Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over, setting them the task of driving out the ghosts from the various rooms and reporting back on Twelfth Night. The resulting ghost stories form the basis of a thrilling narrative.For this work, 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.