I have blogged last Saturday about horror stories of Bram Stoker, recomending that you read them this year for Halloween. I mentioned the recently rediscovered Gibbet Hill. This Halloween 2025 has been for me, so far, the year of Gibbet Hill. Because it is the perfect read for Halloween, for many, many, many reasons, which I have listed here:
- It's set in mid-October, so it's already both autumnal and of course fittingly in the Halloween season.
- The autumn atmosphere is brilliantly rendered by Stoker.
- Gibbet Hill is a real place in Surrey, for added authenticity. Also, you can actually visit it, if you live in England, for a sort of scary pilgrimage.
- It has snakes in it. Seriously, snakes deserves a more prominent place among Halloween critters.
- It features a strange and mysterious cult, practiced by two Indian girls and a blond boy. It's not merely a ghost story witha single antagonist, Stoker gives us a glimpse of something larger scale, a threat to civilisation. He will develop this in Dracula, of course, see this post from 2024.
- In the end, nothing is fully explained or rationalised, which adds to the unease.
- There's just something about an old ghost story set in late XIXth century.
So yes, if you have to read one horror story this Halloween, it has to be Gibbet Hill.
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