Sir David Suchet

It brought back memories of another recent train disaster, the Clayton Tunnel Crash of 1861, when an exhausted, overworked signalman had made a fatal error at the end of a 24-hour shift, leading to a devastating collision.

Dickens walked away from Staplehurst with little more than scrapes and bruises, but it wasn't a day he would soon forget.

The normally garrulous author spent the next two weeks barely able to speak.

Letters written to his friends show his hands must have been shaking continuously.

For the rest of his life, he never set foot on a train without being overcome by a feeling of dread.

And yet, within a space of just over a year,

Dickens was parlaying those two train disasters, Staplehurst and Clayton Tunnel, into perhaps the most chilling ghost story he ever wrote.

A story that I'm going to read to you now.

It's called The Signalman.

I'm David Suchet, and from the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Charles Dickens' Ghost Stories.

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole.

One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came.

But instead of looking up to where I stood, on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the line.

There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what.

But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

Below!

From looking down the line, he turned himself about again, and raising his eyes saw my figure high above him.

Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?

He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle questions.

Just then, there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back as though it had forced to draw me down.