Plot
The novel is narrated by Arthur Kipps, who formerly worked for Mr. Bentley. One Christmas Eve he is at home with his second wife Esme and four stepchildren who are sharing ghost stories. When he is asked to tell a story, he becomes irritated, leaves the room and decides to write the following horrific experiences from his past in the hope that doing so will exorcise them from his memory.
Many years earlier, whilst still a junior solicitor for Bentley, Kipps is summoned to Crythin Gifford, a small market town on the northeast coast of England, to attend the funeral of Mrs. Alice Drablow and settle her estate. He is reluctant to leave his fiancée, Stella, but eager to get away from the dreary London fog. The late Mrs. Drablow was an elderly, reclusive widow who lived alone in the desolate and secluded Eel Marsh House. On his train ride there, he meets Samuel Daily, a wealthy landowner.
At the funeral, Kipps sees a woman dressed in black and with a pale face and dark eyes, whom a group of children are silently watching.
When a local coachman takes Kipps to the house, he learns that it is situated on Nine Lives Causeway. At high tide, it is completely cut off from the mainland, surrounded only by marshes and sea frets.
Over the next several days, as Kipps sorts through Mrs. Drablow's papers at Eel Marsh House, he endures an increasingly terrifying sequence of unexplained noises, chilling events and appearances by the Woman in Black. In one of these instances, he hears the sound of a horse and carriage in distress, followed by the screams of a young child and his maid, coming from the direction of the marshes.
Most of the people in Crythin Gifford are reluctant to reveal information about Mrs. Drablow and the mysterious woman in black. Any attempts Kipps makes to learn more causes pained and fearful reactions. From various sources, he learns that Mrs. Drablow's sister, Jennet Humfrye, gave birth to a child, Nathaniel. Because she was unmarried, she was forced to give the child to her sister. Mrs. Drablow and her husband adopted the boy, and insisted that he should never know that Jennet was his mother. Jennet went away for a year. When realising she could not be parted for long from her son, she made an agreement to stay at Eel Marsh House with him as long as she never revealed her true identity to him. She secretly planned to abscond from the house with her son. One day, a pony and trap carrying the boy across the causeway became lost and sank into the marshes, killing all aboard, while Jennet looked on helplessly from the window. The child's screams that Kipps heard were those of Nathaniel's ghost.
After Jennet died, she returned to haunt Eel Marsh House and the town of Crythin Gifford, as the malevolent Woman in Black. According to local tales, a sighting of the Woman in Black presaged the death of a child.
After some time (but still years before the beginning of the story), Kipps returns to London, marries Stella, has a child of his own, and tries to put the events at Crythin Gifford behind him. At a fair, while his wife and child are enjoying a pony and trap ride, Kipps sees the Woman in Black. She steps out in front of the horse and startles it, causing it to bolt and wreck the carriage against a tree, killing the child instantly and critically injuring Stella, who dies ten months later.
Kipps finishes his reminiscence with the words, "They have asked for my story. I have told it. Enough."
