Online Talk: Victorian Gothic – Haunted Houses and Night-time Terrors

  • DATE

    28 October 2026

  • TIME

    7:00 pm to 8:00 pm

  • AGES

    All ages welcome

  • PRICE

    £6

Cross the threshold into a world of flickering gaslight and cold stone.

Step beyond the velvet curtains of the Victorian home to discover the era’s greatest gothic writers, from the atmospheric dread of Wuthering Heights to the suffocating psychology of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

Find out more about the psychological stories of terror written by Elizabeth Gaskell’s contemporaries where crumbling buildings reflect unravelling psyches. We’ll consider terrifying tales about ancestral curses, haunted railways, dead lovers and doomed servants by British and American authors including Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edgar Allan Poe.

Join speaker Dr Emma Liggins, Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, as we unlock the doors to Victorian Gothic fiction, just in time for Halloween.

‘Absolutely fascinating. She had unearthed so much information previously unknown to me.’ – Previous online attendee.

Part of Short Stories – The Gothic Season.