Wolverden Tower

Wolverden Tower is a Christmas ghost story by Grant Allen, published in 1896. It belongs to the late Victorian tradition of Christmas ghost stories that flourished in English magazines from Dickens onward and that produced some of the most enduring short fiction of the period from writers as various as Henry James, M R James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Allen’s contribution to the tradition is short, atmospheric, and oddly satisfying.

The story is set at Wolverden Hall, an English country house, during a Christmas house party. The narrator is Maisie Llewelyn, a young Welsh woman invited to spend Christmas with her schoolfriend Mrs West. The Hall is presided over by old Colonel Belmont and his nervous wife, and the gathering includes the usual mixture of young people enjoying themselves and older guests with various private histories. The Wolverden tower of the title is an ancient church tower on the estate, and there is a local legend that on Christmas Eve a young woman is required as a sacrifice to keep the tower standing for another year.

The story moves with the steady patience of the best Victorian ghost stories from the cheerful house party atmosphere of the opening into the strange events of Christmas Eve and then to a final scene at the tower itself. Maisie meets two beautiful and unusual young women at the party, women whose backgrounds are mysterious and whose interest in her becomes more pointed as the evening goes on. The ending is one of those moments where the supernatural and the natural seem to merge in a way the reader is left to interpret.

The story is short, about thirty pages, and works perfectly as a single evening read, ideally near a fire. It is one of the better examples of the form from the 1890s and shows Grant Allen working in a genre that was not his usual territory. He brings to it his interest in folklore and in the survival of ancient religious patterns in modern English country life, which gives the ghost story an underlying anthropological weight that most Christmas ghost stories of the period did not have. It pairs naturally with the ghost stories of M R James and with the supernatural fiction collected in the Pall Mall Magazine and similar periodicals of the same decade.