We wish you good fear and present this swashbuckling ghost story from the late Victorian age.

Our "Fiendishly Forgotten Female Frighteners" series continues, albeit belatedly (apologies), with "A Ghost's Revenge" by Lettice Galbraith.

Now, Lettice Galbraith is a writer who is increasingly becoming a channel favourite! Her obscure accounts of paranormal activity set down in the late Victorian era have made quite an impression on us!

In the introduction to an earlier video, "In the Séance Room," I mentioned that Miss Galbraith was "as mysterious as the tales she told." Indeed, she has been hailed as "probably the most mysterious figure in the history of supernatural literature." But, thanks to some terrific recent research by Alastair Gunn, we know much more about this enigmatic Victorian writer now.

One of the things we know, which I was so happy to learn, is that she was a Yorkshire lass! (I should add that I'm an adoptive Yorkshireman; I wasn't born in this grand county but have spent most of my life here, including my childhood.)

Lizzie Susan Gibson, or Lettie as she was known, was born in Drypool, Hull, in the old East Riding, although she later relocated to London. She adopted the pseudonym Lettice Galbraith, and her ghost stories are still mostly excluded from histories of the Victorian supernatural.

Despite writing within a genre popular in the 1890s, little is known of her biography, her literary inner circle, or those who may have influenced her.

Writers of terrifying encounters, haunting Tales, and unexplained phenomena made the most of the prevailing public fascination with the tropes of disturbing narratives. You know, misty London streets, sensational newspaper accounts, violence, and suppressed depravation. Lettie capitalised on this trend and also embraced the fascination with hypnotism and the occult revival.

Her tales have it all; scary encounters, spine-chilling experiences, eerie atmospheres, ghostly apparitions, and phantoms.

Within the conventions of 1890s supernatural fiction, Galbraith's work should have been read alongside stories by other women writers such as Louisa Baldwyn, E. Nesbit, Marie Corelli, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

It has been posited that the late Victorian period witnessed the rise of the psychological paranormal story, in which "ghosts, whether objectively existing or subjective phantoms – materialise the psychological conflicts of the ghost-seer." The fascination with scientific experimentation, the limits of art, and the explanations for hauntings and hallucinations often underpin the addiction to the "ghostly" in this era.

This story above was published in the Collection "New Ghost Stories" in 1893. I hope you enjoy listening to or watching this rendition of a long-forgotten tale. And I look forward to engaging on the next one.

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