Hello and welcome to my Victorian nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Mannion,

and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era.

Because to me, there's just something especially intriguing, creepy, and oddly comforting

about horror and mayhem from the 19th century.

So, listener discretion is advised.

Hello, friends, and welcome to this little bonus Halloween episode. A number of weeks ago, I posted an episode announcing a Patreon which I had to shelve for a number of reasons,

temporarily, after I posted the episode. So I deleted that episode

announcing it. But it had something in it, which I kind of want to preserve for posterity and

thought today of all days, Halloween is a perfect day to repost it along with two other

wonderful pieces.

In this episode, I'm going to read three of my favorite spooky Victorian poems.

I had included The Raven in that last episode, and I included again today, along with the Return of the Witches by Oliver Wendell Holmes and the very eerily romantic,

The Lake of the Dismal Swamp.

By Thomas Moore.

We'll begin with the most famous Gothic narrative poem of all, The Raven, an ode, if you will,

to the vexing, torturous, unwavering tenacity of grief.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping,

rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying emper

wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow from my books

...