J. Sheridan Le Fanu's The Ghost of a Hand (aka Ghost Stories of the Tiled House): A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

Excerpted from one of Le Fanu’s most renowned novels, The House by the Churchyard, the following two episodes relate a series of strange events that have taken place at a purportedly haunted manor in the then-rural Dublin parish of Chapelizod: the Tiled House. In the novel the home is purchased by a newcomer who disregards its poor reputation. While The House by the Churchyard is a mystery rather than supernatural novel, it is nonetheless very chilling, and, for me, the closing scene of the first section (which compares the wound of a slashed throat of a ghost to a laughing mouth) has always been one of the creepiest in Le Fanu’s entire canon. As small and slight as this particular episode is (one paragraph), the weirdness of this very comfortable specter (cozily sashaying about someone else’ bedroom while wearing a dressing gown) who creeps to the side of a girl’s bed before exposing his gashed throat is a terror that once literally kept me awake at night.

This first episode comes by way of a series of ghost stories told to the precocious Lilly (who will, sadly, later waste away to death after learning of her fiancé’s infidelity) by her doting nursemaid. “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” follows a line of Lefanuvian logic that consistently represents the supernatural as a malignant, cruel menace to living mortals, with truly sadistic, even carnal intentions toward even the good and the innocent (and, of course, this all foreshadows the blameless Lily’s imminent fate). Far from justice-seeking spirits, or guardian angels, these troublemakers are damned souls that love to prey on the vulnerable – just to watch their misery.

The first episode, of the dead man in the dressing gown, has a particularly rapine character to it, and his intimate exposure of his gaping, vaginal throat wound has a decidedly sexual subtext to it. The second episode, even more famous and highly anthologized, is the very strange and disturbing story of a groping, fleshy, phantom hand. Many have referred to it the progenitor of Thing from the Addams Family, but in a far, far more sinister (and sexually suggestive) way. I will address that story in the afterword.

SUMMARY

In this richly layered and unsettling tale, Sheridan Le Fanu presents a haunting centered not around a traditional ghost, but around the eerie and inexplicable appearance of a ghostly hand. The story opens in the warm, domestic comfort of young Lilias and her elderly companion, old Sally, who helps prepare her mistress for bed while entertaining her with chilling local legends. Lilias, a bright and good-humored young woman, delights in Sally’s stories—not because she believes them, necessarily, but because of the cozy unease they inspire.

It is May, though unseasonably cold, and Sally sits knitting by the fire while Lilias tucks into her four-poster bed and requests to hear once again the lore of the infamous Tiled House near Ballyfermot. The house, tucked away by a grass-grown avenue and half-concealed behind nettles, elms, and hemlock, has long been feared in the region for its desolate air and ghostly reputation. From childhood, Lilias had known it as a place of danger and dread, home to unseen occupants and “unearthly dangers.”

When she asks Sally to frighten her “out of [her] wits,” the old servant obliges gladly, launching into a string of stories as traditional and atmospheric as a fireside folktale.

Sally recounts the haunted orchard behind the house, where dogs kept by tenants would howl mournfully, terrified of some unseen presence. Even children, usually emboldened by mischief and curiosity, dared not venture there after dark. Local boys, entranced by golden pippins glowing in the trees, could never pluck one.

Several people claimed to have seen a pale woman in a hooded cloak, walking in silence through the orchard with a little child skipping at her side. She would never speak, only place her finger to her lips in a gesture of secrecy.

The Widow Cresswell once encountered the pair and watched, stunned, as they passed like shadows, “swift as the shadow of a cloud,” without acknowledging her presence. There were tales of ghostly knockings, of spectral sounds mimicking the Earl’s return—whips striking windows, dogs whining, footsteps at the door—but when the doors were opened, there was only silence.

The most unnerving detail in Sally’s long series of accounts comes from Kitty Haplin, who saw a man in an old-fashioned morning gown with a velvet cap and no wig enter her room one night. When she turned to face him, he leaned over the bed and, trying to speak, revealed a second mouth: his throat had been slashed ear to ear, and the gash leered at her like a grotesque grin -- "his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her." She never recovered and died weeks later in a fever of terror.

These stories, filtered through Sally’s reverent and dramatic telling, drift Lilias off to sleep, but the narrative warns us that they are not “mere winter’s tales.” Beneath all the embellishment and folklore lies something more—something with the hardness of fact.

The second half of the story draws from what purports to be a real historical account, preserved in a letter from Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, dated 1753. The Tiled House is no longer the subject of gossip and ghost stories alone—it becomes a legal matter. Mr. Alderman Harper, a wealthy Dublin man, had leased the property from Lord Castlemallard for his daughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Prosser.

Though initially comfortable, the couple soon became disturbed by inexplicable phenomena and fled the house. Mr. Harper refused to complete the lease, calling the house a “nuisance” and implying it was inhabited by something worse than mere criminals. When Castlemallard tried to enforce the contract in court, Harper presented seven affidavits attesting to the disturbances—enough to scare off any further legal action. Though the case never made it into official court records, Miss Chattesworth relayed the details with an uneasy fascination, including specific testimony from the Prossers and their servants.

The manifestations began simply, with Mrs. Prosser seeing a single, plump white hand appear on the window ledge outside as she sat alone at twilight. It seemed to belong to no one, and vanished when she screamed. It returned again and again. The cook saw it pressing against the kitchen window, gliding over the glass as if searching for a way in. It would rap softly at doors, scratch and pat windows, and slide through even the smallest gaps in shutters. Its touch was always soft, deliberate, disturbingly human.

One servant swore she saw a pale finger probing through a hole in a pantry window—“turned about this way and that”—as if searching for a latch. The household grew tense and paranoid. Servants fled; the family refused to walk about after nightfall without company. Mr. Prosser, a self-described skeptic, dismissed the events as fraud or hysteria and resolved to expose the perpetrator.

But when the rapping came one night to the hall door, Mr. Prosser armed himself and went to confront it. He flung the door open and saw no one, but something invisible passed beneath his arm—something that “squeezed gently” as it went. From that moment on, Mr. Prosser changed. He no longer mocked the fear in his house.

That night, he went to bed early, read his Bible, and prayed. Shortly after midnight, he heard the now-familiar sound of the soft palm brushing across his bedroom door. The next morning, a perfect handprint was discovered in the dust on a table in the little parlour, and when Mr. Prosser had every member of the household replicate the print, none matched. It was the same as the hand seen at the window and the pantry. Whoever it belonged to, it was now inside the house.

The haunting grew more intimate and invasive. One night, Mr. Prosser drew back his bed curtain and found his wife lying deathly still. Beside her head, resting on the pillow, was the pale, puffed hand—its fingers twitching slightly, stroking the space near her temple. With horror, he hurled a heavy ledger at the curtains. The hand vanished, and he saw the closet door close silently. When he flung it open, it was empty, and he felt for a moment “as if he were like to lose his wits.”

Worse followed. Their infant daughter grew mysteriously ill, waking in terrified fits, inconsolable. One night, as Mrs. Prosser and the nurse watched the child, they both saw the hand again—emerging from a closet, shrouded by a bed valance, hovering above the child’s head. They screamed, fled, and slammed the nursery door. A moment later, came the unmistakable tap.

The horror of this tale is sharpened by its restraint. The ghost never shows itself in full. We never see the face, never learn the name, never discover the source of the haunting. We see only the hand—its pudgy whiteness, its confident familiarity, its sly, obscene tenderness. It taps like a visitor. It caresses like a lover. It probes like a thief. It is not severed or bleeding—it is alive, attached, purposeful, and always just out of sight.

In the final coda, the narrator recalls meeting an old Mr. Prosser, who recounted how his cousin “poor Jemmie,” when ill or feverish, would always dream of a “fat and pale” gentleman whose image had engraved itself on his mind with nightmare clarity. The dream figure’s face was “as minutely engraved upon his memory” as that of his father’s portrait. Though never seen in the main narrative, the implication is that this ghostly man—grotesque, laced, powdered, unwholesome—is the owner of the hand, and the source of the lingering horror.

ANALYSIS

The first episode of “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” has, as I previously mentioned, a very sexual, very violent element to it. The torn throat is an encoded vaginal image, and the quiet, intimate exposure of it has the character of an exhibitionist exposing his genitals to a stranger, except in that it seems to serve the purpose of him symbolically revealing her own sexual nature to her, as if to say: “let me show you what I am hiding from you under my cravat; now you show me what I know you are hiding under those sheets.” It is essentially a graphic sexual invitation, and Victorian readers – consciously or unconsciously – would have understood the shocking subtext.

Indeed, the setting (a bedroom) and the intimacy of his clothing (pajamas), along with his almost ritualistic act of disrobing his self-injury (and if we know Le Fanu, we can assume that he committed suicide out of self-loathing after a life of wickedness and immorality) all have a very nasty nature to them. Poor Kitty’s eventual death – wasting away from her exposure to this unwanted horror – is also a Victorian code: this is what happened to good girls in literature who were raped or molested.

All told, this narrative is a subtle and psychologically-charged exploration of the lingering effects of guilt, secrecy, and unresolved trauma. Set in a decaying mansion associated with mystery and scandal, the story gradually reveals a haunting – not of loud specters – but of atmospheric unease and emotional repression.

The true horror lies in the house’s oppressive silence and the suggestion of a violent, concealed past—domestic crimes and sexual betrayals so shocking and terrible that they imprints themselves on the building. Le Fanu masterfully uses ambiguity to heighten the dread, allowing the tiled house to stand as a gothic symbol of decayed aristocracy and buried sins, where the ghost is less a literal apparition than the inescapable memory of something dreadful left unspoken.

II.

Likewise, the “Ghost of a Hand” delves into some very murky subtext, and there is a strong suggestion that this pulpy, pale hand belongs to the same man in the dressing gown. Le Fanu has, as you may have noticed, recycled his comfortably dressed villain from “Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (also clad in a silk dressing gown and a velvet morning cap, also fleshy and fat and pale), whom he will also repurpose in “Mr Justice Harbottle.” 

Previously we can recognize him as the suicidal rake, Lord Glenfallen in the “History of a Tyrone Family”, and later this figure, or a version of him, will appear in “Ghost Stories of Lough Guir” as the legendary “Wizard” Earl of Desmond:

“He was a ‘grand-looking’ gentleman, arrayed in a flowered silk dressing-gown, with a cap of velvet on his head; and as he stepped toward her, in his slippered feet, he showed a very handsome leg.”

Who is this archetype – a fop defined by luxurious comfort, soft hands, fleshy feet, and handsome legs? I cannot divine a historical or biographical counterpart from Le Fanu’s life, other than to say that this is the manifested specter of Corruption itself, and corruption is a ubiquitous theme in Le Fanu’s writings. This fleshy spirit who is so desirous to climb into windows, to place his hands on children, to touch, to feel, to grope, is the embodiment of the corruption of power.

He (the collective archetype of Horrocks, Harbottle, Glenfallen, Desmond, and the man in the Tiled House) is a member of the wealthy gentry, consistently described as “sensual,” repeatedly defined by his body and its contact with things, and universally given the fate of suicide – usually a grotesque form of suicide enacted to escape feelings of guilt: Horrocks and Harbottle hang themselves from the bannisters with their bastard children’s jump ropes, Glenfallen and the man in the house opened their throats up with a razor, and while Desmond is said to have sunk into a lake, it is hinted at that he too cut his throat.

They are figures of shame, immorality, sensuality, entitlement, abuse, harassment, and corruption that has rotted them to the root – morally, spiritually, civically, sexually.

III.

While Le Fanu would never openly write about such a thing, there is the strong implication that the ghost belonging to the hand – “a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, benignant, and unwholesome face, was as minutely engraven upon his memory” – had sexual designs upon the infant whom he visited so frequently.

Why, for instance, is does he manifest solely as a hand, as though it is the epitome of his nature? The hand is one of the most erotic of the sensory organs – unlike the eyes or ears or nose it requires intimate contact to sense, feel, or grab. To distil a figure down into a hand is to suggest much about his character: that he is a lech, a groper, a molester, a man of fleshly appetites. Shane McCorristine calls the ghostly hand “a stylised fetish object.” Glen Cavaliero quips, “God knows what childhood nightmares may have been reanimated” in the reading of this tale.

This figure, who simultaneously seems both malevolent and benevolent, calls to mind the sex abuse scandals of Jimmy Saville, Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein, and so many others: people who took genuine interest in the welfare of vulnerable people – children, orphans, ingenues – but whose basic instinct was to prey on and denigrate them.

Regardless of the intentions of the ghost-with-the-hand, and regardless of whether it belongs (as I suspect) to the suicide in the dressing gown, or if (as I also suspect) this is the ghost of a morally corrupt grandee who committed suicide to escape the consequences of his horrifying character, Le Fanu is consistent in his themes: the universe will do nothing to aid humanity, to preserve innocence, or to protect the vulnerable. If it even has any anima at all, it is one which derives pleasure from the humiliation of humanity, the perversion of innocence, and the destruction of the vulnerable.

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated collection of Le Fanu's best ghost stories HERE!