Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator--undaunted by the warnings of the locals--sets before a group of friends the task of driving the ghosts out of the house's various rooms before reconvening on Twelfth Night. The resulting ghost stories form the basis of a thrilling narrative. Initially commissioned for his periodical "All the Year Round," Dickens enlisted some of the period's most famous writers--including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins--to collaborate with him on this Victorian supernatural classic.