[Wikipedia]

Supernaturalist bibliography. [Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Tartarus Press]

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Sometimes mentioned as one of the best ghost stories in the language. A haunted old house, the tangible ghost of (apparently) a nun, and a major episode of fear and trembling -- all enclosed in a travel frame that references vast swaths of the British Empire. A critique of Victorian self-assurance, or a mindless indulgence? Read it and decide.

At the last station on a railroad under construction -- the "railhead" of the title -- a man finds himself at the junction of technology and the nonrational. This story's an excellent example of the use of "distancing," the intervention of multiple layers of narrative between the reader and the recounted supernaturalist events in order to facilitate the "willing suspension of disbelief," as Coleridge put it; the Victorians loved this tactic, although it goes all the way back to Horace Walpole's Preface to The Castle of Otranto. This story is also a good example of the haunted technology and haunted railroad motifs.