Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories

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

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...ies, such as The Signalman by Charles

Dickens.

I think ‘The Signalman’; by Charles Dickens is the better story. It

seems to have more substance and builds up the atmosphere in a more

dramatic way Crossing Over. This is probably because it describes

things using a larger amount of details, as well as using words that

build up the atmosphere. By doing this, the atmosphere of the story is

exaggerated to create tension in the readers.

In contrast to this, the other story is not frightening, but has a

ghost for a different reason. As I said before, I do not think that

the story was written to be a ghost story or to scare people. Instead,

it was probably only written to explore around the ideas of the

existence of an afterlife. However, after it was written, it fell

under the classification of the Ghost genre because it has a ghost

included in the story.