The Red Room

“The Red Room” is a gothic-horror short story by the British author H.G. Wells, written in 1894 and published two years later in The Idler magazine. The story follows an unnamed young man—its narrator—as he undertakes to spend a night in the famously haunted “Red Room” of Lorraine Castle. After a terrifying night, the initially skeptical narrator concedes that the room is haunted, not by a ghost but by “Fear” itself. Wells, a major figure of turn-of-the-century British literature, is best known for sci-fi and horror novels including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man.

The story begins with the unnamed narrator standing by a fire, glass in hand, and announcing that “it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten” him. In “eight-and-twenty years,” he has never seen a ghost.

His companions—an old man with a “withered arm” and an old woman with “pale eyes”—warn him that he is being foolhardy. The old man reminds the narrator that he is acting by his “own choosing.” The woman adds that twenty-eight years is not that long: the narrator still has “many things…to see and sorrow for.”



A second old man enters, wearing a “shade,” and begins to cough fiercely. A silence follows which feels tense to the narrator: he imagines that the old people dislike one another. He announces that he would like to begin his vigil in “this haunted room of yours.” The three elderly people ignore him. He repeats himself, more loudly. The man with the withered arm gives him directions to the “Red Room,” and tells him where he can find a candle, but warns him that on “this nights of all nights,” the narrator is on his own.

The narrator is only too glad to leave the old people behind: their old fashioned clothes and aging bodies, he realizes, have been making him jumpy and irrational.

He follows the old man’s directions up a spiral staircase and along a moonlit corridor. He is startled by a sculpture, which momentarily looks like someone waiting to ambush him. He reflects on the history of the house, which we now learn is Lorraine Castle, abandoned for the last twelve months by its owner, “her ladyship.” The Red Room has been the site of unnatural happenings ever since a former owner of the castle played an unfortunate joke on his “timid” wife, with a “tragic end.” The most recent Duke, a young man, died after trying to pass the night in the room in order to dispel its ghost. The narrator is certain that the Duke’s death was a coincidence.



He enters the room: it is large and dark and full of old furniture. With his candle, he inspects every corner of the room, trying to settle his nerves. He finds six more candles and lights them. A fire has been prepared in the grate and he lights that too. He arranges some furniture around the fireplace and begins to talk aloud, reminding himself that the idea of ghosts is absurd, until the echoes of his own voice start to unsettle him.

At the other end of the room is a “dark alcove.” The shadow in its depth looks like a “lurking thing.” He puts his candle in the alcove to dispel the darkness. Remembering seeing some candles in the hallway, he fetches them and arranges them around the room, until there are no shadows left. He begins to feel quite cheerful.

Sometime after midnight, the candle in the alcove suddenly goes out. When he stands up to light it again, two more candles—behind him—suddenly go out. The narrator rushes to relight the candles, but they are going out faster than he can light them. Finally, in his hurry, he trips and falls. The candle he is carrying goes out and rolls away, and the room is dark except for the red glow of the dimming fire. He snatches up a candle to relight it from the fire, but as he thrusts the wick through the bars, the fire goes dark and cold.



Now the narrator is in a blind panic. He runs for the dark, but on the way, he trips and begins to stumble around, being “battered” by the furniture. Finally, something strikes him on the forehead and he is knocked unconscious.

When he wakes, he doesn’t remember what has happened. The old people are tending to his wounds: they found him in the room at dawn, they explain, bleeding from his forehead and mouth. The old people no longer seem sinister to the narrator, but friendly and caring.

The narrator remembers his ordeal of the previous night. He announces that the old people were right: the room is haunted. They want to know who the ghost is: the timid wife or her husband? Neither, the narrator explains, “There is no ghost there at all, but worse, far worse, something impalpable…and that is, in all its nakedness—Fear! Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room—”



The man with the shade agrees with the narrator, “It is even as you say. Fear itself is in that room. Black Fear…And there it will be…so long as this house of sin endures.”