“The Room in the Tower” is a horror story by the English novelist and historian E. F. Benson (1867–1940), first published in January 1912 in the The Pall Mall GazetteEvening newspaper launched in London in 1865, which introduced investigative journalism into British journalism, along with other innovations., and included in his collection of short stories The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912).^[1]

The story is told in the first-person by an unnamed narrator, who has since the age of sixteen been experiencing a recurring dream in which he is invited to the mansion of the Stone family. The visits always begin pleasantly enough, until the family’s fearsome matriarch, Mrs Stone, tells the narrator that he will now be shown to his room for the night – the titular room in the tower. Upon entering the room he senses that it contains “something awful”, and wakes up in terror. As the years pass, the characters grow older and stranger. At some point Mrs Stone dies in the sequence of dreams, yet still she assigns the narrator the room in the tower.

In real life, a friend named Clinton invites the narrator to his family’s house in the country. The narrator is surprised to find that everything there matches his nightmare, except for the names and personalities of the family. As a thunderstorm gathers, Clinton’s mother offers the narrator a room in the tower. Clinton helps him prepare the room, in which he finds an unsettling portrait of a woman he recognises as Mrs Stone. They remove it from the wall and carry it into the hall, and find that their hands are covered with blood, although neither man is injured.

The narrator, wakened by a clap of thunder, finds Mrs Stone standing over his bed. She confesses herself a vampire, and her intention to transform him into one as well. He succeeds in fending her off and escapes from the room. Clinton tries to assure the narrator that it was only a nightmare, but they find that the portrait has returned to the wall, and there is a mouldy burial shroud on the floor.

An epilogue describes a report eight years earlier about the burial of a woman in the churchyard at West Fawsley. Three attempts were made, but each time the coffin was found to be protruding from the ground a few days later. The woman’s name was Julia Stone, and she had committed suicide in that room at the top of the tower. Her body was subsequently buried in unhallowed ground; when it was secretly dug up again, her coffin was found to be full of blood.

Adaptations

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“The Room in the Tower” has been adapted for television as an episode of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series, featuring Joanna Lumley as Mrs Stone, broadcast on Christmas Eve 2025.^[2]

External links

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• Full text of “The Room in the Tower” at Project Gutenberg