"Hey! You down there!"

When the narrator of Dickens in "The Signalman", this artistic ghost story, goes down, for no particular reason, to the remote cabin, beside the railway line, he realizes that he has found himself "in the most isolated and depressing place he had ever seen", feeling "a shiver as if he had abandoned the natural world".

His concern is justified, as the signalman who lives there has a secret: a supernatural visitor who has already warned him twice about imminent disasters and has now appeared again, foretelling some calamity that neither of the two men is able to predict or understand.

"The Signalman" is Dickens' last complete masterpiece. He lived another year and a half after its publication, in Christmas 1866, leaving, as is known, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", his last novel, unfinished. It is also the most perfect of his ghost stories - possibly the most perfect of all English ghost stories.

Its origin should be sought in the railway and the role it came to play in the life of the author himself. His constant curiosity pushed him to learn in every way everything about its functioning and about the lives of those who worked in it. In 1857, Dickens and his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins spent an entire sleepless night at the Carlisle station, just to find out what was happening there in the early hours of the morning.