Hi and I'm

Welcome back to Nighty Night,

Bedtime stories to keep you awake.

My name is Ravi Jodry and I'm your host.

This week we revisit the Master of Horror and Suspense himself, Edgar

Alan Poe. In a short, actually very short story about the supernatural and about what happens when an obsession turns into tragedy.

The Oval Portrait The chateau into which my valet had been

the oval portrait by Edgar Allan Poe

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance rather than permit me in my desperately wounded condition to pass a night in the open air was one of those piles of commingled gloom and

grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact

than in fancy of Mrs Radcliffe.

To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned.

We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments.

It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique.

Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multifform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of

very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces,

but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary,

in these paintings might insipient delirium perhaps

had caused me to take deep interest so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy

shutters of the room, since it was already night,

to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed,

and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself.

...