Susan Hill’s 1983 novella opens on Christmas Eve with the retired solicitor Arthur Kipps at home with his second wife, Esmé, and his stepchildren. When they ask him to tell them a ghost story, he offers up a tale of “haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy … an inextricable part of my past”. It is a story so bleak, he continues, that he cannot say it out loud; he will write it down so that he “might finally be free of it”.
It concerns a visit made by Kipps as a young man to Eel Marsh House, a coastal mansion at the end of a causeway which is cut off from the mainland at high tide. He has been dispatched there by his boss to settle the affairs of a deceased widow named Alice Drablow. Kipps sifts through acres of paperwork, working through the night alone – or so he thinks. In the midst of his work, he catches glimpses of a ghostly woman dressed in black. Eventually a local man, Sam Daily, informs him that Alice Drablow’s sister Jennet haunts the house. During Jennet’s life, her child died in a terrible accident; legend has it that whenever the woman in black appears, another child dies in the village.
