1 Setting. Read para 1. In what ways is the setting appropriate to a ghost or horror story?
Old, quaint, beams, panels , old staircase, has ‘ grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels,’ ‘ very mysterious character after nightfall’. The detail suggests it is real whilst at the same time suggesting an appropriate setting for horror (as with the cutting in ‘The S’man’).
2. Read paras 2-4. What is odd about the six old men?
Have not reappeared; mysterious openings/closings of sitting-room door.
3. What is odd about the circumstances and conversation of the one old man?
How does the description of him (‘A chilled, slow….grey hair’) add to this oddness?
- Comes when Goodchild says the time (‘One.’), not when bell is actually rung
- categorically states ‘There is no-one at your grave’
- ‘I see many who never see me.’
- (later in the story): has ‘ a ghastly and a stony stare’ (‘ghastly’ suggests ‘ghostly’)
4. explain how the tension rises when Idle asks about hanging condemned animals at the castle
- describes in remarkable detail what the condemned man sees as he is hanged (and changes the pronoun, with ‘you’ suggesting an uncanny familiarity with the process!)
- fingers his cravat
5. How does the old man’s story gain our interest?
- Mingles passion and greed
- We wonder how the first husband died
6. What is chilling about the thwarted lover’s treatment of the daughter?
- Virtually ‘buried alive’ in ‘a secret, dark, oppressive, ancient house’
- ‘He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her.’
- He has her in fear and brainwashes her that she is destined to marry him
- Our sense of horror derives from the fact that marriage should grow out of love and be a liberation, but in this case it comes out of hatred and is a death sentence; instead of love letters, ‘he surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation’
- Psychologically terrorises her – wields the ‘power to coerce and power to relieve’.
7. Explain how he contrives to bring about her death
- he instructs her, ‘Now die! I have done with you.’
- He gives her no escape from him except through death as he has imprisoned her in her room
8. Explain the anti-climax of the ‘figure among the branches’
- anti-climax is a standard ‘horror’ genre technique which relaxes the tension so that a shocking event to come shortly is felt with greater effect and the tension shoots up.
9. What is the effect of the clause, ‘He saw a red curve stretch from his hand to it?’
- the reader experiences a dramatic thrill of horror as he imagines the blood pulsing from the cleft skull
10. What is spooky about the description of the garden beginning, ‘As the seasons changed…’?
- ‘the upper boughs were growing in to the form of the young man’
11. What was the consequence of the thunderstorm?
- the tree is cleft in two and this leads, ultimately, to the scientists examining the roots finding the corpse, the man being tried and then hanged
- note that thunder and lightening and dramatic event such as an old tree being hit and cleft in two are a frequent ingredient of horror stories
13. What effect is there on the tension within the story of the old man’s revelation, ‘I am he , and I was hanged at Lancaster Castle with my face to the wall a hundred years ago!’?
14. What are readers’ feelings as we believe that the ghost may be relieved?
15. What is the effect on readers’ credulousness of the realisation that Mr Goodchild has written down this account of what has happened in the ‘real and tangible old Inn’?