’Rain,” said the Ovilus.
Later, after this had occurred on several subsequent occasions, I discussed the device with other seasoned investigators, finding that others had observed the same suspicious phenomenon.
Dickens would have had a great time with the Ovilus.
Ostensibly.
SEEING THINGS
I’m not sure if Dickens would have a theory about reports that his own spirit now haunts Boston’s Parker House Hotel, where he stayed during a promotional tour of A Christmas Carol. The hotel’s history carries on memories of that time, when staff reported hearing the writer practicing the various character voices of the story, preparing for public readings of it. The mirror in the room where he stayed is supposedly haunted. They say that guests sometimes see reflected in it the ghost of the long dead Dickens, practicing his dramatic skills even now.
“Humbug!” I can hear him comment.
But that Dickens ghost haunts America—albeit in a very different way--is a fact, and it’s one that dates from an earlier American tour—in 1842. In that year, Dickens arrived on American soil with his wife, Catherine, their kids, and the author’s pet raven, a talkative thing named Grip. Dickens was just thirty years old, but his arrival caused what some call the modern world’s first real celebrity frenzy. The mutual love affair between Dickens and the Americans would quickly sour for both sides, but that’s a story for another day.
A couple of years earlier, the soon to be great American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe had reviewed the first chapters of Dickens’ novel, Barnaby Rudge, and he’d loved it. He’d taken a particular liking to the Barnaby character’s pet raven, and when Dickens and Poe met on that first American tour, Poe was utterly delighted to discover the bird was real, and most historians now agree that Grip was the inspiration for Poe’s most famous work, The Raven.
Dickens loved that bird, too. When it passed away, he took it to a taxidermist so he could keep him around forever. The stuffed Grip is, today, part of the collections of Philadelphia’s Free Library.
A number of scholars have gone out of their way to insist that Dickens did not himself believe in ghosts, though he was obviously enchanted by the question of their existence. In three of his books (Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Sons and A Tale of Two Cities) he and his characters refer to one of the most scandalous poltergeist cases on record—London’s “Cock Lane ghost”—with typical Dickensian amusement. Interestingly, the Cock Lane events broke out at Christmastime—in 1762, pre-dating Dickens’ own Yuletide classic by many decades. The hallmark of the Cock Lane case was an outbreak of knockings that led to communication sessions between the living and the alleged dead. The whole thing turned out to be one great hoax, and between the outbreak and its conclusion, a truly terrific scandal played out in the daily papers—a scandal populated by a cast of characters worthy of Dickens’ own pen. Despite that—or maybe because of it—the episode made a great impact on the young Londoner.
Indeed, like the Cock Lane ghost, most of Dickens’ ghost stories are not supernatural spectaculars, but morality plays. Lots of joviality contrasts with the spooky—or sometimes really scary--moments, and everything comes out all right in the end. Dickens’ skepticism was present in his editorial pieces, his private letters and his dealings with the famed Ghost Club, the society of paranormal skeptics of which he was reportedly a founding member. Yet Dickens had his own brushes with death—and maybe even with the dead, even though he may not have admitted that’s what they were.
Mary Hogarth was the sister of Dickens’ wife, Catherine, and when the latter married the up-and-coming author, Mary and Charles became much more than siblings—they became close friends. Mary and Catherine joined Dickens one evening to watch a performance of one of his plays in the West End. Though she was in good spirits and fit as a fiddle during the outing, a sudden illness came over Mary upon the trio’s return home. She died the next day in Charles’ arms.
Mary’s death devastated the busy writer, who immediately—heartbreakingly—wrote his own, alternative ending to the story by creating the character of Rose Maylie and including her in Oliver Twist, the book he was writing when Mary died. He describes Rose as “mild and gentle, pure and beautiful,” and no one doubted who the inspiration had been.
(Above) Mary Hogarth
You could definitely say that Dickens was “haunted” by the young woman after her death. The two of them had exchanged lockets containing pieces of each other’s hair, and Dickens later took a ring off the dead girl’s finger to wear. As the weeks and months turned to years, he dreamed of her, and he even expressed a desire to be buried someday by her side. In fact, many over the years have wondered if there was something untoward in the relationship between Dickens and his sister-in-law, though Mary’s own letters tell no such tale. She gushed over him, yes. But it was mainly to praise his happy influence on her sister.
It’s no secret that the thing which most haunted Dickens—far more viciously and relentlessly that even Mary Hogwarth’s loss—was his father’s disappearance into debtor’s prison, forcing the twelve-year-old Charles to work in a bootblacking factory to help support the family. It was misery; ten hour days, six days a week for a few shillings a week. The experience of his father’s arrest and absence—coupled with the grim labor—would color everything he wrote. It shouldn’t be suprising that Dickens had an experience of seeing his father’s ghost one morning—in that hour just before dawn that the writer spoke of as “the most ghostly time.” It was, like all of Dickens’ paranormal experiences, an event that deeply moved and troubled him—but again failed to convince him that the vision’s source was anything more than his own mind. In that dim light, Dickens saw his father as if he were
“alive and well […] sitting with his back towards me, on a seat that stood beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand, and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed to see him there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and watched him. […] As he did not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder . . . .”
But his hand touched only air.
A year after the publication of A Christmas Carol, Dickens had a profoundly moving experience while on vacation in Italy. He was staying at an old convent, where he fell asleep listening to the nearby church bells chiming the hours—evocative of those now immortal hours he’d imagined for Scrooge. He suddenly awoke to see what he told his friend and later biographer was a “spirit.” During the episode, the anti-Catholic Dickens seems to believe he may be beholding no less than the Blessed Virgin Mary, with whom he attempted to discourse on religion:
“I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in stature… It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me… that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, ‘Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!…’
‘Answer me one… question!’ I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave me. ‘What is the True religion?’ As it paused a moment without replying, I said – Good God in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away! – ’You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good?’
‘Or,’ I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, ‘perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in Him more steadily?’ ‘For you,’ said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; ‘for you it is the best!’
Then I awoke, with the tears running down my face . . . .”
The scene Dickens recounts is so strangely similar to that in the bed chamber of Ebenezer Scrooge--pleading with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to speak to him--, that one might almost wonder if Dickens had some sort of unconscious premonition of the later event, incorporating the profound episode into the book published the year before it even happened.
M. R. James—also a reputed skeptic--once wrote to a friend that, while staying away from home, he woke from a frightening, ghost-filled dream and began saying the Apostles’ Creed. Now, reading of Dickens’ midnight run-in with an unknown something in that Italian convent reminds me of James, one of his many proteges, just as the midnight terror of Scrooge seemed to presage his inventor’s later, tear-inducing vison.
And that seems like just the kind of possibility that Dickens—inquisitive Victorian child that he was--would have loved to consider. As always, though, the skeptic was right there with an explanation for it all. Dismissing the fact that, in the moment, he’d been totally convinced of the visitor’s reality, he told his friend that it must have been the influence of his surroundings—the convent, the church bells (much like Scrooge’s “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard“)--that had led his mind to conjure up this “Madonna”- like figure: Dickens’ own, private Marian apparition.
This was far from the only time Dickens blamed the mind—or perhaps minds—for extraordinary things. In fact, it was another Christmas story of his that made him question just what had happened when an unsung artist accused him of plagiarism.
In 1861 Dickens wrote a collection of four ghost stories for publication in his magazine, All the Year Round. In one of the tales, a young woman inquiries whether a local artist could remember her face sufficiently to paint her portrait months after their meeting--without sitting for him. She soon passes away, and the puzzled painter later realizes that--at their meeting--the potential client was already dead.
Thomas Heapy was enraged when he read Dickens' story. Not only had Heapy written a closely identical story, to be published the next Christmas in another magazine, but Heapy also said the story was true. That he himself was the artist in the tale. The paranormally-minded Dickens, far from arguing with the young man, was filled with wonder. Adding to the already bizarre "co-oincidences" involved, he marveled at the date he'd marked in the margin of his story after writing it. "Sept 13." It was the same date Heapy claimed he had been visited by the phantom girl.
HAUNTED TO HAUNTER
Today, the UK is all-in with the “ghost stories at Christmas” phenomenon that Dickens was largely responsible for popularizing in modern times. Here in the United States, the tradition never really became a thing. Dickens’ friend, Washington Iriving, shared Dickens’ love of the supernatural and even published some Christmas ghost stories himself, but they never eclipsed his other works like A Christmas Carol did for Dickens. Scholars theorize that, while America and England shared some of the same Puritanical beliefs that burned witches, the American experience also includes a secularism and “future thinking” that has sought to leave all that behind . . . that has associated ghosts, goblins and other supernatural characters with an antiquated past: the same kind of past that Britons continue, in many ways, to embrace.
A few years back now, I traveled to Norfolk, England to film a documentary on the late, great English ghost story writer, M.R. James, whose tales—though always popular—resurface increasingly each year as the snow flies and carols come on the radio. James is often cited as one of the most obvious literary children of Dickens. But it wasn’t A Christmas Carol that birthed the stories of James. Rather, it was Dickens’ last, dark ghost stories that made an irrevocable impression on the young academic. In particular, it was Dickens’ macabre masterpiece, The Signal-Man that most captured James’ Gothic imagination.
The story is believed to have been inspired by two real accidents that occurred in the years before the publication of the Dickens short story. In 1861, a crash accident in the Clayton Tunnel near Brighton, England led to the deaths of 23 passengers, most of who were scalded to death in the last car. More than 170 were also injured. The horrific event, which played out in the chilling darkness of the tunnel, deeply affected Britons, maybe more so the empathic Dickens.
Then, in the summer of 1865, at the age of 53, Dickens found himself onboard the boat train from Folkstone—in the south of England—to London, accompanied by his paramour, actress Ellen Ternan, and her mother. The train derailed at Staplehurst while crossing a viaduct where a piece of track had been removed during construction. Dickens and his companions survived, but ten fellow passengers did not. He himself rushed to help a number of the victims. Some died by his side. This experience had a profound impact on Dickens, leaving him unable to speak for two weeks. Subsequently, he developed a deep apprehension towards train travel, resorting to alternative means whenever possible.
(Above) Dickens was deeply affected by the Steeplehurst Rail Accident, of which he was a part.
Five years to the day after the Staplehurst derailment, Dickens passed away. His son later revealed that his father had never fully recovered from the traumatizing event.
Moments after his death, a drawing was done of the now silent story master. In it, Dickens is pictured with his jaw tied up with a cloth. It was a common practice of the time, to keep the mouth from falling open ignobly. But for us, not accustomed to the gesture, the detail evokes only one thing: the ghost of Jacob Marley.
{Above} Rochester Castle, near Dickens’ home in Kent.
Dickens had died at his home near Rochester, Kent. He had left instructions for a private funeral, and for burial in the churchyard at Rochester Cathedral. His wishes were famously ignored, and plans for interment in Westminster Abbey commenced. Each Christmas Eve, they say, the ghost of Charles Dickens can be seen wandering the grounds of Rochester Castle, where he often rambled in life. He’s seen as a young man, at the height of his popularity. Others swear they’ve seen him standing before Restoration House, gazing silently at this, the Gothic residence that inspired Satis House in Great Expectations. At midnight, they say, as the clock in the corn exchange tolls the start of Christmas Day, Dickens is there, perhaps wistfully remembering Scrooge’s midnight visitors that traveled from his own mind into the imaginations of so many.
Or are these stories, too, just a humbug?
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Maybe there are no ghost-disbelievers in midnight bedchambers.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that Charles Dickens may, indeed, not have believed in ghosts, but in a world in love with the supernatural, he was one of the most haunted of them all.
FOR FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
Thanks so much for reading. As a small Christmas gift, I’ve recorded Dickens’ chilling, moving ghost story, “The Signal-Man” for you. Click below to watch. I hope that you enjoy it, and know I’m so grateful for you.
For further reading and viewing on what we’ve explored today, I cannot recommend enough this version of Dickens’ Collected Ghost Stories. It’s available as a book, audiobook or on Kindle, and there is no better time of the year to jump into this wonderful world than in the dead of winter—especially now at Christmas—, with his most famous yarn.
I also highly recommend the book, Phantasms of the Living, a classic of paranormal research that will really get you thinking. It’s one of my most treasured volumes, and I know you’ll see why after you dig in.
And if you love M.R. James, please check out our documentary, The Haunting of M.R. James, filmed on location in many of the places he set his ghost stories. Making this film was such a labor of love. I hope you like it!
Finally, if you are looking for a daily planner, please check out my 365 Midnights Dreary planner inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. I designed it myself, and you can use it any year and start it any month. Thanks for checking it out!
Please join me in praying for Charles Dickens and all of his descendants, as well as those of all who inspired his beloved works. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
URSULA BIELSKI
#prayforghosts
#dickens
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