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This episode is brought to you by Moonlit Trapped Doors.

Tonight, for the next in our October spooky sleep Story series, we'll read an excerpt from

The Castle of O'Tronto, a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally

regarded as the first gothic novel.

Set in a haunted castle,

the novel produced a new style that has endured ever since

and has shaped the modern-day aesthetic of the goth subculture.

Walpole wrote it at Strawberry Hill, his fanciful neo-Gothic villa, and pitched it as a gothic story that fused chivalric romance with novelistic realism. Its startling images, a colossal helmet from the sky, moving portraits, doors that yield on their own,

fix the template later taken up by Clara Reeve and Radcliffe and beyond.

Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths.

Princess Isabella recollected a subterraneous passage which led from the vaults of the castle to the Church of St. Nicholas. If she could reach the altar before she was overtaken, she knew even Manfred would not dare to profane

the sacredness of the place, and she determined if no other means of deliverance offered

to shut herself up for ever among the holy virgins, whose convent was contiguous to the cathedral.

In this resolution, she seized a lamp that burned at the foot of the staircase

and hurried towards the secret passage.

The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters, and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern.

An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of

...