Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of his time, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.
Michael Jeremy Thomas Clyde is an English actor and musician. During the 1960s, he was one-half of the folk duo Chad & Jeremy. Their first song was the 1963 hit "Yesterday’s Gone". The duo became more successful in America than in their native country. Clyde has enjoyed a long television acting career, often playing upper-middle class or aristocratic characters.
Gerrit Dou, also known as GerardDouw or Dow, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, whose small, highly polished paintings are typical of the Leiden fijnschilders. He specialised in genre scenes and is noted for his trompe-l'œil "niche" paintings and candlelit night-scenes with strong chiaroscuro. He was a student of Rembrandt.
Carel de Moor was a Dutch Golden Age etcher and painter. He was a pupil of Gerard Dou.
"The Oval Portrait" is a horror short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, involving the disturbing circumstances of a portrait in a château. It is one of his shortest stories, filling only two pages in its initial publication in 1842.
A ghost story is any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. The "ghost" may appear of its own accord or be summoned by magic. Linked to the ghost is the idea of a "haunting", where a supernatural entity is tied to a place, object or person. Ghost stories are commonly examples of ghostlore.
Godfried Schalcken was a Dutch artist who specialized in genre paintings and portraits. Schalcken was noted for his night scenes and mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight. He painted in the highly polished style of the Leiden fijnschilders.
William Maurice Denham OBE was an English character actor who appeared in over 100 films and television programmes in his long career.
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories is a collection of short semi-comic mystery stories that were written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1891. It includes:
The Fijnschilders, also called the Leiden Fijnschilders, were Dutch Golden Age painters who, from about 1630 to 1710, strove to create as natural a reproduction of reality as possible in their meticulously executed, often small-scale works.
John Justin was a British stage and film actor.
A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived sporadically by the BBC since 2005. With one exception, the original instalments were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and the films were all shot on 16 mm colour film. The remit behind the series was to provide a television adaptation of a classic ghost story, in line with the oral tradition of telling supernatural tales at Christmas.
David Rogerson Wheatley was a British film and television director.
Robert Le Vrac de Tournières was a French painter. After the Second World War, a street in the new Saint-Paul district of his home city of Caen was named rue Robert Tournières.
Nicolaas Verkolje or Vercolje, was a Dutch painter and mezzotinter.
He specialized in history pieces and portraits in a classicistic style.
Gerhard Jan Palthe, was an 18th-century painter and portraitist from the Dutch Republic.
Norman Leslie Megahey was a British television producer, director and writer.
Irish Gothic literature developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the writers were Anglo-Irish. The period from 1691 to 1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy, Anglo-Irish families of the Church of Ireland who controlled most of the land. The Irish Parliament, which was almost exclusively Protestant in composition, passed the Penal Laws, effectively disenfranchising the Catholic majority both politically and economically. This began to change with the Acts of Union 1800 and the concomitant abolition of the Irish Parliament. Following a vigorous campaign led by Irish lawyer Daniel O'Connell, Westminster passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 removing most of the disabilities imposed upon Catholics.
