The 19th century tales of the supernatural The 19th century was a time when religious belief was almost universal and extended to all sorts of additional beliefs in fate, the supernatural, ghosts and monsters. The three stories that I am going to discuss, exploit supernatural only to scare and entertain. Charles Dickens’ story “The Signalman” is a story about mysterious sighting of a ghost, and mysterious death of the signalman. H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room” is describing the haunting of a person who does not believe in supernatural.
In the Charles Dickens’ story the narrator meets the Signalman who is confessing to him his problems. The narrator is coming every night to find out that the signalman was seeing a ghost of a man, who was pointing out that certain train accidents are going to happen. After a few days the narrator goes peacefully to the signalman’s shed, and finds out that he mysteriously died. The key details were that certain sentences were repeated a few times, which were used just in the time when the death occurred. “Below there! Look out…”. The interesting thing is the way in which Dickens is writing to make the story more interesting. He is writing about the sightings, describing the light and the circumstances in which the ghost appeared, and than when everyone is expecting the story to discover the truth, Dickens uses final twist with sudden death of the signalman. The story maintains a mystery at the end, and makes the readers think a lot about the details of the text.
