A short story about haunting told by a young governess sent to a country house called Bly. She is engaged by the uncle of two orphaned children. She becomes embroiled in the presence of evil, meeting the ghosts of the previous governess and valet, and finds out the guilty affair they shared. The young governess believes that the two children are communicating with these spirits and wants to exorcise them.

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York, was educated at Harvard and came to Europe in 1875. He spent twenty years in London before moving to Rye on the south coast, where he died in 1916. An early exponent of the horror story, where the reader is left to decide whether the occurrences were only happening in the impressionable governess' mind or whether they were a real presence of evil.