The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Elizabeth Anna Hart

The Dead Man of Varley Grange by Elizabeth Anna Hart
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A young officer receives a Christmas invitation to an old country house in Westernshire. His friend, hearing the name, begs him not to go.

He goes anyway.

There are things in that house that have been seen before, by people who did not speak easily of what they saw. Something on the stairs. Something in the gallery, after dark, when the fire burns low and the talk runs out. Those who see it together are marked by it, in ways that take a year to come due.

This is the story of what a house remembers, and what it does to those who are told to stay away, and don't.

Published anonymously in 1878, later reprinted with the tag "by the author of Freda." Modern editors tentatively attribute it to novelist Elizabeth Anna Hart, though the evidence remains circumstantial.

Elizabeth Anna Hart (1822–1890) was a London-born novelist and poet, cousin to Lewis Carroll, best remembered for her children's classic The Runaway and the novel Mrs Jerningham's Journal.