Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish author writing at the same time as Charles Dickens. He specialized in Gothic tales of helpless young women trapped in desperate situations and some pretty spooky ghost stories. Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery was his first collection of short stories. It was published anonymously in 1851, and it consists of two ghost stories and two Gothic ones.

The first story, The Watcher, is about a retired navy officer, Sir James Barton, who is engaged to be marries to an eligible young woman. Everything is going extremely well for Captain Barton, except that when we walks home from visiting his fiancée one evening, he hears some footsteps following him. Every time he turns around, the street is empty, but as soon as he resumes walking, the footsteps also resume.

He soon receives a brief letter that reads as follows:

“Mr. Barton, late Captain of the Dolphin, is warned of danger. He will do wisely to avoid —— Street — (here the locality of his last night’s adventure was named) — if he walks there as usual, he will meet with something bad. Let him take warning, once for all, for he has good reason to dread
“The Watcher.”

The mysterious Watcher continues to shadow Captain Barton, to the point that his mental and physical health decline to an alarming degree. It turns out Captain Barton has some skeletons in his closet that have come back to haunt him, literally!

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