The Red Room

The Red Room is a tale of terror written by H.G. Wells and originally published in 1894.

In the remote castle of Lorraine there is a room that is said to be haunted. This room is called The Red Room and there, supposedly, a young duke has died succumbing to apoplexy.

The narrator, rather skeptical, decides to spend the night there to prove that nothing strange happens there and with the intention of disproving all the local legends surrounding it. The very guards who reside there warn him not to do so, but he decides to go ahead.

Some of the shadows seem to have human figures and, although initially reason prevails, little by little the fear of the darkness and the place increases. Are there really ghosts there? Or is it the person's own fear that makes him see the apparitions?

"I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the queer old mirror at the end of the room".