Victorian Thriller

It's the very end of December, 1880, and the servant Kathleen Hennessey expects to spend a quiet week taking care of the O'Farrell Street boarding house while her employers, Annie and Nate Dawson, are off spending the Christmas holidays with Nate's family. However, when she agrees to help out one of her friends, Kathleen discovers that a simple case of a servant being dismissed without notice has turned into a complicated puzzle that she is determined to solve.

Living in Victorian London is difficult at the best of times. So, instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Albert decides on adventure. However, fate has other plans. One drunken night on his way home, he responds to the blood-curdling scream of a woman. He rushes her attacker and in the ensuing fight, he is bitten. Albert's world is changed forever. With that one savage bite, he is turned into a monster that people had believed was just a creation of an author's mind.

Whatever you do, don't go on to the beaches at dusk, or the Sand-Walker will come to your window at night. Such is the sinister warning given to the new lodger at the Beach Farm, a lonely house on the North Sea coast of England. But who, or what, is the Sand-Walker?

In this well-known classic, a school inspector travelling to the village of Pit End wonders whether the things he’s seeing are products of his imagination or something supernatural. There’s a rational answer, but is it the right one? Was It an Illusion is taken from the Victorian Anthologies series featuring short stories by classic writers of the spooky, the scary and the supernatural. Guaranteed to give you the shivers, each collection includes familiar and loved creepy tales as well as those less well-known. With music by Benedict Edwards.

‘The Signalman’ (1866) is a short story by the English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). In the story, a practical-minded narrator meets a railway worker who has been seeing supernatural visions. The narrator doubts the man at first, but at the story’s conclusion a strange event makes him a believer.

An old man lives in a Victorian house alone. Or so he thinks. When he visits his basement, he is literally haunted by his past.