The Haunted Hotel

A doctor is visited by a desperate woman with a question: am I evil, or insane? When the letters from Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered. In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and suddenly dies. How are these little mysteries connected? In Venice, a fashionable hotel is haunted by the crime it was built to conceal. A woman walks into a London consulting room with a question no doctor can easily answer: is she evil, or is she mad? From that uneasy beginning, Wilkie Collins draws the reader into a Victorian Gothic mystery where marriage, money, suspicion and supernatural dread gather around a palace on the Grand Canal. Lord Montbarry dies in Venice, apparently from illness. An Italian courier vanishes. A grieving wife receives money from an unknown hand. Months later, the palace has become a fashionable hotel, yet Room 14 remains marked by whispers, illness and visions no guest can comfortably explain. A classic haunted-house story, The Haunted Hotel deals in London society, Venetian secrecy and family unease with Collins’s gift for suspense and moral ambiguity. This edition also includes The Dream Woman, a compact tale where nightmare, premonition and domestic terror combine in a spine-chilling tale.