A Haunted House

Virginia Woolf does not offer any physical description of any character in the short story. The narrator states that the woman and the man who form the ghostly couple died at different times after having lived in the house for a long time. Their main characteristics are given by actions performed, mainly searching through the house. The ghostly couple is therefore only a shadow of a story that has vanished through time, and that is precisely what they set about to find. The couple comes back to the house in which they once lived to find traces of a long lost love they shared. Beyond being characters in a story, the ghost are symbols of unrest, of something that has not met a closure during a lifetime. Woolf’s ghosts are not meant to be scary, as in conventional ghost stories; they are effectively two people seeking closure about a situation that death caused; that is, the eternal separation of lovers.

Woolf refuses to give shape and form to the main characters since they are also part of a narrative structure that is ambiguous in its entirety. The male ghost even doubts the identity of the narrator. In his last words in the story, after finding the sleeping couple, the male ghost says, “Long years—” (5), melancholically pointing to a period in time when the ghostly couple lived together undisturbed by the overwhelming presence of death in the house.