The Old Nurse's Story

The narrator—the old nurse of the title—is an old family retainer who has worked in the service of the same family for three generations. She tells the young children about a dark incident that she experienced in the company of the children's mother, when she was a young woman and visiting her mother's ancestral home This story hits all the marks of a classic ghost story: an isolated manor, creepy music sounding from a disused organ, ghostly apparitions begging to be let inside. Despite all the hallmarks of a ghost story, the true horror of the story is in the very real, all-too-capable cruelty people and in their inability to right the wrongs of the past, showing readers how ghosts are not the only beings capable of creating terror.