J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Ultor de Lacy: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

In my estimation, "Ultor De Lacy" is one of the most accomplished, enigmatic, and viscerally terrifying pieces of short fiction that Le Fanu ever penned. It belongs in the upper echelon of his supernatural tales, easily standing alongside the haunting ambiguities of "Schalken the Painter" and the psychological unease of "Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street." Yet it is with no small frustration that I’ve discovered how little critical attention this remarkable story has received—aside from a fine, if isolated, essay by Ann Cahill.

The neglect is baffling. Among the cluster of Le Fanu's Faustian-themed stories—including "The Vision of Tom Chuff," "The Haunted Baronet," "The Familiar," and "The Dead Sexton"—"Ultor De Lacy" may be the most cohesive and compelling in terms of narrative momentum, emotional weight, and sheer dread. While many of Le Fanu’s Faustian tales tend to become ponderous or diffuse in their final acts, "Ultor De Lacy" maintains a taut structure that crescendos steadily without ever lapsing into inertia.

What makes it especially unforgettable is the chilling figure of Roderic O’Donnell—a grotesque revenant whose ghostly presence is steeped in both historical trauma and symbolic horror. His characterization is remarkable not just for its vivid physicality—his gaunt features and the lecherous, sneering expressions—but for the symbolic weight of his defining feature: a vivid, wine-colored birthmark (the so-called "claret-mark") that disfigures half his face.

This is no arbitrary flourish. The mark reads like a spectral brand of blood-guilt—a visual indictment of the ancestral sin committed by the De Lacy family during the aftermath of the Battle of Kinsale. More than just a physical blemish, the mark becomes a metaphor for inherited shame and festering betrayal: a family curse visible on the flesh of its persecutor. The effect is not just spectral but deeply psychoanalytic. O'Donnell is not merely a ghost; he is a personalized vengeance, a walking scar, a symptom of buried guilt made flesh.

II.

The story is saturated—indeed, haunted—with acts of betrayal, rebellion, and reversals of political fortune that deepen its thematic resonance. Treason is not just an event in "Ultor De Lacy"—it is a moral atmosphere, the oxygen of its world. First, there is Walter De Lacy, the ancestor who, in a bitter irony, betrays his countrymen by remaining loyal to the English crown. Then, generations later, the tides turn during the Glorious Revolution: the Protestant Whigs depose the Stuart monarchy and install William of Orange, rendering Jacobites like the De Lacys—once loyalists—into traitors. Their loyalty becomes treason by historical accident, and their social descent is both swift and irreversible.

Ultor himself, in continuing this doomed fidelity to the Stuarts during the 1745 uprising, becomes a traitor in the eyes of the British state. Betrayal is recursive in this tale. It loops, contradicts, and turns in on itself like a curse; those who remain loyal are punished, while those who betray are rewarded, only to become the next scapegoats when the wheel turns again. What makes this treachery so thematically fertile is how it resonates with Le Fanu’s own divided sympathies.

As a Protestant of Anglo-Irish stock writing in a country still riven by the legacy of colonialism, rebellion, and Catholic disenfranchisement, Le Fanu was, in some respects, both an insider and an outsider. His cultural loyalties were complex. He was a unionist and a loyal subject of the British crown, but he was also an Irishman, writing in the long, bitter shadow of Irish defeat, famine, and revolution. In "Ultor De Lacy," one senses Le Fanu interrogating his own position—both as a loyal Briton and as a literary inheritor of a suppressed, ghost-ridden culture. The story plays like a parable of guilt—national, familial, and perhaps even personal. It suggests that to be loyal to a cause—whether political or spiritual—is to be vulnerable to the ultimate betrayal: history itself.

III.

One detail in particular hints at the deeper structure of meaning embedded in the tale: the name “Ultor.” At first blush, it appears to be a variant of Walter (pronounced OOL-tur or AWL-tur), and thus a subtle echo of his grandfather’s name, creating a link across generations. But its true weight comes from its Latin meaning—Avenger.

Ultor is not just a name; it is a prophecy, a role, a burden. His very life is intended as an act of vengeance: he is raised, quite literally, to restore the De Lacy name and undo the historical wrongs committed against his line. But what does it mean to be an “avenger” in Le Fanu’s cosmos? In a world where vengeance invites retribution, and justice is little more than the cruel inversion of justice past, Ultor’s name becomes tragically ironic. He is not so much an avenger as he is a sacrificial victim—one whose very existence invites the culmination of a blood feud that transcends mortal time.

In this light, "Ultor De Lacy" becomes something far more than a simple ghost story. It is an allegory of historical violence, of cursed lineage, of vengeance disguised as justice, and of loyalty transfigured into doom. In Le Fanu’s fiction, evil is rarely flamboyant or easily vanquished; it is slow, systemic, inherited—and perhaps most unsettling of all—morally coherent within its own cruel calculus. The haunting of the De Lacy family is not only supernatural—it is historical and ethical, and it leaves the reader with the shivering suspicion that, in Le Fanu’s pitiless universe, the specter’s claim may be the only just one.

SUMMARY

The author relates how – as a child growing up in Ireland – he consumed a regular diet of supernatural tales and atmospheric locales. One, however, stood out to him. It was set at a lonely, ruined castle overlooking the heavily-wooded glen of Cappercullen – in the Slieve-Felim Mountains where the counties of Limerick and Tipperary meet. The rugged citadel is remote – located many miles away from any village – and has been spared from demolition and salvaging because of its awkward location.

The ruin was the hereditary seat of the extinct house of De Lacy, the last patriarch died without an heir in the 18th century. When he was a child, his dying father – an exiled Jacobite officer living in France – made him promise to wait to marry until he turned thirty – to prevent him from being distracted from managing the family financial and business responsibilities – and then went on to show him a terrifying portrait of a strange man – a portrait which both his father and the family priest insist that he memorize despite the fact that “the child [turned from it] with shrieks.”

Before dying, his father deposited the portrait (along with a document explaining its provenance) “in the hands of the priest, in trust, till his boy, Ultor, should have attained an age to understand their value, and to keep them securely.”

Young Ultor was cared for by the priest, and when he came of age, returned to Ireland to claim his estate. Since he hadn’t been a Jacobite rebel, he had no trouble reclaiming the estate at Cappercullen, and kept his word to his father: marrying just past thirty years old to a woman who withered away in the “isolation and gloom” of her husband’s lonely territory, dying young, but not before giving birth to two beautiful daughters.    

***

During the 1745 Jacobite uprising, Ultor de Lacy couldn’t resist his hereditary rebelliousness: he joined the Scots and became one of the few Irishmen who was charged with treason for participating in their insurrection. He fled Ireland for France, leaving his two beautiful daughters alone at his isolated manor, unsure of his fate. Eventually, the Crown seized his lands and funds, forcing his daughters to abandon their castle and lay off their staff, although the dismal little Cappercullen estate remained unused, abandoned, and unwanted.  

A few years later, the local children were at first terrified when they saw the desolate building with “light streaming redly from the narrow window … across the glen, already dim in the shadows of the deepening night,” and by the sight of two ghostly maidens standing at the turret window in their white dresses, imagining them to be phantoms or fairies.

It was the De Lacy sisters who had quietly returned, in these less political times, to find refuge in one of the towers at Cappercullen – one which was precariously perched on the edge of a cliff while the rest of the castle remained shut up and falling into ruin. Sustained by a small stipend from their mother’s inheritance, they were just barely able to stave off complete poverty, but still languished in threadbare obscurity.  

Like Rapunzel, they lived in the top room of the tower, isolated and hidden from sight, attended by two Jacobite servants – an old man and an old woman. The elder of the two, Alice, was brunette, serious, and stoic, experiencing her exile like a cloistered nun. The younger, Una, was blonde, fanciful, and romantic, imagining herself as a fairy princess in a nursey tale.

As the politics of the day cooled down, the government became less invested in punishing Jacobites, and while de Lacy knew that he couldn’t openly return to Ireland, his daughters were largely safe from harassment as long as they stayed quiet and removed from society – a task made all the easier by the haunted reputation of their castle, which was only ever visited by a Jacobite-allied priest who secretly came to occasionally hold Mass with the inmates at night.

This priest – friend though he was to the family – was the first to sense supernatural activity at their house in the form of sinister visions of a dead man’s face, antagonistic confusion which causes him to become inexplicably lost on the familiar property, and warped impressions of reality, such as mistaking the castle for a cloud. As a result, he refuses to visit after nightfall, and – not wanting to be caught going there by the authorities – his Masses largely cease, and the girls were deprived of his spiritual direction.

***

Soon after his ministering slowed to a halt, the male servant, Laurence, began noticing strange sights. It began with a sinister, red light coming from the crumbling bell tower – a closed-off, ruined turret that overlooked the one which the girls inhabited – which looked like a lamp moving back and forth. The inmates are terrified that they are being monitored by the government, but Laurence takes it to be worse than that: it is a sign that Ultor has died overseas and is now watching over his daughters.

And yet, after several appearances, he begins to suspect a natural source and agrees to investigate the phenomenon, so he mounts the spiral staircase with a brace of pistols, but the “ill-omened glare” fades teasingly seconds before he can come face to face with it.

He recalls that the bell tower was the site where “the De Lacys of those evil days used to sit in feudal judgment upon captive adversaries” whom they were known to torture and hang from its battlements, and decides that catching the perpetrator is “a hopeless business.”

Indeed, the light continues to gleam from the ruined tower and becomes part of their daily life, and a romantic joke to Una. But the joke is short-lived, because the female servant, Peggy, soon reports a haunting of her own: she has seen a “thin-faced man, with an ugly red mark all over the side of his cheek, looking out the same window, just at sunset.”

Not long after, Laurence sees him, too, with his legs crossed, leaning on his elbows at the tower window, his face twisted in a “sickly sneer.” Horrified, he fires two pistols at the figure, just as Ultor De Lacy – concealed in a cloak – comes up behind him.

Doubly startled, Laurence points out the creepy eavesdropper, but his figure “somehow dissolved and broke up without receding.” He also notes that the yellow and red ivy, lichen patches, and white masonry of the bell tower wall seem to create the illusion of the stranger’s face.

Now that the master had returned – with a handsome, French Army captain, no less – the inmates’ focus shifts to one of merriment. De Lacy reveals to Alice that the King of France has helped him by arranging a marriage between Una and the young officer (a poor but landed nobleman) since the elder sister plans to join a French convent once Una is taken care of. However, he asks her to keep it a secret, so that headstrong Una can have the illusion of falling in love.

That evening, Alice and her father tour the castle grounds, discussing politics and wishful hopes for their future, when they see the man with the red birthmark coming towards them. He is dressed in antiquated Spanish fashions – a dingy doublet, plumed hat, and laced cloak – and wordlessly walks past them, although: “as he strode past, he touched his cap with his thin, discolored fingers, and an ugly side glance.”

De Lacy is horrified by the encounter, chasing after him with his sword to no avail. He confesses that – although he doesn’t know the man personally, he knows who he is, and curses the priest for having ceased his visits which have deprived them of the Sacraments.

He raves that they must find a way for the girls to make their Confessions and to receive the Eucharist as soon as possible, and – in the meantime – begs Alice to pray fervently for protection, and gives her an amulet with a consecrated Host to wear at night. Desperate tears run down his face as he moans “the curse has fallen, indeed, on me and mine.”

***

In the meantime, the girlish Una – assumed to be safe due to her growing attachment to the officer – “began to lose spirit and to grow pale. Her fun and frolic were quite gone.” She began to prefer solitude to singing and was “strangely reserved and cold.” Alice assumes that she – in one of her serious moods – has offended her gregarious sister, but over time begins to worry for her sanity:

“Once or twice, when her sister urged her with tears and entreaties to disclose the secret of her changed spirits and demeanour, she seemed to listen with a sort of silent wonder and suspicion, and then she looked for a moment full upon her, and seemed on the very point of revealing all. But the earnest dilated gaze stole downward to the floor, and subsided into an odd wily smile, and she began to whisper to herself, and the smile and the whisper were both a mystery to Alice.”

One night, as they lay in bed in their tower grotto, Una says – “as if speaking to herself [as an] odd smile stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight” – “’Tis my last night in this room – I shall sleep no more with Alice.” Alice is distraught by this strange pronouncement, especially when Una explains that she simply must leave, otherwise she will have to die:

"Die, Una darling!--what can you mean?"

"Yes, sweet Alice, die, indeed. We must all die some time, you know, or—or undergo a change; and my time is near—very near—unless I sleep apart from you."

"Indeed, Una, sweetheart, I think you are ill, but not near death."

"Una knows what you think, wise Alice—but she's not mad—on the contrary, she's wiser than other folks."

"She's sadder and stranger too," said Alice, tenderly.

"Knowledge is sorrow," answered Una, and she looked across the room through her golden hair which she was combing—and through the window, beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of the glen in the misty moonlight.

Una goes onto insist that she will move her quarters to an adjacent antechamber which is separated from Alice by two massive oak doors. In the morning, “the change was made, and the girls for the first time since childhood lay in separate chambers.” That evening, Alice suffers a terrible nightmare of the man with the birthmark on his face, and when she awakens, she thinks she can hear a deep, male voice singing – “like the melody of a man whiling away the hours over his work” – in the glen below the cliff.

More worrisome, still, she thinks she can overhear Una singing in harmony with the strange voice in the next room. Going to her window, she peers out at Una’s window and sees her silhouetted against it by the red flicker of a candle.

On another evening, Alice is terrified by the sound of Una clearly conversing with a low-voiced man long after bedtime, with no apparent attempt on their part to avoid being overheard. Alice knocks at the door, which is opened by Una – holding a candle and wearing a nightgown – who coldly invites her to come inside. The room is small and sparsely furnished, with no hiding places and no man in sight.

Eventually, Ultor returns again, concerned by his correspondence with Alice. He has warned her not to share any of these scandalous details with the servants, and brings the news that Una can be married to the young Frenchman in a matter of weeks.

But this news doesn’t dampen Una’s mysterious courtship: two nights later, Alice overhears the voices again, and this time – after confirming that Una is again at her window with a candle – looks down into the glen beneath the cliff, where she sees the shadow of what seems to be the man in 16th century Spanish garb:

“there were the cap and mantle, the rapier, the long thin limbs and sinister angularity. It was so thrown obliquely that the hands reach to the window-sill, and the feet stretched and stretched, longer and longer … and disappeared into the general darkness.”

With her sense of dreams and reality severely distorted – unsure of her own sanity and what threats are being posed to whom – she buries her head under the pillow and falls asleep praying.

***

The next day De Lacey announces that the priest is on his way to serve them with Confession and the Eucharist, but it is not to be: that evening, Una tearfully looks over at Alice with love, and they embrace, as if for the last time. Alice thinks that her sister has returned to her, but Una suddenly looks up at the window – attentively, as if listening to a command – then:

“she smiled a strange pleased smile, and then the smile slowly faded away, leaving that sly suspicious light behind it which somehow scared her sister with an uncertain sense of danger.”

Lost in a reverie, Alice begins singing “Siuil a Run” – the famous Irish ballad told from the perspective of a woman longing for her soldier-lover who has gone to battle.

Later that night, Alice wakes up to see Una standing over her with a knowing, sinister grin – unaware that Alice is awake – reaches under her pillow, as if stuffing something under it, walks over to the fireplace, retrives a piece of chalk, and seems to slip it into a sallow, thin hand which reaches out to her through the door. She then smiles over her shoulder and walks toward the doorway.

Alarmed, Alice runs after her, but finds her sister asleep in bed, but then – a second time – she is woken by the sight of her sister looking down on her, this time dressed in a cloak and hood, wearing travelling shoes, and clutching a pack. She gives Alice a parting smile, unbelievably “soulless and terrible,” and turns for the door. Before sunrise thinks she hears a knock at her door followed by soft laughter.

In the morning, of course, Una is gone, and the headboard of her bed is inscribed – with the chalk she stole from Alice’s room – with the words: “ULTOR DE LACY, ULTOR O’DONNELL.” Under Alice’s pillow they find Una’s purse with the words “UNA’S LOVE” embroidered on it.

De Lacy rages with blasphemies at the tardy priest whom he accuses of failing his duty to guard his daughter’s soul, but it is too late: Una is only seen in fleeting visions, but never in body. Sometimes she is glimpses combing her hair in the window of the bell tower. She is at first frightened when she realizes that she is being watched by humans, but then smiles “her slanting, cunning smile” and disappears. In the present day, only her melancholy singing voice is occasionally heard singing an Irish ballad about a faithless lover or a hapless lass who has been spirited away by the forces of darkness.   

After Ultor’s death, Alice – who entered a convent in Dublin and shared this sad story with a friend of the narrator – inherited his effects, among which was a startling portrait of the thin, sallow man with the birthmark on his face. Along with it was a parchment which told his tale. In December of 1601, Walter De Lacy of Cappercullen successfully led government forces against Spanish regulars and Irish rebels at the end of the Nine Years’ War (aka Tyrone’s Rebellion), likely the Battle of Kinsale. He imprisoned many captives in his dungeon, including his cousin, Roderic O’Donnell, who passionately begged De Lacy for his life, offering to pay a massive ransom. De Lacy, however – a zealous loyalist – was unmoved, and hanged his cousin for treason from the bell tower.

Before his execution, Roderic swore to devote his afterlife to ruining the De Lacy family happiness. His ghost, the parchment says, was often seen afterwards, and the portrait has been traditionally shown to all the De Lacy children to warn them from “being misled by him unawares.” His ultimate mission, it warns, is to end the De Lacy bloodline – a mission which he has seemingly achieved.   

ANALYSIS

"Ultor De Lacy" stands as a rich and deeply unnerving story that deftly combines folkloric terror with psychological dread. Drawing on motifs from several of his most sinister tales—including "Schalken the Painter", "Laura Silver Bell", "The Child That Went with the Fairies", "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street", and Carmilla—it serves as a kind of Gothic palimpsest, where themes of spiritual doom, erotic possession, ancestral sin, and spectral vengeance intersect. Central to the story’s enduring unease is its treatment of the Demon Lover trope: the archetype of a supernatural seducer who appears under the guise of romantic desire, but ultimately serves as an agent of destruction, entropy, or damnation.

Roderic O’Donnell, the ghostly antagonist of the tale, may be less well-known today, but he is one of the most successful and terrifying versions of this figure in Victorian literature. His revenge is not merely personal—it is dynastic, theological, and metaphysical. O’Donnell’s haunting is not a single visitation but a multi-generational siege, a slow-burning campaign that culminates in the perverse seduction of a descendant of the man who wronged him. This idea of long-game vengeance—of a ghost with strategic patience and a hunger for annihilation—places the story at the nexus of Gothic horror and Irish political allegory.

II.

Le Fanu’s tale likely influenced, and was in turn influenced by, Charles Dickens’ highly Lefanuvian sketch "To Be Read at Dusk". In Dickens’ tale, a bride is haunted by dreams of a mustachioed stranger, who later materializes in the form of Signor Dellombra—whose name translates to “Lord of Shadows.” Like O’Donnell, Dellombra seduces the bride away from the world of the living, suggesting a common fascination with women pulled into a dark romantic orbit that culminates in abduction, damnation, or death. In both cases, the women appear willing—or at least mesmerized—participants in their undoing, blurring the line between enchantment and choice. Though "Ultor De Lacy" is little remembered today, its influence can be traced in the work of multiple Victorian horror writers. Three masterpieces, in particular, bear its fingerprints.

The first is "The Man with the Nose" by Le Fanu’s gifted niece, Rhoda Broughton. Although she penned only a small number of supernatural tales, Broughton was widely regarded as one of the finest ghost story writers of the late Victorian era. Her story, published a decade after De Lacy, closely mirrors its structure: a young woman is haunted by dreams of a sinister suitor whose grotesque nose becomes the unmistakable mark of doom—just as O'Donnell’s claret birthmark brands him with folkloric horror.

Second is E. F. Benson’s terrifying tale "The Face", which revolves around a girl plagued since childhood by recurring dreams of a rapacious red-haired man. Eventually, she recognizes his face in an ancestral portrait—just as Alice De Lacy recognizes her sister’s suitor as the man from the family miniature—and later opens the door to the very visage that has haunted her for decades. Like Le Fanu, Benson here weaves together dream, destiny, and death with devastating effectiveness.

III.

Third—and perhaps most fascinating of all—is the tale’s unmistakable influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. While literary scholars often note the strong echoes of Carmilla in Dracula and acknowledge "Aungier Street" as the germ for "The Judge’s House", "Ultor De Lacy" has gone relatively unmentioned. Yet its DNA is all over Stoker’s novel. The dynamic between Una and Alice De Lacy in "Ultor De Lacy" prefigures the relationship between Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker in Dracula. Una, the fair, flirtatious, spiritually wayward sister, is shadowed and eventually devoured by an unseen lover whose courtship mimics a haunting; Alice, the sensible, dark-haired confidante, watches in growing horror.

The story follows familiar beats: the sister’s increasingly cryptic behavior; her erratic sleepwalking and solitary night rambles; the presence of a lover whose identity is withheld; her progressive estrangement from family and faith; and her ultimate, horrifying departure from the world she knew. Like Lucy, Una resists, but ultimately yields. The contrast between night-birds and day-birds, a poetic image from Una herself, mirrors Dracula’s rejection of the natural and sunlit world in favor of nocturnal dominion.

Una’s seduction is both metaphorical and literal: her romantic preferences align with the supernatural; her sensual imagination finds more pleasure in mystery and shadow than in convention and propriety. The parallels deepen when we consider Una’s refusal of a suitable, aristocratic fiancé—a French nobleman of impeccable credentials—in favor of the ghostly O’Donnell, just as Lucy breaks away from the trio of respectable suitors to follow Dracula’s call.

IV.

The figure of Roderic O’Donnell is vampiric in every way. He is able to appear in daylight, shocking those who know what he is. He resists being named or directly confronted—when Laurence attempts to shoot him, the bullet inexplicably veers off target, as if bent by some occult force. Like Dracula, he is kept at bay by the rites and sacraments of the Church, yet ultimately defeats his enemies not with brute force, but with seduction, stealth, and spiritual corruption. His revenge is not a crude haunting but a calculated perversion of inheritance, love, and lineage. He is a warrior, like Vlad the Impaler, betrayed and executed, who returns from death not to seek justice, but to claim power. His revenge culminates not in violence, but in the quiet extinguishing of a family’s future.

Perhaps most disturbingly, O’Donnell is not merely a ghost. He is something older, stranger, and more chthonic. He bleeds into the realm of faerie lore, demonic visitation, and pagan revenants. He transforms into lichen and ivy. He commands the landscape. He mocks bullets. He is a corporeal revenant, a mythic embodiment of long-buried guilt and unatoned sin. In this, he goes beyond the ordinary ghost and prefigures Dracula’s blending of vampire, incubus, aristocrat, and ancient sorcerer.

V.

Independent of its influence, "Ultor De Lacy" is one of Le Fanu’s most emotionally merciless tales. The victim, Una, is not merely seduced and ruined—she is the final link in a multi-generational punishment inflicted for a crime long buried. Her ancestor Walter De Lacy’s betrayal of kinship, in executing the wounded and pleading O’Donnell after the Battle of Kinsale, is the original sin, and it is for this that the house of De Lacy must fall. The betrayal violates two sacred codes: the Irish tradition of hospitality and the chivalric tradition of mercy to kin. That it was done “through zeal for his queen” resonates with Le Fanu’s own uneasy position as a Protestant Tory, loyal to the British Crown during times of Irish suffering, especially the Famine.

The story can be read as Le Fanu’s subconscious meditation on inherited guilt and political apostasy. What if, like Walter de Lacy, he had aligned himself too deeply with the “wrong side of history”? Would his descendants one day suffer the metaphysical consequences? Would future generations be cursed by the ghosts of neglected kinship and political zealotry? The supernatural punishment is only warded off by Catholic ritual, which further emphasizes the story’s ideological tension. The family’s Protestant past cannot save them; only Mass, confession, and relics offer brief reprieve.

The priest’s absence removes the last spiritual shield between the De Lacys and destruction. And when O’Donnell interferes with the priest’s ability to serve the family, he symbolically undermines their only remaining grace, clearing the way for Una’s seduction. Una’s union with the ghost is an incestuous inversion of marriage, replacing dynastic continuity with spectral domination. She rejects her family’s future—the alliance with the French noble—in favor of a cryptic and damned lover who annihilates, rather than preserves, lineage. Her sexual defection completes the curse: the family’s womb is seized by the very spirit they tried to forget.

VI.

At its core, "Ultor De Lacy" is about betrayal and possession. The final treason is not Walter’s, nor De Lacy’s, but Una’s. Her betrayal is spiritual, erotic, and familial. As scholar Ann Cahill notes, “Part of the horror for Alice and her father is not just that they lose [Una] to O'Donnell but that she is secretive, sly and gone of her own will.” While Ultor De Lacy attempts an exorcism—perhaps to absolve himself of responsibility—the text strongly suggests that Una leaves willingly. When she tells her sister, “Knowledge is sorrow,” she invokes not only the sorrow of forbidden truth but hints at “carnal knowledge”—a veiled admission of her physical and spiritual surrender to O'Donnell.

Her sexual agency, misused, seals the family’s doom. The name she inscribes on her bedpost—“ULTOR DE LACY, ULTOR O'DONNELL”—is a grim pun: “The Avenger of the De Lacys has been defeated by the Avenger of the O’Donnells.” The past, once silenced and buried, has returned not to be redressed, but to dominate. In the end, Le Fanu’s ghost is not appeased by justice. He is satisfied only by absolute reversal—a final, irrevocable replacement of lineage, of narrative, and of power.

You can read the original story HERE!

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