This is a very effective short ghost story about a haunted house in the middle of London, the typical place where no tenant has served out their term and all quitted after a day or two. The author builds up an atmosphere of thick horror and oppression very well within a few pages - "I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life". The narrator is determined to find the true rational explanation for the hauntings as he refuses to believe in the supernatural and, in the end, he does identify the source, but it is based on a Medieval monkish curse. A gripping piece of writing. ( )

El narrador de esta desasosegante fábula de fantasmas, desoyendo los consejos de sus allegados, decide pasar una noche, junto con su criado y su perro, en una casa encantada situada en Londres, de la que todos los demás huyen despavoridos. Allí tal y como él esperaba, asiste a una serie de apariciones espeluznantes y descubre, a través de unas cartas, que la casa, muchos años atrás, fue el escenario de unos horribles crímenes. El secreto de todo parece encerrarse en una habitación vacía. Conectada a esta, la voluntad de un ser inmortal y perverso, uno de los que tuvo que ver con la casa en el pasado, ha creado y gobernado a distancia los extraños fenómenos.

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I believe this ghost story may be the first to convey the idea that belief is necessary to be harmed by apparitions. ( )

*Partial spoilers ahead*

Essentially Pliny the Younger's "restless spirit" ghost story in a (relatively) modern setting, this 1859 novelette is one of the greatest haunted house tales in all of Western literature. M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft admired it, and the story's influence is palpable in virtually every haunted house yarn written since. It's also a masterpiece of mood and atmosphere, Lord Bulwer-Lytton's description of the ghostly phenomena encountered by the narrator retaining much of its potency despite the passage of 160 years.

It appears that there were two published versions of "The House and the Brain": A.) one ending with the solution of the haunted house mystery and B.) the slightly longer version I read, in which the narrator confronts the villain of the piece (the man whose mesmeric spell was responsible for all the trouble to begin with). Some critics feel that this last scene is an unnecessary appendage, but I enjoyed it. It lends some weight and reality to a character who would otherwise have been no more than a spectral presence in the story, and I think the Comte de Saint Germain would have gotten a kick out of it, too. ( )