Showing results for "The SignalMan" in Ghosts

A lone narrator meets a railway worker who is confined to a cold, gloomy station in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance. This worker is a signalman, and it is his responsibility to give the green light for trains to pass through the area. These are slow, monotonous days. The signalman’s life is not marked by much, until the nightmares begin. Three times in a row, a ghost mysteriously appears before the signalman – and with each apparition, a tragic accident unfolds on the rail tracks. Although our narrator doubts the man at first, events soon make him a believer too.

‘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.

One of Dickens’ best loved short stories, "The Signalman" is the mysterious tale of a railway worker haunted by premonitions of disaster. The titular signalman works on a remote and forbidding part of the line, and finds himself with an unexpected visitor in the form of a tourist (the story’s narrator), but the travelling man is not the only stranger the signalman encounters at his post.