Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator—undaunted by the warnings of the locals—sets before a group of friends the task of driving the ghosts out of the house’s various rooms before reconvening on Twelfth Night. The resulting ghost stories form the basis of a thrilling narrative. Initially commissioned for his periodical All the Year Round, Dickens enlisted some of the period’s most famous writers—including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins—to collaborate with him on this Victorian supernatural classic.