The Signal-Man

"The Signal-Man" is a first-person horror/mystery story by Charles Dickens, first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.

The railway signal-man of the title tells the narrator of an apparition that has been haunting him. Each spectral appearance precedes a tragic event on the railway on which the signalman works. The signalman's work is at a signal-box in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance on a lonely stretch of the railway line, and he controls the movements of passing trains. When there is danger, his fellow signalmen alert him by telegraph and alarms. Three times, he receives phantom warnings of danger when his bell rings in a fashion that only he can hear. Each warning is followed by the appearance of the spectre, and then by a terrible accident.

An 1861 train crash at the Clayton Tunnel entrance near Brighton in West Sussex (here seen from the north) may have inspired the story.

Horror literature, horror fiction, horror/mystery story, Short Stories, fiction, classics, train crash, phantom warnings of danger, tragic event