I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: October 28, 2025] “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”

It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….

After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.

As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.

I admit that I have never read Edith Wharton (not even The Age of Innocence).  But I read an essay by Jonathan Franzen which made me think I really should:

readers tend to read writers we finding sympathetic in some way–whatever appeals to us about their humanity.  But Wharton really has nothing appealing about her.  She was utterly privileged: touring Europe in private yacht with chauffeurs, and she was deeply conservative: opposed to unions, socialism and women’s suffrage.  She even left America in 1914 because it was too vulgar. My favorite example of her unsympathetic nature:  she was often “writing in bed after breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor, to be sorted and typed up by her secretary.”

But despite all that, her novels are engaging and hard to put down … compelling reasons for reading them include the wonderful character names she creates:  Undine Spragg, Lily Bart, Ethan Frome.  And, you root for the protagonists despite themselves.  Lily Bart is profoundly self-involved and incapable of true charity; Undine Spragg is spoiled, ignorant, shallow and amoral.  Wharton even sets The Age of Innocence at a time when divorce was unthinkable–even though she herself had just had one.

But I had no idea that Wharton wrote scary stories (there is a book called The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, so…).

This story is about a young woman who accepts a job as a lady’s maid.  The main character, Hartley, has just gotten over the typhoid and looks weak and tottery.  She had been denied jobs because of this.  But a friend suggests she apply for a job with Mrs Brympton.  She was something of an invalid and lived all year round at her country place.  The last thing she was told was that the gentleman of the house was almost always away and when he was at house, she would just need to stay out of his way.

Things are unusual from the start.  There’s a room that the Mrs insists will be kept locked.  Hartley’s room is across the hall from the locked room. And Hartley learns that her lady will not ring the bell for her.  Rather, she will send the house maid, Agnes to fetch her.  Hartley also saw a woman in one of the doorways and when she asked Agnes about that woman–was it the Mrs’ nurse?–Agnes says that there has been no one up there in quite some time.

After about a week Mr Brympton finally showed up and he was just as unpleasant and overbearing as one can imagine. He looked Hartley over and as she says, she knew that look: “I was not the kind of morsel he was after.”  The other servants were clear that the marriage was a poor one from the start with the master being coarse, loud and pleasure loving while she was quiet, retiring and a little cold.

The work was light but there was always an air of unease in the house.  And when she ran into an old acquaintance, when the friend heard where she was staying said that she wouldn’t last three months there–nobody has.

Then one night in the middle of the night her bell rang.  She woke and ran to Mrs Brympton’s room, but she had been sound asleep and hadn’t rung the bell.

A few nights later she found a picture of a woman.  The cook told her it was Emma Saxon, Mrs Brympton’s maid who had died some time ago.  Hartley said that she had seen that face before–it was the woman she saw when she first arrived, the one who supposedly wasn’t there.

Soon after she heard someone at her side.  She thought it was Agnes but when she looked up she saw that it was Emma Saxon.  And Emma Saxon beckoned her to follow.

Although the story is written in an older style (it is from 1902 after all), the spookiness is really quite good.