An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

"An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" is a novella by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1853. The story revolves around a series of mysterious and unsettling occurrences at a house in Aungier Street, Dublin. The protagonist, a curious and skeptical narrator, investigates claims of supernatural phenomena, including ghostly apparitions and eerie sounds. Le Fanu masterfully blends elements of Gothic horror and psychological tension, creating a chilling atmosphere that explores themes of hauntings, belief, and the unknown. The tale is a captivating example of Victorian supernatural fiction, showcasing Le Fanu's skill in evoking fear and intrigue.

• Horror

								
It is not worth telling, this story of mine--at least, not worth
writing. Told, indeed, as I have sometimes been called upon to tell it,
to a circle of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good
after-dinner fire on a winter's evening, with a cold wind rising and
wailing outside, and all snug and cosy within, it has gone off--though I
say it, who should not--indifferent well. But it is a venture to do as
you would have me. Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the
marvellous, and a "reader" decidedly a more critical animal than a
"listener." If, however, you can induce your friends to read it after
nightfall, and when the fireside talk has run for a while on thrilling
tales of shapeless terror; in short, if you will secure me the mollia
tempora fandi, I will go to my work, and say my say, with better heart.
Well, then, these conditions presupposed, I shall waste no more words,
but tell you simply how it all happened.

My cousin (Tom Ludlow) and I studied medicine together. I think he would
have succeeded, had he stuck to the profession; but he preferred the
Church, poor fellow, and died early, a sacrifice to contagion,
contracted in the noble discharge of his duties. For my present purpose,
I say enough of his character when I mention that he was of a sedate but
frank and cheerful nature; very exact in his observance of truth, and
not by any means like myself--of an excitable or nervous temperament.

My Uncle Ludlow--Tom's father--while we were attending lectures,
purchased three or four old houses in Aungier Street, one of which was
unoccupied. He resided in the country, and Tom proposed that we should
take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue
unlet; a move which would accomplish the double end of settling us
nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of
relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings.

Our furniture was very scant--our whole equipage remarkably modest and
primitive; and, in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as
those of a bivouac. Our new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon
as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the
bedroom over it, and Tom the back bedroom on the same floor, which
nothing could have induced me to occupy.

The house, to begin with, was a very old one. It had been, I believe,
newly fronted about fifty years before; but with this exception, it had
nothing modern about it. The agent who bought it and looked into the
titles for my uncle, told me that it was sold, along with much other
forfeited property, at Chichester House, I think, in 1702; and had
belonged to Sir Thomas Hacket, who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in James
II.'s time. How old it was then, I can't say; but, at all events, it
had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all that mysterious
and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most
old mansions.

There had been very little done in the way of modernising details; and,
perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and by-gone in
the very walls and ceilings--in the shape of doors and windows--in the
odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces--in the beams and ponderous
cornices--not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from
the banisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defied disguise,
and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any
conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish.

An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the
drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping; and
the old woman, who kept a little dirt-pie of a shop in the lane, and
whose daughter--a girl of two and fifty--was our solitary handmaid,
coming in at sunrise, and chastely receding again as soon as she had
made all ready for tea in our state apartment;--this woman, I say,
remembered it, when old Judge Horrocks (who, having earned the
reputation of a particularly "hanging judge," ended by hanging himself,
as the coroner's jury found, under an impulse of "temporary insanity,"
with a child's skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided
there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port.
In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather,
and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms.

The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in
it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its sombre associations. But
the back bedroom, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows,
staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to
be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet,
which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the
bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. At night-time, this
"alcove"--as our "maid" was wont to call it--had, in my eyes, a
specially sinister and suggestive character. Tom's distant and solitary
candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always
overlooking him--always itself impenetrable. But this was only part of
the effect. The whole room was, I can't tell how, repulsive to me. There
was, I suppose, in its proportions and features, a latent discord--a
certain mysterious and indescribable relation, which jarred indistinctly
upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised
indefinable suspicions and apprehensions of the imagination. On the
whole, as I began by saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a
night alone in it.

I had never pretended to conceal from poor Tom my superstitious
weakness; and he, on the other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my
tremors. The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a lesson, as you
shall hear.

We had not been very long in occupation of our respective dormitories,
when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I
suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a
sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was now, however,
my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to "sup
full of horrors." After a preliminary course of disagreeable and
frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision,
without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least
(on an average) every second night in the week.

Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion--which you please--of
which I was the miserable sport, was on this wise:----

I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness, although
at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and
accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know,
is incidental to ordinary nightmare. Well, while in this clairvoyant
condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was
to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights

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