Sir David Suchet

Neither of them is sure whether they're going to survive the next few moments.

The Staplehurst rail crash proved a seminal moment for Charles Dickens.

He and Ellen were lucky to survive it.

Sitting at the front of the train, their carriage remained upright throughout the disaster.

Others, meanwhile, broke off from the locomotive, tumbling down a bank to one side.

Ten people were killed in the crush, and many more seriously injured.

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.