Strange Things That Really Do Happen

This is the closing piece in the collection, and it's the one Dickens is remembered for. A lonely railway signalman is haunted by a spectral figure that appears before disaster strikes, and warns him each time, though never clearly enough to prevent what's coming. A visitor, our narrator, hears his story and tries gently to talk him out of it.

There's a detail worth knowing before you read it. Dickens wrote this not long after surviving a real train crash himself, the Staplehurst disaster of 1865, in which he helped pull the dead and dying from wrecked carriages and was shaken by it for the rest of his life. That's not incidental to the story. It's the reason a piece about warnings nobody heeds in time feels less like invention and more like something Dickens was still working through.

The narrator spends most of his visits trying to offer the…

By this point in the collection, the ground has shifted. We're fully in Dickens's uncanny register now, a murdered man appears to the narrator, and later to the jury trying his killer, steering the verdict from beyond the grave.

What makes it unsettling isn't just the ghost. It's the narrator himself. He insists, calmly and repeatedly, that he's a rational man simply describing what happened to him, and yet what happened to him is something no rational account can explain. He never once seems to notice the contradiction he's living inside.

Dickens gives us no way to resolve it either. The verdict lands as Guilty, the story ends, and the question of what actually happened, justice, coincidence, or something else entirely, is left standing exactly where it started.

Something to think about: 

the narrator insists throughout that he's simply reporting facts as a rational man would. Do you believe that's…

Five couriers sit together at the top of a mountain pass as the light fails, trading stories to pass the evening. One of them, German, is insistent on a point: he doesn't believe in ghosts. He's quite firm about it. There are no ghosts, he says, only strange things that really do happen.

Then he tells two stories that make that distinction very hard to hold onto.

It's a clever piece of framing on Dickens's part, and it gives the whole collection its title for a reason. This is a writer who spent his whole life insisting he didn't believe in the supernatural while being unable to stop writing about it, and here he's built a narrator who makes exactly that same claim, in exactly the same breath as the story that undermines it.

Something to think about: 

the courier tells us he doesn't believe in ghosts, only in strange…

After the longer, more admiring piece before it, this one moves fast. Three short cases, told briskly, each one turning on the same trick: a detective gets his result by pretending to be something he isn't, a customer, a friend, a nobody worth noticing.

They're genuinely funny in places. Dickens has an eye for the absurd details, the elaborate small performances these men put on to get a suspect talking. But there's a quieter current running under the humour. Every one of these successes depends on someone being deceived by a person they had no reason to distrust.

That's easy to read past at speed, because the stories move so quickly and land so neatly. Read a little slower and the discomfort is right there on the page, Dickens just isn't the one pointing it out to you.

Something to think about: 

these are told almost as entertainment, quick and…