Ghost and Haunted Place

Knowl’s ghost stories and haunting imagery form an atmosphere of inherited legend and ambiguous evidence: the house seems populated by figures who are heard but not seen, while ordinary sounds and unexplained lights invite supernatural explanations. For Maud Ruthyn, these stories are not merely local entertainment. They intensify her vulnerability to fear and help prepare the ground for Madame de la Rougierre’s influence, even as the narrative leaves room to question what has truly happened.

The Legends of Knowl

Knowl’s inhabitants preserve the familiar belief that an old English house has its ghostly traditions. One is Rachel Ruthyn, remembered as a beauty of Queen Anne’s time who died grieving for Colonel Norbrooke, killed in the Low Countries. Rachel is not seen; her presence is inferred from the sounds attributed to her: high-heeled shoes, rustling brocade, sighs in the galleries near bedroom doors, and, on stormy nights, sobbing. The legend makes the house’s past seem to persist in its corridors, but offers sound rather than a visible apparition as proof.

A second figure, the “link-man,” is described in almost opposite terms. He is seen but never heard: a lank, dark-faced man carrying a torch that usually smoulders with a red glow as he makes his rounds, including through the library. When the torch flares, he is said to whirl it above his head, and the display is treated as an omen of crisis or calamity. Such a flare is believed to occur only once or twice in a century. The contrast between Rachel’s invisible, audible passage and the link-man’s silent, visible one gives Knowl’s lore two distinct forms of haunting, each sustained by signs that must be interpreted.

Reported Sounds and Uncertain Evidence

Madame de la Rougierre tells Maud and Mary Quince that someone has walked in the gallery outside her bedroom, rustling a dress and breathing audibly. Twice, she says, she has stood in the dark to listen; once, after she called out and received no answer, the unseen person seemed to turn back and hurry towards her, prompting her to retreat into her room. The account frightens Maud and Mary, but Maud notes that the first shock of such stories soon fades as they take their place among the house’s other tales. The narrative thereby gives Madame’s report an immediate emotional effect without confirming its cause.

About a week later, Maud herself wakes after Mary Quince has gone downstairs for a night-light. Her candle has gone out. Hearing an approaching step, she opens the door expecting Mary and instead hears what she takes to be a bare foot on the oak floor, followed by rustling clothes and breathing moving away towards the upper staircase. She returns to her room in fear and shuts the door. Mary, however, had returned and gone to bed half an hour earlier. The mismatch between Maud’s expectation and Mary’s movements makes the encounter disturbing, but does not establish who—or what—made the sounds.

About a fortnight after Maud’s experience, Mary Quince reports seeing a strong, moving light through the shuttered library window at around four in the morning. She identifies it with the link-man’s torch, imagining that he has waved it above his head in anger. Her report echoes the house’s traditional omen, but the text presents the identification as her inference, not as an independently confirmed apparition. Across these episodes, footsteps, breathing, rustling, and a shifting light remain perceptible signs whose meanings are supplied by the stories already attached to Knowl.

Fear, Dreams, and Madame’s Influence

Maud reflects that the strange occurrences make her nervous and prepare the way for the peculiar ascendancy Madame de la Rougierre gains through Maud’s sense of mystery and the supernatural. The connection is psychological and narrative rather than proof that the haunting is genuine: the legends provide a setting in which uncertainty itself can be frightening, while Madame’s unsettling reports and conduct become harder for Maud to dismiss. The household’s ghostly atmosphere thus has practical consequences in Maud’s experience of fear.

That fear enters Maud’s dreams as well. In one, Madame leads her by candlelight into the library, whispering too quickly for Maud to understand. They approach the oak cabinet indicated by Maud’s father, and Maud feels that they are engaged in forbidden business. She turns the key; inside stands her father, whose terrible cry is “Death!” Madame’s candle goes out, and Maud wakes screaming in the dark, remaining hysterical for an hour. The dream gathers together the house’s supernatural unease, Maud’s fear of transgressing the cabinet’s secrecy, and her memory of her father. It is a dream, not evidence that a ghost has appeared, yet it shows how thoroughly the language of haunting has entered her imagination.

Religious Mystery and the Meaning of Death

The novel also places the supernatural atmosphere beside religious ideas about what lies beyond visible life. When Maud is a child, an unidentified man invokes Swedenborg to tell her that her mother is not in the place she imagines. He describes the return home as possible only through the gate of death and presents death as a passage through which people will eventually enter and be refreshed. The exchange leaves Maud frightened and grieving, while giving the unseen world a religious rather than simply folkloric vocabulary.

After Doctor Bryerly’s unexpected visit to Knowl, Maud associates the Swedenborgians with a mystery surrounding her father. She wonders whether their beliefs are good and true or instead amount to heresy and witchcraft, and fears that Bryerly exercises an influence over her father that she cannot understand. This is Maud’s anxious interpretation, not proof that Bryerly uses supernatural powers. Later, in speaking about religion, her father invokes Swedenborgian study and biblical imagery, including the deluge and the waters of Mara, and says that he is washed and sprinkled. The recurrence of religious symbolism keeps spiritual conviction, fear, and uncertainty in close proximity without resolving them into a single explanation.

From Haunted Houses to Human Confinement

Knowl’s legends provide a contrast to the later Gothic spaces of Bartram-Haugh. On her arrival, Maud sees its grand, white-stone front and elaborate architecture alongside overgrown grounds and storm-felled trees; the house’s grandeur is already shadowed by neglect. Inside, high locked barriers interrupt the corridors and galleries, while rooms remain shut under an order that nothing be disturbed. The atmosphere of a house withholding access thus moves beyond the imagined presence of ghosts and into its physical arrangements.

Maud later remembers the room where Mr. Charke killed himself, identifying it by its stripped panelling. Much later, when Madame takes her into an unfamiliar room, Maud recognizes a cut-stone inner court as resembling Bartram-Haugh’s quadrangle. There she discovers that her bedroom window is barred and screwed shut, making the room a prison. In a subsequent nocturnal encounter, a concealed section of the window opens and Dudley Ruthyn enters. These events give concrete human causes to the confinement and hidden access that Gothic atmosphere can make seem uncanny. Across the book, haunting imagery makes houses feel secretive and threatening, but the danger is not settled by a supernatural explanation: locked spaces, concealed arrangements, and people’s actions supply their own disturbing reality.