The Thing in the Upper Room

Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was an English writer and journalist known for his realistic novels and stories about working-class life.

'The Thing in the Upper Room' is a classic Victorian horror story. Poor young English artist Attwater is delighted to find an oddly cheap top-floor room to rent in an old house in Paris. The room, as he is aware, has a reputation for being haunted. But what the nature of the haunting is, nobody seems to know - the place has been let only once in living memory owing to its reputation, and that tenant had committed suicide at the point where the police were breaking down his door to arrest him for murder. But Attwater could not possibly conceive the terrifying nature of the spirit that inhabits that unsettling room at the top of the stairs.