Ghost stories

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GCSE Coursework

Ghost stories help us to explore the idea of an afterlife, focusing mainly on death and dying. These stories usually use our fear of death and what happens when we die to build up an atmospheric scene and to build up suspense in the reader. They also explore our feelings of what happens to us when someone we love and who is important to us dies. Ghost stories are often related to the time and place where a person may have had a very violent death, this can take on a symbolic significance to relate back to the dead. As many ghost stories are hard to believe, the writer often uses various ways to help us imagine and believe them by often writing in the first person and usually including their own personal experiences. They can also use the build up of tension in the story to help us explore the idea of an afterlife.

In The Signalman, a man (the narrator of the story) is walking beside the embankment of a railway line. He notices the signalman below him, and greets him by calling out “Haloa, below there.” However, the signalman does not appear to notice the man. When the man walks down to converse with the signalman, he is surprised to discover him strangely afraid of the words that he shouted, “Haloa, below there”. We later learn that he had been seeing mysterious and ghostly appearances. This had shocked him, because each time this happened, dreadful catastrophes had occurred. The narrator, very troubled by the signalman’s reactions, promises that he would return to assist the signalman the next day. Except when he returns, however, he discovered the signalman had been ‘cut down’ by a train. At the end of the story, we finally understand that the signalman had been seeing a premonition of his death.

In Crossing Over, a girl doing a school assignment decides to help the community by walking Togo, Mrs Mathew’s dog. However, Togo appears to dislike her very much. One day, he misbehaves at the zebra crossing and runs straight into the oncoming traffic. The girl thinks that he has been killed when she hears the lead snap. She panics, remembering that the dog was Mrs Mathew’s only friend. She decides that she needs to tell Mrs Mathew personally. However, when she arrives at Mrs. Mathew’s house she finds that Togo was unharmed and Mrs Mathew did not appear to notice her. The reader has been thinking that Togo had been killed, but at the end of the story, realise that it was actually the girl who had been killed. This creates a clever twist in the tale as you were expecting it for end differently.

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As you can see above, both stories are ghost stories, however they are very different from each other. For instance, the story of Crossing Over has a ghost in its plot. Whereas, The Signalman has no ghost, but there are mysterious activities taking place, hinting to us that there may be a ghost. In the end, we realise that it was not a ghost, but was only a premonition of the signalman’s death.

The plot and structure of the two stories are both very different generally. Nevertheless, there are a few similarities:

Both stories have a resolved ending. In ...

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