The Red Room

Abstract

“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.”